EasyPost is a simple shipping API for developers

EasyPost

are everywhere. They have become indispensable in our everyday lives. They are also ubiquitous in various industries, notably e-commerce logistics. Mobile applications Nowadays, apps are redefining how e-commerce is conducted. One of the main reasons for their effectiveness is that these apps help immensely in attracting personnel. The traditional barriers tied to experience and competence levels are significantly diminished. This is, in a large part, because a mobile app introduces a rigid workflow, making it difficult for users to stray from prescribed tasks. Furthermore, these applications enable a high level of oversight, so all activities carried out by the user are thoroughly monitored. Apart from that, they assist in all areas: from product browsing to delivery tracking. They act like the bonding agent that links customers, retailers, and delivery services, allowing instant information exchange and effortless cooperation. For businesses, they enhance operational efficiency, improve customer relations, and provide a competitive advantage. For consumers, they offer a swift, engaging, and user-friendly interface for satisfying their shopping desires. How mobile apps influence e-commerce make different parts of the business, like finding products and delivering them, a lot easier thanks to their simple and clear interfaces. Mobile apps On the frontend, they deliver an engaging and personalized user experience. Advanced algorithms analyze user behavior to recommend products, tailor promotions, and facilitate personalized interactions. Mostly, apps are designed for easy navigation, quick checkouts, and secure payment processing. Many also offer features like wish lists, product comparisons, and customer reviews. On the backend, mobile applications are instrumental in managing inventory, processing orders, handling customer inquiries, and tracking deliveries. They help in making various office tasks more automatic and precise, reducing mistakes and making sure the operations run smoothly. In addition, these apps keep a bunch of helpful information that companies can use to tweak their operations, guess what their customers might want next, and make wise decisions about what's to come. Also, a good many of mobile apps have built-in tools for accessibility. These include voice-enabled search functions, speech synthesis, and the option for high-contrast displays. Such features guarantee that e-commerce platforms cater to the needs of all customers, including those with visual, auditory, or motor difficulties. What's their role? From what we can tell, mobile apps offer a bunch of tools and features that simplify and speed up a lot of operation parts, like taking care of inventory, tracking orders, and sorting out delivery systems. Inventory Management Applications like TradeGecko and Vend offer robust solutions here. These apps synchronize data across multiple sales channels, making it easier to manage stock levels, predict demand, and prevent both overstocking and stockouts. Features such as real-time inventory tracking, automated reordering, and reporting help businesses maintain optimal inventory levels and streamline their supply chain operations. Order Tracking For order tracking, mobile apps have significantly improved transparency and communication between businesses and customers. Applications such as AfterShip and Route offer real-time tracking and automatic updates on shipment progress, giving customers clear visibility of their orders' status. These platforms also allow businesses to customize their tracking pages, reinforcing brand identity and improving customer experience. Delivery Systems Mobile applications have revolutionized the way businesses coordinate their deliveries. Apps like Onfleet and Bringg provide sophisticated dispatching, route optimization, and driver-tracking features. They facilitate efficient delivery operations, reducing costs, improving delivery speed, and, as a result, enhancing customer satisfaction. Mobile apps in scaling One of the most critical challenges in e-commerce is scaling logistics to accommodate business growth. This requires managing larger volumes of orders, delivery routes, inventory, and customer communication, all of which can quickly become complex. Mobile applications help the scaling process. In a sense, they can grow along with a business. As the volume of transactions increases, mobile applications can handle the increased data and complexity without the need for significant investments in new hardware or infrastructure. They enable businesses to manage growth without disrupting existing operations, and their modular nature allows for additional features to be integrated as needed. For example, ShipBob, a logistics platform designed for e-commerce businesses, faces the challenge of managing increased order volume, as business operations grow. ShipBob offers a unified platform where companies can manage orders from various sales channels. The app provides inventory management across multiple warehouses, order management, and even advanced analytics to improve decision-making. With ShipBob, businesses can scale their logistics seamlessly without the headache of dealing with increased complexity. Similarly, applications like EasyPost allow businesses to manage an extensive network of carriers. As businesses expand geographically, they need to work with more delivery services. EasyPost offers API solutions that integrate with numerous carriers, making it easier for businesses to ship worldwide without getting bogged down by the complexity of managing multiple relationships. Sellbrite and Zoho Inventory provide further support for scaling logistics. Sellbrite facilitates multi-channel selling, allowing businesses to list and sell products across numerous online marketplaces from a single interface. This centralized control simplifies the management of increased sales channels as businesses grow. Zoho Inventory, on the other hand, is a robust inventory management solution that can manage the growing complexity of stock control. It handles tasks like inventory tracking, order fulfillment, and also integrates with multiple online sales channels, keeping all systems synchronized as a business scales. Who uses them, and how? ASOS This British online fashion retailer also made great progress in scaling its logistics with a mobile application. They integrated their operations with Metapack, a delivery management software that offers a range of features, including track-and-trace functionality, returns management, and delivery personalization. With Metapack's capabilities, ASOS was able to enhance its delivery process and manage a greater volume of orders. Stitch Fix Stitch Fix, an online personal styling service, used mobile applications to scale its operations and deliver personalized style boxes to customers across the United States. They used an app called Style Shuffle, which allows users to rate clothing and accessory items, thus helping the company gather data about customer preferences. This helped the company streamline its inventory management and improved the efficiency of its operations. Instacart Instacart, a North American leader in online groceries, turned to mobile apps to grow the scale of its operations. They developed their in-house app that connects customers, personal shoppers, and grocery stores for efficient delivery or pickup of groceries. This allowed them to manage a complex logistical challenge of coordinating between multiple stakeholders. As a result, Instacart became able to handle a growing volume of orders and expand their operations. The Home Depot The Home Depot, a leading home improvement retailer, provides another example of successful logistics scaling through the use of mobile applications. Facing increasing demand online, they realize the need to optimize their e-commerce logistics to handle the surge in orders. The company turned to mobile tech. The app they used was Roadie. It’s an Uber-like system that connects businesses with local drivers who can deliver goods on routes they were already taking. The Home Depot turned to Roadie to help make its delivery process smoother and deal with more orders. The company also created their own app that helped customers keep tabs on their orders, find things in stores, and even use augmented reality to see what products would look like in their homes. The payoff was a big boost to The Home Depot's e-commerce operations. Conclusion So, for e-commerce, mobile apps enhance clarity and speed, which results in an improved shopping journey for consumers, as well as businesses becoming able to work more efficiently. It's easy to expect that, with time, apps will gain an even bigger role in e-commerce logistics. We’ll probably be seeing a constant stream of more and more specialized apps, designed to offer even more help. Likely, they will introduce new methods to boost operational efficiency, cut costs, and amplify customer satisfaction. As these changes come, businesses that can use mobile apps well will lead the pack, ready for the opportunities and challenges the future brings. Try to be one of them.

