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What Big Companies Can Learn from the Success of the Unicorns

Harvard Business Review

Until 2014, Uber had fewer than 500 employees; today their headcount is around 3,000 people. The small size of unicorns allows the top management teams to be directly and deeply involved in most of the strategic decisions, which are then implemented through a flat organization. Unicorns are: Small in size.

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4 Factors That Predict Startup Success, and One That Doesn’t

Harvard Business Review

Although female-founded companies represent a greater percentage of First Round’s investments than the national average — startups with at least one female cofounder account for approximately 18% of new VC-backed new ventures in the U.S. — they were still the minority of investments.

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How Israeli Startups Can Scale

Harvard Business Review

In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 to build the satellite office and to personally oversee the recruitment and management of American executives who can lead the sales and marketing efforts. Although the technical team often remains in Israel, many of the executives interviewed recommend departing for the U.S.

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Why Some of the Most Groundbreaking Technologies Are a Bad Fit for the Silicon Valley Funding Model

Harvard Business Review

In 2014 a graduate student at Stanford named Etosha Cave and two colleagues began their entrepreneurial journey. The problem that Etosha and her cofounders ran into when they first sought to leverage the Silicon Valley ecosystem to get their business off the ground was that venture investors typically want to see a real product.

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Lessons from Yelp’s Empirical Approach to Diversity

Harvard Business Review

For instance, in 2014 only 10% of Yelp’s engineers were female. These figures were similar at other tech companies, most of which had fewer than 20% of their technical positions filled by women and had low representation of black and Hispanic employees. .… The numbers were grim. has increased from 10% to 18%.