The business mantra you hear more than ever these days is customer-centricity, the philosophy of putting customers at the core of every business model.
Many companies want to embrace it, but shifting your business model may not be enough to get you to true customer-centricity. Achieving it requires a shift not in your model but in your mindset: having the confidence to understand that the ideal outcome is not solely business growth but customer happiness—while recognizing that if done correctly, the former follows the latter, making the shift worthwhile on all fronts.
The pharmaceutical sector is a prime example …
Democrats are all agog that Biden was able to pass more stimulus dollars than Barack Obama. What will make a sustainable difference, though, is whether the Biden stimulus doesn’t just rescue the poor but also propels the private sector to start new companies and create more good jobs that improve productivity and sustainably boost living standards, so that we’re not just redividing the pie, but rather growing the pie.
Opinion Debate
What should the Biden administration prioritize?
Nicholas Kristof, Opinion columnist, writes that “Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a …
Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Information Age
David Gardner Founder & Managing Partner, Cofounders Capital
David Gardner is a serial entrepreneur, writer, adviser, and early-stage fund manager with over thirty years of experience in creating and building software technology companies.
After failing at retirement twice, David became the Triangle's most active angel investor spending his time as a volunteer coach and mentor to startup founders and managing a free accelerator he sponsors with the Town of Cary. To combat the lack of early stage capital in NC, David created and runs Cofounders Capital, a $12M seed fund, the success of which led to a second $31M fund.
As an entrepreneur, David was the founder or co-founder of seven companies including PeopleClick (purchased for $100 million) and Report2Web, which sold for $12M in less than eleven months from inception. He has demonstrated a record for consistency across multiple industries with six successful exits in a row... and one he refuses to talk about.
David served as the Executive VP and Thought Leader for Compuware, a Fortune 1000 Corporation, after it acquired ProviderLink, a healthcare IT exchange he founded.
As a writer, David is the author of a popular book on entrepreneurship called The StartUp Hats. He has published many articles and forward-thinking white papers on technical innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Among other firsts, David is credited with founding and launching the first software-as-a-service venture in NC.
As a lifelong learner, David is constantly researching new technologies and challenging traditional ways of thinking. In addition to several years of full-time computer science and business-related post graduate studies at NCSU, Mr. Gardner holds degrees in Philosophy and Music with a postgraduate concentration in theology and dead languages.
What drives David today is his passion for helping smart, coach-able, first-time entrepreneurs build their businesses, watching them succeed and witnessing their life-changing transformations.
Cofounders is an early-stage seed fund and startup accelerator focused on B2B software ventures predominately in the NC Triangle area. Created in 2015, Cofounders partnered with the Town of Cary to provide free lab space to entrepreneurs who receive expert help modeling and vetting their startup ideas. We help with everything from prototyping and testing value propositions to lining up beta customers.
Cofounders is also a funding source for early stage capital. Cofounders Capital deployed it’s first $12 million fund and is now investing out of it’s second $31M fund. Cofounders also manages funds for Hatcher+ providing up to $35,000 in pre-seed convertible debt financing. Cofounders Capital is managed by serially-successful entrepreneur, David Gardner and Tim McLoughlin along with a team of three venture partners and over ninety advisers and volunteer mentors who are all investors in the fund, eager to support entrepreneurship and to help our portfolio companies succeed.
The transportation industry is abuzz with upstarts, legacy automakers, suppliers and tech companies working on automated vehicle technology, digital platforms, electrification and robotics. Then there are shared mobility companies from cars to scooters and mopeds to e-bikes. And who can forget the emerging air taxi companies?
At the center of this evolving industry are the investors. Simply put: TechCrunch can’t hold an event on mobility without hearing from the people who are hunting for the best opportunities in the industry and tracking all of its changes. That’s why we’re happy to announce investors Clara Brenner of Urban …
That’s essentially what has happened in the last few decades as China has gone from being isolated to being deeply integrated in the world economy. When the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, its population of 1.28 billion was bigger than that of the combined 34 advanced countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (1.16 billion).But that was a one-time adjustment, and wages are rising rapidly in China as it moves beyond low-end manufacturing and toward more sophisticated goods. India, the only other country with comparable population, is already well integrated into the world economy. To …
China is freeing up tens of billions of dollars for its tech industry to borrow. It is cataloging the sectors where the United States or others could cut off access to crucial technologies. And when its leaders released their most important economic plans last week, they laid out their ambitions to become an innovation superpower beholden to none.Anticipating efforts by the Biden administration to continue to challenge China’s technological rise, the country’s leaders are accelerating plans to go it alone, seeking to address vulnerabilities in the country’s economy that could thwart its ambitions in a wide …
Health and life science specialist investment firm Foresite Capital has raised a new fund, its fifth to date, totally $969 million in commitments from LPs. This is the firm’s largest fund to date, and was oversubscribed relative to its original target according to fund CEO and founder Dr. Jim Tananbaum, who told me that while the fundraising process started out slow in the early months of the pandemic, it gained steam quickly starting around last fall and ultimately exceeded expectations.
This latest fund actually makes up two separate investment vehicles, Foresite Capital Fund V, and Foresite Capital Opportunity Fund V, …
“Today’s batteries are not competitive,” said Jagdeep Singh, chief executive of QuantumScape, which is based in San Jose, Calif. “Batteries have enormous potential and are critical for a renewable energy economy, but they have to get better.”For the most part, all of the money pouring into battery technology is good news. It puts capitalism to work on solving a global problem. But this reordering of the auto industry will also claim some victims, like the companies that build parts for internal combustion engine cars and trucks, or automakers and investors that bet on the wrong technology.“Battery innovations …
SAN FRANCISCO — Robert Van Winkle, who is better known as the rapper Vanilla Ice, held court online last week with more than 1,000 fans.In a rambling conversation, Mr. Van Winkle praised the poses of the 1990s band Bell Biv DeVoe and demurred when asked about his relationship with Madonna. He dispensed advice on real estate and life, saying, “You got to protect your happiness to protect your life.” At one point, an attendee serenaded the gathering with an a cappella version of his hit “Ice Ice Baby.”Several hours later, Mr. Van Winkle confessed that he needed to leave before …
Stephanie Nashawaty, chief customer innovation officer, SAP North America, and Lisa Dalesandro DiChristofer, head of North America Industry Advisory Practice, SAP
Techies love jargon. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud—these terms, regularly employed in the information technology (IT) world—were typically not that well understood outside the IT context. But 2020 changed all that.
The pandemic turned the entire “technopedia” into a catalog of solutions that would keep families and friends connected, students learning, businesses running, economies moving, and health care professionals caring for their patients. In a matter …