Mobile Applications and their Impact on E-commerce Logistics Scaling

In the WooCommerce ecosystem, there are several interesting plugins that will help you execute a great shipping strategy. You may need to create advanced shipping rules, integrate popular carriers, or set up shipping methods conditionally. For all these scenarios, you can find an advanced plugin to help you with it. In this article, we will list out some of the best WooCommerce shipping plugins. ELEX WooCommerce USPS Shipping Plugin with Shipment Tracking & Print Label This plugin will help you integrate USPS shipping to your WooCommerce store. Apart from displaying real-time rates on the cart and checkout pages, it will help to print eVS labels as well as provide tracking information. Please note, USPS eVS accounts are only for high volume shippers. Additional features Print USPS eVS Scan Form. Multiple parcel packing options. Supports USPS Flat Rate Boxes ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage If you don't have an eVS account with USPS, and still want to integrate it to your WooCommerce store, you can use this plugin. It helps you integrate USPS services through Stamps.com. You will have to create an account with Stamps.com for this plugin to work. It will help you display live USPS shipping rate and estimated date. Also, you will be able to print labels from your WooCommerce admin and also provide tracking details to customers. Additional features Advanced parcel packing options Price adjustments to shipping services. Options to auto generate, bulk print and email labels. Schedule pick ups with USPS. Table Rate Shipping You will be able to extend the default shipping capabilities of WooCommerce using this plugin. It allows you to define multiple shipping options based on location, product price, quantity, etc. With this plugin, you will be able to add table rates for each of your shipping zones. Additional features Multiple table rate calculations Can add extra charges per weight unit, item count or row. ELEX EasyPost (FedEx, UPS & USPS) Shipping & Label Printing Plugin for WooCommerce If your shipping strategy requires you to integrate multiple shipping carriers on your WooCommerce store, this plugin could help. Through the EasyPost API, you will be able to add FedEx, UPS and USPS rates and services to your store. Moreover, it will help you with label printing, shipment tracking as well as to display estimated delivery dates. Additional features Option to select different service for each when multiple packages are created. Return label printing EasyPost shipping insurance Multiple options for parcel packing. g Shipment Trackin If you need a simple solution exclusively for shipment tracking, you can use   this plugin. It will help you add tracking information to the order view page in the customer's My Account section, emails and the order tracking page. It supports the tracking codes of major shipping carriers in the world. Additional features Customization options REST API support ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express / eCommerce / Paket Shipping Plugin with Print Label DHL is a preferred shipping carrier for several store selling in international markets. With the help of this plugin, you can seamlessly integrate several DHL service like Express, Paket and eCommerce. You can also print labels, return labels, commercial invoices, etc. It also offers label printing and shipment tracking. Additional features Auto generate and bulk print shipping labels. Print archive air waybills. Multiple parcel packaging options. Request for pickup. Make price adjustments. Per Product Shipping If different products in your store requires completely different approaches in shipping, you can use Per Product Shipping plugin. It will help you define shipping rates based on a product or variation. In addition, you can configure additional costs in your existing shipping methods specific to products. Additional features Option to import and export rates via CSV. Choice to keep it as a standalone shipping option or combine with other shipping methods. ELEX WooCommerce Australia Post Shipping Plugin with Print Label & Tracking You can integrate Australia Post eParcel and StarTrack Courier to your WooCommerce store using this plugin. It also allows you to print labels with both services. You can use the plugin to display contracted rates as well as print international shipping documents. Additional features Auto generate and bulk print labels. Automatic parcel packing Generate order summary report. ELEX Hide WooCommerce Shipping Methods When you want to display shipping methods conditionally on your WooCommerce store, this plugin could help. The plugin offers several filters, such as product category, shipping class, order weight, etc, to restrict shipping methods. Moreover, the plugin will help you hide shipping methods created by third party apps. Additional features Hide specific shipping services of popular shipping carriers. Save filters for later use. Hide shipping methods based on user roles. Option to hide default shipping methods of WooCommerce. Print Invoices and Packing Slips You can print different shipping documents directly from the WooCommerce admin using this plugin. Invoices, packing slips and pick slips can be printed using this plugin. Moreover, you can customize the documents effectively to align with your store's branding as well. It will help you create sequential invoice numbers, or you can choose to use the order numbers for invoice. Additional features Live preview while customizing documents. Automatic email option to share documents with store managers. Print multiple packing lists and pick lists for quicker order fulfillment. ELEX Address Validation & Google Address Autocomplete Plugin for WooCommerce You can make your order fulfillment process more efficient with the help of this plugin. It will help you validate shipping addresses with the help of different services such as UPS, USPS, Australia Post and EasyPost. You can use services specific to a country and also verify with customers if there is a doubt in the address. Moreover, the plugin also offers an option to auto complete address Additional features Option to enforce address validation. Keep address validation in the background. Conditional Shipments and Payments This plugin lets you configure different rules to selectively disable shipping methods and payment options. It uses conditional logic to make different shipping methods available at different circumstances. You can make adjustments to your shipping options based on product, category or shipping class. In addition, you can restrict methods based on cart value or the user role of a customer as well. Additional features Selectively disable payment options. Control shipping methods when coupon is activated. Support for subscriptions and memberships. Canada Post Shipping Method If your business is located in Canada, a popular choice of shipping carrier will be Canada Post. This plugin will help you automate shipping through Canada Post.  You will be able to display both international and domestic shipping services on your store using this plugin. The plugin uses the API of Canada Post to fetch the rates and you need to use Canadian Dollars as the store currency. Additional features Extra coverage and pick schedule options. Modify Canada Post services including an option to make price adjustments to each. Choice of individual packing or advanced box packing. Role-based Payment / Shipping Methods You will be able to offer specific shipping methods and payment options according to the user role of a customer with this plugin. It even allows you to set up specific shipping and payment options to guest user on your store as well. When you have a wholesale store with customers of different segments, you can very well use this plugin. Additional features Supports Groups plugin and the customer groups it creates. Simple user interface to choose the payment and shipping options for each user role. Shipping Multiple Addresses Shipping to multiple addresses from the same order can be a requirement, especially during holiday seasons. You can use this plugin to split the cart into multiple addresses. And, your customers will be able to checkout with one order, and different items in the order will be delivered to the different addresses specified. Moreover, the plugin offers an option to replicate a cart and send it to multiple addresses. And, there are no limits to the number of products or number of addresses your customers can include. Additional features Customers can save multiple addresses in their account. All WooCommerce shipping methods are supported. Hopefully, these plugins will help you supercharge your WooCommerce strategy. Let us know what you think about these plugins by leaving a comment.

