Larry Summers’ Advice to Startup Founders: Raise Early, Raise Often

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

Larry Summers’ Advice to Startup Founders: Raise Early, Raise Often

Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers joined the 2023 Upfront Summit Thursday, and among his insights was some interesting advice for tech founders – an industry, he said, that should be better supported by the government.


Speaking to moderator and Economist senior reporter Alexandra Suich Bass at Upfront Ventures’ annual Upfront Summit, Summers (who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton) said he thought the FTC and Justice Department under President Joe Biden are “highly misguided” in targeting Big Tech with antitrust actions. Summers instead argued that instead of “constantly overreaching, and therefore stumbling and failing,” the FTC should encourage competition.

“My view is that consumer welfare is exactly the right standard for antitrust, [and] that one should be supporting competition in order to produce the lowest possible prices for consumers, including through the greatest efficiency,” Summers said. For its part, the Biden Administration claims to want the same thing, though Summers’ remarks indicated that he didn’t think over-regulation was the right method to foster competition in the tech industry.

Part of that, Summers added, is fostering startup growth. “Nobody would check into a hotel that they weren't going to be allowed to check out of; and so it seems to me that if you want people to enter startups of various kinds, in a world where 90-plus percent of startup exits are sales and acquisitions, you wouldn't want to shut down that market,” he said.

Adding that, “having new startups seems to me to be central to having the kind of competitive economy that we want to have. So I'm all for competition.”

In addition, Summers said that startups should be aggressively seeking funding, in spite of the overall downturn in venture funding.

There’s been a slight drought in venture capital over the last couple of years, as investors have been even more cautious in the last several years. While VCs have ample cash, they’re a lot slower to deploy it and are favoring smaller, strategic investments over big IPO or SPAC bets, which were once a startup’s ideal path to raising huge rounds. The IPO market remains pretty stagnant, after grinding nearly to a stop by the end of 2022. Of course, there’s exceptions, especially as VCs earmark money to invest in hot-topic startups, like March Capital’s recently announced $650 million fund for artificial intelligence.

Perhaps with that context in mind, Summers advocated for fledgling companies to take any funding offer they get.

“Don’t be greedy,” Summers cautioned. “Raise cash, even if you don’t particularly like the terms, [and] slow the disbursement of cash.”

Stephane Lintner, CEO of San Francisco-based money management startup Jiko, joined the panel and had advice for startup founders that somewhat contrasted with Summers’ encouragement to not dole out funding immediately. “The one thing you should do right now is deploy your cash in high-yielding instruments, treasuries,” Lintner asserted.

When asked about his predictions for the tech industry’s future, Summers noted, “I think it’s not likely to be as spectacular a period as the last 15 years have been, but these are clearly institutions with enormous staying power.”

Summers also briefly tossed in his thoughts on TikTok. When Suich Bass asked if he was long or short on the app, he replied he was bullish on its prospects despite numerous bans. “At the end of the day, the political system will not decide to ban something 100 million Americans love,” the former Chief Economist of the World Bank said.

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“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

At Super Bowl LVII, advertisers paid at least $7 million for 30–second ad spots, and even more if they didn’t have a favorable relationship with Fox. But the pricey commercials didn’t persuade everyone.

A recent report from advertising agency Kern and neuroscience marketing research outfit SalesBrain is attempting to answer that question using facial recognition and eye-tracking software.

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https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

Behind Her Empire: ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Helping Small Businesses

Yasmin Nouri

Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.

Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.

Behind Her Empire: ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Helping Small Businesses

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, ComplYant founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson discusses her journey to building a multimillion dollar business and making knowledge of taxes more accessible.


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Taylor Swift Concert in the Metaverse? Ticketing Platform Token Is Using NFTs To Optimize Experiences

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

Taylor Swift Concert in the Metaverse? Ticketing Platform Token Is Using NFTs To Optimize Experiences
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. With Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke.

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

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