David Velez: Building the Most Valuable Digital Bank | Startups Aiding Startups' Closure | Jim Koch on Sam Adams and Staying Small | 10 Reasons for Delaying Business Start

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How David Vélez Built The World’s Most Valuable Digital Bank And Became A Billionaire - Forbes

In the summer of 2012, David VÃ©lez moved to SÃ£o Paulo with a newly minted Stanford MBA and a plum job as a Sequoia Capital partner. Douglas Leone, the head of Sequoia, had recruited the then-30-year-old Colombian to stake the venture capital powerhouse's claim in Brazilâa youthful, resource-rich country of 200 million that had grown 4% a year for a decade to become the world's seventh-largest economy. But on October 1, Leone called VÃ©lez with bad news: After considering the uninspired pitches from Brazilian entrepreneurs and hearing that top-ranked University of SÃ£o Paulo had produced just 42 computer science graduates the prior year, he was pulling the plug. Sequoia's Brazilian adventure was over.

"It was the day before my birthday and it was a bit of a shock," VÃ©lez admits. Still, he had always wanted to launch his own startup and saw opportunity in the very dearth of Brazilian innovators that had turned his VC compatriots off. "You want to position yourself on the side of the market where there's scarcity," VÃ©lez explains. "In the U.S., there's an oversupply of good entrepreneurs. Somebody with my experience and background is a commodity. In Latin America, there was significant scarcity."

Before long, he had a target: Brazil's big andâto hear Brazilians tell itâbulletproof banks. Yet as VÃ©lez saw it, the banks, with their notoriously high fees, poor service and seeming obliviousness to new technology, were sitting ducks. And they were. Less than a decade after its founding, VÃ©lez's SÃ£o Paulo-based Nubank has 35 million customers and is valued at $25 billion. VÃ©lez, who is Nubank's CEO, retains a 23% stake that Forbes values at $5.2 billion. "What's happening in Brazil is nothing short of a real revolution. And it's waking up the incumbent banks, who have had the going really easy for a long time," says Nigel Morris, the cofounder of Capital One and a Nubank investor.

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This Startup Wants to Help Startups Go Out of Business--and It's Not Just Because We're in the Middle of Tech Winter - Inc.com

Closing up shop can be painful for any business owner. For startup founders there's the extra hurdle of possibly unwinding venture investment and putting valuable IP in metaphorical mothballs. Dori Yona is keenly aware of the distinction. The CEO and co-founder of SimpleClosure went on something of a listening tour of failure earlier this year before launching his startup, which assists with the administrative minefields of shuttering other startups. "Every one of them was telling me about how painful the process is, how much they're left in the dark, and how ambiguous the process is."

Yona knew he had hit on a problem. His solution: automating many of the bureaucratic headaches that come with ceasing a business's operations, and doing it for a fraction of the traditional cost.

Traditionally, a company might hire a bankruptcy consultant or law firm to deal with the process. That can be a costly endeavor, argues Yona. "There's vendors that are owed money, there's payroll taxes, or severance" when closing a startup, he says. And while a founder might take solace in a group of lawyers swooping in to tie up all the loose ends when a firm goes belly up, those costs can break the bank. "In the past, you had to hire four lawyers for that [at] $1,000 an hour, and it took four weeks, plus an accountant and auditor," adds Ewens.

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Billionaire Jim Koch On Why Sam Adams Is Still One Of The Little Guys In The Industry - Forbes

Boston Beer founder and chairman Jim Koch runs a program that supports small craft brewers.

Nearly four decades ago, Jim Koch helped spark a craft beer revolution when he launched Sam Adams. That brand became the centerpiece of Boston Beer, a publicly traded company with $2.1 billion in annual revenues—and has made Koch a billionaire, worth an estimated $1.5 billion, per Forbes. Now, as both the number of craft breweries and those breweries’ obstacles to profitability spike, Koch wants to protect the craft beer revolution at all costs—even by funding those who might end up being his own competition.

Microbrewers setting out today face high startup costs and a dearth of banks willing to lend small sums. Remembering his own difficulty obtaining initial financing for Sam Adams, Koch created a program called Brewing the American Dream to provide loans and mentorship to small food and beverage entrepreneurs. The program has partnered with microfinance nonprofit Accion Opportunity Fund to loan out $99 million since its founding in 2008, and Koch says the repayment rate has been 96%. This year the program will cross the $100 million mark.

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10 Reasons Why You Haven’t Started Your Business Yet - StartUp Mindset - StartUp Mindset

According to one report, as of 2018, a staggering 24 million people are thinking about starting their own business. However, only a fraction of that number take the big step and launch their business. Starting a business is an exciting and life-changing event. So why do so many people continue to delay starting or, even worse, never launch?

You may have been thinking about starting a business as a side project or even to replace your full-time job one day. If you’ve dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur but still haven’t taken the necessary steps to get things going, this article will help give you some insight into why and what you can do about it.

In this article, we’ll share the 10 reasons why you haven’t started a business yet. But before we start, we need to identify the different types of barriers most people face when trying to start a business.

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