15 Best WooCommerce Shipping Plugins for your eCommerce Store

As you grow your business, your shipping requirements also increase. You can no longer use the default WooCommerce shipping methods. You have to look for a more advanced approach. One such shipping strategy is to make use of third-party shipping carriers. With this, you will also be saved from the overhead of shipping the packages your yourselves, as the shipping carrier company will ship on your behalf. One such shipping carrier that stands out from the rest is . DHL is a German logistics company, and is undoubtedly a front-runner in the field of logistics, particularly in sea and airmail. The company provides customized supply chain solutions, handling everything from contracts, delivery and reverse logistics as well. DHL But when it comes to integrating DHL with WooCommerce, are there any good solutions? …Yes! Here’s a list of the best WooCommerce DHL shipping plugins: Let’s find out… 1. ELEX WooCommerce DHL Shipping Plugin with Print Label One of the front-runners in the WooCommerce-DHL integration is the ELEX WooCommerce DHL Shipping Plugin with Print Label. ELEX is an . This is due to their constant efforts on improving this plugin at every level, with inputs from customers and the DHL team. Official DHL Partner The plugin integrates not one but three of DHL services: , , and . You can choose to enable either of the services. DHL Express DHL Paket DHL eCommerce With this , store owners can: WooCommerce DHL plugin Access DHL shipping rates on their cart and checkout pages. Print DHL shipping labels, return labels, proforma invoices, commercial invoices, and archive air waybills. Track DHL shipments. Schedule DHL Pickup Requests. Configure Box Packing. Show a price breakdown on the checkout page for shipping charges (as shown on the screenshot). Display the estimated delivery time for each service (as shown in the screenshot). Handle , Shipping Alcohol, and Prohibited Goods. Dangerous/Hazardous Goods Opt for special services like , Remote Area Surcharge, Duty Payments, Paperless trade, Saturday delivery, Cash on Delivery, and so on. Customs 2. Print DHL Express Shipping Labels via WooCommerce With the help of this plugin, you will be able to integrate DHL Express to your WooCommerce store. In addition to accessing real-time rates, you can generate shipping labels from your store’s back-end without hassles. However, you should note this plugin requires you to have an account to work smoothly. For each label that you generate, you pay 5¢ to EasyPost; there are no other fees you have to pay to access the EasyPost API. EasyPost Some of the highlights of the plugin include: Real-time rates from DHL Express. Printing shipping labels. Shipment tracking. Insurance. Address verification. Set box dimensions. Check out the for more details. product page 3. DHL WooCommerce Plugin by Wetail This plugin is relevant for those who are doing business in Nordic countries. This plugin helps you integrate your WooCommerce store with DHL and other carriers. It helps you transfer data that contains customer and shipping information. As soon as an order is placed on your store, it creates a freight note in Unifaun. As per the Unifaun website, DHL multi-shipping is handled by Unifaun in Nordic countries as it is the local carrier. The advantage of using this would be that it helps you automate your complete logistics flow. This means you will be able to save a lot of time required otherwise for manual efforts. The plugin provides an option to choose between manual and automatic sync of relevant data to Unifaun after customers place orders on your store. DHL plugin 4. Shippo You can use Shippo to access multiple carriers for your shipping needs. In fact, using Shippo, you will be able to find the best shipping options from carriers like USPS, DH, and FedEx. You need to create a Shippo account, which is free without any charges for signup. However, for every label that you print, you will be charged 5¢ by Shippo. Moreover, you can even print shipping labels for free for the first 90 days after registration. offers: Shippo Dependable shipment tracking with address validation. Scan-based return labels and international customs forms. Shipping insurance. Importing order details automatically from WooCommerce to your Shippo’s dashboard. Reliable sync with WooCommerce, as any changes in the WooCommerce dashboard, will be reflected in Shippo. Conclusion: Choosing a WooCommerce shipping plugin is one part of your shipping strategy, there are other aspects that you would need to take into consideration. Read WooCommerce Shipping Strategies for Better Profitability and WooCommerce Shipping Strategies to Meet Customer Expectations . Are there any other WooCommerce DHL plugins that you found useful? Let me know in the comment section. Would love to explore the plugins! :)

Choose the WooCommerce DHL Shipping Plugin for Your Shipping Needs

If you are selling physical products on your WooCommerce store, you should also know how to handle the shipping properly. Whether you ship the products yourself or make use of third-party shipping carrier plugins like , , , , etc., you must be very well aware of how shipping works and how you can integrate shipping carriers using WooCommerce plugins. DHL USPS FedEx UPS In this article, I’ll list some of the best free WooCommerce shipping plugins that are available in the WordPress eco-space. Let’s dive in… Here are the Best Free WooCommerce Shipping Plugins 1. ELEX EasyPost (FedEx, UPS & USPS) Shipping Method Plugin for WooCommerce If the default WooCommerce shipping methods don’t suit your business requirement and you do not want the hassle of shipping the parcels to your customers, you can opt for third-party shipping carriers. This is capable of returning rates from FedEx, UPS, and USPS on your WooCommerce store. ELEX WooCommerce EasyPost Plugin Cool, isn’t it? It also allows you to select either Retail or Commercial Rates. Download the Free Plugin The screenshot on the left shows the USPS, FedEx, and UPS shipping rates and services on the cart. The is capable of the following: premium version Printing shipping labels Track shipments Show USPS Flat Rate Boxes Add Insurance Option Box Packing Options, and much more… 2. WooCommerce Weight Based Shipping If one of your primary concerns in calculating shipping costs is order weight, this plugin can be quite handy for you. In addition to using order weight as a determinant of shipping cost, you can also set rules based on the shipping destination and cart sub-totals. Download the Free Plugin The core features of the plugin include creating shipping rules based on Order weight, subtotal, and customer destination. In addition, you can use this plugin to set up free shipping conditions as well. With the plus version, you can override the product shipping class settings of your store. 3. WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping by JEM If you are looking to set up table rate shipping or tiered shipping on your WooCommerce store, this plugin is ideal for that. It boasts a very friendly user interface that will help you configure it pretty quickly. With this plugin, you can define shipping charges by weight or total cost. The rates will be calculated with or without tax based on your store settings. It also allows you to configure multiple tiers of shipping costs as well as incorporate additional charges for each order. Download the Plugin The allows you to set unlimited shipping services, shipping based on the destination address and predefined shipping classes. You can also configure based on a number of items and weight, as well as include handling fees. Pro version 4. WooCommerce DHL Shipping Plugin by ELEX This plugin helps you display DHL Express services and their real-time rates on the cart and checkout pages of your WooCommerce store. The rates will be automatically determined based on the product weight, dimensions, and shipping destination. You will be able to set a custom method title for the DHL shipping method while using this plugin. And, you can create price adjustments to each specific service. The developers are an , giving you another reason to trust this plugin. Official DHL Partner Download the Free Plugin In addition, you can - Show rates specific to your DHL account so that your customers will get the advantage of reduced rates. Show a price breakdown on the checkout page for shipping charges (as shown in the screenshot). This would help to create better clarity and transparency in shipping charges and consequently enhance the customer experience. Display the estimated delivery time for each service (as shown in the screenshot), which is another essential component of a good shipping experience. The premium version — allows store owners to: ELEX WooCommerce DHL Shipping Plugin with Print Label Print shipping labels, return labels, commercial invoices, proforma invoices, and archive air waybill. Integrate DHL Paket and DHL eCommerce Track DHL Shipments Box Packing DHL Parcel Pickup Service Easy handling of , Alcohol, and Prohibited Goods. Dangerous/Hazardous Goods Special services like , Duty Payments, Paperless trade, Saturday delivery, Cash on Delivery, and so on. Customs 5. WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips by Ewout Fernhout This plugin helps you add a PDF invoice automatically to the order confirmation emails sent out to your customers. You can modify the available template based on your business requirements. You can also download or print the documents from the WooCommerce order admin page. Download the Plugin You can bulk generate PDF invoices and packing slips. The templates are fully customizable as they are created using HTML and CSS. Another important feature of this plugin is its multi-language compatibility. Languages like Ukrainian, Slovenian, Japanese, and Slovak also feature in the long list this plugin supports. There are several premium extensions that let you create/email PDF Proforma Invoices, Credit Notes, Email Packing Slips, and Automatic upload to Dropbox. Additionally, the extensions help to automatically send the documents to the printer whenever the order is placed. And there are a lot of templates to choose from. 6. WooCommerce Shipping This extension will help you print shipping labels directly from your store by accessing the discounted rates of your USPS account. By being able to print USPS shipping labels right from your store, you can save money, and save time by avoiding a visit to the post office. However, to display services and rates of USPS, you need to purchase the premium extension. Download the Plugin 7. WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping (You know you have been on the receiving end too, where you look out for Free Shipping for that Amazon product! :D) Free shipping is one of the most popular shipping strategies in the eCommerce business. It is a great strategy to improve conversions and reduce cart abandonment on your WooCommerce store. However, setting up a free shipping option requires careful considerations as it can eat into your profit margins. This plugin will help you set up advanced conditions to decide how and when free shipping will be offered to your customers. Download the Plugin The plugin makes available several conditions to set up free shipping on your store depending on the shopping pattern of your customers. You can use parameters like user roles, order quantity, product weight, shipping class, shipping destination, etc., to enable free shipping. [There are also ways to apply free shipping on your WooCommerce store without a plugin, find those methods in .] this article 8. AfterShip — WooCommerce Tracking This free plugin allows you to track shipments using 550+ shipping carriers! ( ). You need to signup for an AfterShip account and choose the desired shipping carrier. That’s a lot! Download the Plugin The tracking information will be displayed on the order history page, as shown in the screenshot below. Hence, these are the Best Free WooCommerce Shipping Plugins on the WordPress market. In addition to this, I am giving you a guide for WooCommerce Shipping Strategies for Better Profitability . Go check out!

Freemium WooCommerce Shipping Plugins

It’s been four years since we braved the harrowing depths of the 2014/2015 bear market and widespread tales are still told of OG’s not only surviving, but going on to achieve incredible things. To this day names like Angelo and Cobain are still celebrated and revered amongst their peers. A level of natural respect and admiration is born from seeing a Twitter account with over 10k followers knowing the sheer amount of hours put in and the great content you would have to provide in order to achieve those staggering numbers. Love them or hate them, Crypto Influencers are and always will be an integral part of the Cryptosphere whether it be providing YouTube content, interviews, reviews, medium articles, telegram channels or just simply posting charts or fundamental analysis on Twitter. But how does the Cryptosphere feel about influencers being recruited to advise ICO’s? Or releasing a series of scheduled tweets and not disclosing it’s an ad they’ve been paid for? What about large accounts promoting those pre-sale Masternode coins promising you a wealth of fortunes if you sign up early? Opinion will always be divided on these matters and you can find passionate arguments on either side of the coin. I aim to explore these issues by starting with a little about myself and my background. December will mark my fifth anniversary of a career in marketing and advertising. I’ve accumulated a vast amount of experience having worked for two of the largest media agencies in the world, a multi-billion dollar tech company and more recently a member of FANG. In December 2013 I started working in London for part of WPP who boast a portfolio of the biggest and most established brands in the industry. The social department at the time had a team of three — a manager and two juniors. By summer 2014 the team had increased to over 30 people — fully tiered and structured. Social then evolved to become a fundamental part of every single media plan and it became evident to me that this was the future of advertising. Fast forward five years and most brands have dedicated social media account managers specifically to respond to comments and drive engagement through interaction with other brands. A great example of this is Wendy’s who are renowned for . poking light hearted fun at their competitors The majority of TV ads are now accompanied with hashtags as brand’s further attempt to engage their consumers on all other media channels whether it be Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Paid partnerships are the latest trend with Hopper reporting that . From personal experience I know that some minor YouTube personalities can be paid up to $25,000 for simply putting a brand’s URL in the description of one of their posts. Kylie Jenner is paid $1million for an Instagram post So how does this relate to Crypto, a relatively new industry and community? Like I touched on earlier there are various methods that influencers are utilised in Crypto, some more obvious than others. Let’s break these down. Advisor Roles After the 2017 ICO boom it has become common practice for new projects to recruit influencers with a large following who will hype up the coin, promising it to be the next 100x. These influencers will be paid handsomely with free tokens from the project or they will be allowed to purchase the token at a heavily reduced price during the pre-sale. The job of the advisor is to spread awareness about the project and whip their followers and others into a frenzy. If done correctly the ICO will sell out very quickly and when tokens get released into the market the hype surrounding the coin will allow it to open at 3,4,5 times and above the ICO price. Paid Tweets Fairly straight forward in that the influencer will agree on a number of posts promoting the project and being paid in either USD or the project’s token. Interviews Project’s will often look to further their reach and drum up interest by being interviewed by large accounts that are then released on either Twitter or YouTube. Most projects don’t have a YouTube following and are around the 5–10k follower mark on Twitter so it makes sense that if they want to attract new interest an, often scripted, interview is released via a large influencer account. Giveaways An influencer and project will partner up in order to both gain more interest and followers. The common practice for this is for the influencer to give away $100 or more worth of the token and the follower must follow, retweet and tag three friends in order to be made eligible. Pre-Sale Masternodes I’m including this method of promotion as these projects are often red flags. These coins will offer influencers free Masternodes to promote their project whilst ROI is incredibly high at the start. Most influencers will then already be able to set up around 5 or more masternodes before the project has even sold their first official node in the pre-sale often for around 0.25 or 0.3 BTC. A common theme of these coins is to have Zero Protocol and it’s own Dex on the roadmap and you will often see the same people as ‘marketers’ in many of these coins in Discord. Many of these coins are known to have the same set of devs across multiple projects and are prone to exit scams as they are often anonymous. Cryptocurrency projects know their market. The Crypto community is thriving on social media mostly Twitter, Reddit, Telegram and Discord. They know that it would be a waste of time, resource and most importantly funds to try and target non Crypto users using traditional display or video advertising. The promotional methods mentioned above are highly effective in targeting the correct users across social media and traditional advertising brands would be ecstatic to find such a highly engaged and active community that is so easy and simple to target. Because of this it makes complete sense for Crypto projects to employ these strategies. Which brings me to the influencer. In any other industry if you have built up your own brand, following and you consistently provide content for free should you be entitled to monetise this? If you’ve spent countless hours providing charts, entry points and generating revenue for your followers should you be able to accept a fee to promote a coin providing all relevant and correct information? In my view this is completely reasonable and should be accepted throughout the Cryptosphere as long as the influencer is transparent in being clear that it’s an ad or they have received some type of compensation — similarly to how an Instagram post is tagged with the words “Paid Partnership”. This could be as simple as completing the tweet with ‘#ad’ at the end like some more trustworthy influencers already do. Transparency is absolutely essential in what is still an unregulated environment. In order for mainstream acceptance to occur, it is vital that we weed out the bad actors who seek to achieve nothing but personal gain at the expense of others by tricking or misleading them. Remember that in trading for every winner, you also have a loser. As an investor in Cryptocurrency you have to be able to educate yourself to learn to distinguish the scams from genuine products, the respected to the shady characters and most importantly to make your own decisions and not follow the herd mentality. Which brings me to my last point — Do Your Own Research! #DYOR really isn’t just a meme and I cannot stress this point enough. You should never enter a position without first researching at the very minimum the basic fundamentals. Check the advisors, check the team, check the website, study the roadmap, read the whitepaper, see who’s shilling the coin on Twitter etc.. If the advisors of the coin are wearing “Wen Moon Lambo” t-shirts is that really a project you can take seriously especially if these people are renowned for dumping on their followers? If a coin wants to partner up with a highly controversial and unsavoury character just to try and boost the price of their coin is that something you want to be a part of? Crypto is still very much the wild west. Trade safe. Thank you for reading. Alex Libertas CEO and Founder of www.thedailychain.com

The Crypto Influencer — A Serious Strategy or Cheap Marketing Tactic?

In this post we’ll walk through different AWS services and features that enable canary deployments of Lambda Functions , although you can check the Canary Deployments Serverless Plugin if you just want to safely deploy your functions and you are not interested about the details. Deployment in a Serverless application is an all-at-once process, when we release a new version of any of our functions, every single user will hit the new version. We must be really confident about the new version, because if anything goes wrong and the function contains an error, all of our users will be experiencing ugly issues. However, AWS recently introduced a new feature that can make our deployment process much more reliable and secure: traffic shifting using aliases. How can alias traffic shifting help us? Usually, deploying a Lambda function involves that all the function invocations will execute the new code, either because we are updating or because we are pointing an alias to a new version. That means that if anything goes wrong, 100% of the invocations will be errored and we should quickly roll back to the previous version or, what is even worse, we might not notice the bug and we leave our system in an inconsistent state. However, with the introduction of alias traffic shifting, we can now specify on an alias, so that not all the invocations hit the new release, but only a certain amount of traffic is routed to the latest version. This means that Lambda will automatically between the two latest versions, allowing us to check how the new release behaves before completely replacing the previous one, minimizing the impact of a possible bug. $Latest version weights load balance requests As we see that the new version behaves correctly, we could then gradually update its weight, increasing the load it receives. We can do that in the AWS Console, through the or with some , but there’s a better way to handle Lambda function deployments. CLI open source tools that handle weight updates automatically Automating the deployment process Even though being able to do traffic shifting is a huge leap forward, let’s admit that having to update weights manually (or deploying our own management system) is not really convenient. Don’t worry, as usual AWS has us covered. With we can just specify how we want traffic to be shifted over the time and it the . There are three different types of deployment preferences: CodeDeploy automatically adjusts weights : we specify the percentage of traffic we want to shift and the time we want the deployment to last. So, if we pass 10% and 30 minutes, for example, the 10% of the traffic will be routed to the new version during half an hour. When that time has passed, all the traffic will be shifted to the new version. Canary : the amount of the traffic routed to the new version will be incremented according to the provided percentage and interval. So, if we configure it to increment a 10% of the traffic every 5 minutes, CodeDeploy will update the alias weights adding a 10% to the new version in intervals of 5 minutes, until all the traffic has been shifted. Linear : all the traffic is shifted to the new version straight away. All-at-once This way, we let CodeDeploy do all the heavy lifting in the deployment process, and change alias weights according to our preferences. Traffic will be shifted gradually and, in the meantime, we can check if our new function is behaving correctly and cancel the deployment if we see anything weird. How could we automate the roll back process, so that we don’t have to manually check how the system is performing? CodeDeploy has thought about that as well. Rolling back to the previous Lambda Function version CodeDeploy allows us to configure a and a traffic shifting , which are in fact Lambda functions that are triggered before and after the traffic shifting process. They’re suited for performing tasks like running . CodeDeploy expects to get notified about the success or failure of the hooks , otherwise it’ll assume they failed. In any case, if the hook failed either for not calling CodeDeploy or for explicitly calling it with a failure response, the deployment will be aborted and all the traffic will be shifted to the old function version. pre post hook integration tests within one hour Hooks are not the only way we can check that our function is behaving as expected, since we can provide CodeDeploy with a list of to monitor the deployment process. As the traffic shifting begins, CodeDeploy will track those alarms, cancelling the deployment and to the previous function version if any of them is . CloudWatch Alarms rolling back triggered Deployment process with CodeDeploy and Lambda weighted alias Hooks and alarms allow us to monitor the whole deployment process. We can perform some tests before routing any traffic to the new function version, track alarms during the traffic shifting process and run more tests right after all the traffic is hitting the new version. If CodeDeploy notices something wrong in any of those steps, it will automatically roll back to the old, stable function version. CloudFormation all the things All that sounds really good, but how do we set it up? Well, doing it manually doesn’t seem to be a reasonable option, but fortunately AWS has an awesome service for defining and provisioning infrastructure: . This tool gives us a way to model our system in YAML or JSON templates, which we can use to create a collection of related AWS resources. As you can guess, the syntax of a template where we can define almost any imaginable resource in the AWS ecosystem and its configurations it’s intricate. They even built a simplified syntax to define Serverless applications, the , although it only supports a tiny subset of the AWS resources. The best way to deal with CloudFormation in a Serverless environment is, hands down, the , that provides a nice an easy DSL, which then turns into a CloudFormation template, so that we don’t have to deal with its complexity. However, when the DSL falls short, we can still include chunks of CloudFormation template syntax to create the resources we need. It turns out that the framework has not implemented the canary deployments feature, so we’ll have to specify the resources ourselves. So, we’ll need to include the following: CloudFormation Serverless Application Model Serverless framework A . CodeDeploy::Application An with and permissions for CodeDeploy. IAM::Role AWSCodeDeployRoleForLambda AWSLambdaFullAccess A for every function, where we’ll specify the deployment preference type and alarms. CodeDeploy::DeploymentGroup A for every function including , where we specify the CodeDeploy Application and DeploymentGroup it belongs to, and the associated hooks. Lambda::Alias CodeDeployLambdaAliasUpdate The Serverless Framework always triggers the Lambda function version upon any event, so we must replace any reference to the function by the newly created alias in the event sources. $Latest If this sounds like a lot of hassle… it’s just because it is. Luckily, the Serverless Framework is really modular and there are tons of plugins to complement its features, so you can use the to create all those resources in a much more convenient way (Note: I’m the author of the plugin, any contribution, comment or feature request is welcome). Serverless Plugin Canary Deployments Happy safe deployments! : Reference _By default, an alias points to a single Lambda function version. When the alias is updated to point to a different…_docs.aws.amazon.com Traffic Shifting Using Aliases - AWS Lambda _This post courtesy of Ryan Green, Software Development Engineer, AWS Serverless The concepts of blue/green and canary…_aws.amazon.com Implementing Canary Deployments of AWS Lambda Functions with Alias Traffic Shifting | Amazon Web… _If you use AWS SAM to create your serverless application, it comes built-in with AWS CodeDeploy for safe Lambda…_docs.aws.amazon.com Gradual Code Deployment - AWS Lambda

Canary deployments in Serverless applications

There’s a veneer that people maintain online — and we’ve all done it — showing audiences a polished, glowing side of themselves no matter what else might be going on in their lives. You don’t see the dozen crappy selfies taken, the failed bench presses, or the missteps on the path. You don’t see the messes or the self-doubt or hear about the questions and thoughts that keep them up at night. And while these people might be falling apart inside, we only see the veneer, wondering why we can’t be as polished as they are. What’s worse is that audiences tidy bows and happy endings. They want posts like this one to tell them that what they’re experiencing — depression, anxiety, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and the oppressive feeling that you have no idea what the fuck you’re doing — can be overcome. They want the success stories, so they can follow every single step. like Last week I shared about the bout of depression that has plagued me the last six months, and I didn’t have a tidy bow to put on it. It was not an easy post to share, and I fought with myself to push that “Publish” button. a blog post But I couldn’t write about it and share it with you, either. It is too big a thing, too important to edit out of my story. not And it taught me about authenticity. It’s easy to call yourself authentic, but it’s another thing entirely to be authentic, to take off the mask and pull away the protective veneer. It’s one thing to declare that authenticity is something I value. It’s another thing to be scared shitless while I tell you that for the past six months I’ve suffered from mental illness. Here’s what made me take that leap: if I’m not being real with you, then you don’t know what it’s like to follow the writer’s path. really I’ve spent a lot of time telling you that the life of a writer is filled with grudging, mundane work and bad days followed by a few insights. I finally got to show you what that life looks like. I gave you a glimpse into why I stopped writing on here for so long. I left some details out — no need to wander into TMI territory — but I didn’t make excuses or candy-coat a single thing. If it’s important and it scares the bejesus out of you, then it’s authentic. Some of my favorite stories have characters that are flawed beyond all measure, who aren’t perfectly courageous and who lose their way. That feels more real to me, because that’s the life that I know. In place of the tidy bow, I used a technique that I’ve learned recently from a few storytellers, which is to give the impression that the story goes on from here and this is merely a resting point on it’s path. It’s liberating to take off the mask and pull away the veneer. It’s a relief to admit that you don’t have it all figured out. When you’re ready, you’ll feel it, too.

How To Be Authentic

A note on what follows: As I take what’s been a five-year night-job I’m putting pen to pixel in an attempt to articulate my lens on early-stage investing. I call this framework my own, though in truth it’s a synthesis of counsel from wise predecessors, observation of fantastic (and not-so-fantastic) entrepreneurs, industry literature (more history than blogs), personal experience — including more mis-steps than I would like to admit — and a splash of my own techno-optimism. full-time This is far from a formula. It is not meant to be an absolute calculus on predicting the future (I’ll leave that to or the ) but rather a lens through which to standardize the hundreds of pitches you see as an early-stage technology investor. Contrary to what many established VCs will have you believe, it’s not difficult to pick startups with prospects; investing is as much about avoiding the bad ones as identifying the good. While operational, financial, and technical knowledge are part and parcel to savvy early-stage investing, they have diminishing marginal returns. Hari Seldon TechnoCore The highest contributor to portfolio success (read “IRR”) is quantity*quality of deal flow, and ability to get into the best. VC is an access game, and in access games the motto is location, location, and likability. Criterion 1 of 2: Scored (100 of 120pts req’d for fiduciary-level conviction) i.) Founder + Founding Team (40pts) Ability * Background: I look for uncanny founder-market fit, industry-familiar smart creatives who intimately understand a vertical but approach it in a novel way with new technology–e.g. at , who’s an amputee building human augmentation software, or Jenna Brown at , who became frustrated with the software in dry bulk shipping while at a commodities house. Unusual familiarity with a market is an easy, early defensibility-driver. Jeff Huber Standard Cyborg Shipamax Determination (Grit) * Passion (Conviction): i.e. Are they truly with solving the problem at hand? Why? What would make them give up? The entrepreneur’s motivation (or lack thereof) is a major risk factor. All seems fine and dandy when you close your seed round, but you know, Murphy’s Law. obsessed Honesty + Character (gut read, ‘reference checks’): i.e. Can I trust them? At Seed the entrepreneur has total control — . Not to mention, culture stems from leadership, especially the CEO (a certain Lyft competitor comes to mind). It is my firm belief that Silicon Valley has without regard for empiricism largely deified the wrong entrepreneurs (and investors, for that matter). as they should, though that’s another post Vision * Pragmatism (user-centricity): i.e. Can they inspire others to see a common vision while building a realistic bridge? It’s often easier to see the long-term than the mid. Salespersonship * Connectedness: i.e. Can they sell, and who will read their emails? Note: I believe the Sales Ability-to-Success curve is non-linear. That is, past a certain point it is dangerous to be better at selling as it can disconnect expectation from reality. I’ve seen a lot of vaporware shortsightedly sold to both customers and investors. Your product should largely sell itself. Team history & Cohesiveness: How do they know one another, and for how long? By what mechanism do co-founders resolve disagreement and how well do they move on? There’s no room for resentment on their journey, or for ego. Co-founder disputes are one of a startup’s greatest risk factors. Capacity for speed. A good measure of this is how many code commits you have per week. Bonus points for women, minorities, ‘disabilities’. Venture capitalists systemically undervalue these founders. Notes: Brand and culture are more important (for growth and defensibility) than most entrepreneurs realize. However, both largely extend from the CEO and are incredibly nuanced. I will judge your e-book by its homepage. I look for CEOs who hate raising capital, because they love building businesses that make money. Funding should be a function of traction on positive gross margins, not vice versa. If you’re spending more time fundraising than running your business, you’ve got a problem. Drop VCs who drag their feet — they’re not investing. ii.) Technology * Defensibility / Competitive Landscape (35pts) Numerator: (15pts:) UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGY: If you just hired a freelance developer to build you an MVP then your company probably isn’t for me. If your problem wasn’t hard to solve then you’ll have quite a few competitors who are likely at least as smart as you are. . If you don’t have that — and no one has network effects from the start — then a great team with a head start will buy you a year, two (I saw this first-hand when Common Bond fast-followed SoFi). I’ll only bet on a ‘head start’ if there’s what I call “Competitive Osmosis” (see Note below). There are really only two ways to be long-term defensible: IP and Network Effects maybe : Only acceptable if you’re truly ‘deep-tech’, but by then your defensibility likely derives more from a world-class team than from the patents themselves. I care not a lick for business process patents (they’re circumventable) and steeply discount software patents by “1,000 ways to code a cat”. IP : When this term came into vogue a decade ago it referred to social network effects — i.e. each new user makes the network more valuable. This is why VCs like marketplaces so much: once the network is big enough then it’s difficult to build a viable competitor. You wouldn’t start an Airbnb competitor today and network effects are why. But I’m more interested in a new type of network effect: ML/DL. Machine learning models improve, definitionally, with more data. Network Effects very I believe that any software company not leveraging machine learning (or that’s built as a distributed application vis-a-vis blockchain) has a very good chance of not being around in 5–10 years. (13pts:) Why now? A solution can easily be too late or too early. What technological, societal, regulatory, or market development prevented this company from being started three years ago? Note: Technologies can be too late or early too… IMO, AR/VR and drones are a bit too early (and over-hyped), while mobile is (way) too late. (3pts:) Brand (this is often under-valued, esp. by 1st-time entrepreneurs) (2pts:) Do they have killer advisers? I don’t mean your buddy who’s worked in the industry a few years more than you, I mean people who can pick up the phone and get you your first five customers or coach your engineers through technical problems no one has ever solved before. (2pt:) Cash on hand (Note: Cash-to-Defensibility is non-linear; too much cash breeds profligacy and complacency.) Denominator: # of competitors (direct & possible; there’s always a competitor you don’t know about yet–maybe I’ve seen their deck) Agility of competitors Competitors’ cash on hand (over the “can catch up fast” threshold, discounted by solution’s prioritization on their product roadmap) As frustrating as it is, there are certain entrepreneurs and funds the lion’s share of VCs simply won’t bet against — e.g. Musk, Bezos, Sequoia. Notes on Verticals & Competitive Osmosis (more on this in an upcoming post): First of all, I don’t invest in consumer technology . I don’t pretend to know what consumers want. While the largest technology companies are predominantly B2C, the competition is more fierce, defensibility more difficult, and the risk profile such that it requires a large fund that’s able to make many bets and follow on big in the winners. That doesn’t work with a small fund like Cantos. Companies are much more predictable. They only want to do two things: Increase top-line and reduce cost. Venture capital is a game of statistics, and I like my odds in B2B much better. Now, this is where vertical really matters. I look for sectors that have big, slow movers, and where your average Millennial entrepreneur isn’t yet focused (i.e. NOT social networking, ad-tech, marketing-tech, CRM/sales-tech, on-demand, e-comm, cloud infrastructure, dev tools). This could mean manufacturing (e.g. Bigfinite , Standard Cyborg ), construction (e.g. BuildingConnected , ALICE ), finance (e.g. Qwil , Maxwell ), healthcare (e.g. Patch , GreenLight Medical ), logistics (e.g. Shipamax , EasyPost ), agriculture (e.g. Arable , AgriData ) and other niche sectors that require knowledge thereof. Generally speaking… YES: Finance/insurance (blockchain solutions only; pure software solutions have been played out), manufacturing (esp. +AI), logistics, agriculture (though sensitive to robotics), construction (though ALICE may be my only bet here), gov/law (where ‘humans are serving as middleware’, to borrow a quote from Manan Mehta at Unshackled), synthetic biology (non-clinical), infrastructure for a decentralized web NO: Social, on-demand, ad/marketing/sales-tech, e-commerce, hospitality-tech, hiring tech (too many of you), AR/VR (too soon), bio-pharma (takes a whole other skill set), real estate (played out) Because I don’t/can’t know all of these sectors intimately, be prepared for me to ferret out a SME and revert with more specific questions. iii.) Clarity of Business Model, Unit Economics (10pts) Numerator: Business model simplicity (do one thing, do it well). One of my mantras is: Sell one product to one demographic. Know your fixed and variable costs! Model in ~20-30% uncertainty. Complexity is the enemy of speed. Day 1 revenue or <6-month path to product-related revenue. I typically invest in companies with $5–30K monthly revenue, even at ‘pre-seed’ (pre-money valuation under $5M). Gross-margins > 60%. While I wouldn’t echo his hallmark condescension, a quote from Don Valentine comes to mind: “We need guys [/girls] to have 70% gross margins, because they abuse so much money. You need to be in a business that has huge gross margins, because the managements are not very experienced. You start with a 60% minimum margin as the ideal, because you know the management is going to spend 20% on marketing and 20% on research. We have guys who are 27 years old and have never managed anything.” LTV/CAC > 300%. Payback period also needs to be taken into account–can’t be longer than your ability to fundraise! Churn < 3%. Past that you eventually churn through the entire market. The revenue model must be aligned to incentives of the customers. Note: Its violation of this principle is my fundamental problem with companies driven by ad revenue. Denominator: Extreme bias toward low burn (sub-$50K/mo at pre-seed, $100K at seed). Use advisers for early sales, not FTEs, and don’t sign a lease before product-market fit! CEO will consider herself cash-poor until $5M+ raised. Until then use the currency you have: equity! Notes: Major preference toward enterprise — lower risk profile (granted, lower possible upside), lower churn, deeper pockets I will not invest in anything I feel is or could quickly become commoditized — UI-based products, storage, algorithms on publicly accessible datasets, cybersecurity, on-demand services (better called “labor arbitrage”), or anything that is ‘trending’. Advertising (eyeball-based) revenue is an unacceptable answer for my risk/return profile iv.) Exit Opportunities / Valuation (10pts) Numerator: Natural acquirers at multiple stages. I believe in optionality, not IPO-or-bust. Assume Google won’t buy you (though I do think their acq. activity will pick up; what else will they do with all that cash?) I want to know your market is large enough that a 10% share means at least $100M in revenue–$100M ARR roughly being the hurdle for a SaaS IPO Vertical has high M&A activity, incumbents have large cash reserves, industry is facing or will soon face sweeping changes at the hands of innovation Denominator: Look for “arbitrage” opportunities, i.e. underpriced deals. Note: these are in fact fairly priced deals, often found outside of the Bay Area, where we’ve accustomed ourselves to price inflation. Bias against seed round >$10M post-money valuation, as most acquisitions happen under $50M Berkeley, MIT, & other engineering-heavy universities are overlooked opportunities. Stanford is a fantastic school but over-emphasized. Note: Wary of scientist CEOs unless innate business acumen is present. Notes: If your total addressable market (TAM) — and this should be real revenue potential, NOT GMV! — is under $2B, you’re wasting your time speaking with most VCs, particularly $100M+ funds. What types of outcomes VCs will bet on are primarily a function of their AUM & # of investment professionals. Acquisitions have slowed in recent months but Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, and others (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway’s $60B war chest) are sitting on huge piles of cash that they need to put to work. These cash piles will be heightened should the current administration incentivize repatriation of foreign cash. I believe Google & Facebook will become the Berkshire Hathaway’s of tech. I like the types of acquirers that are more likely to be in $BRK’s portfolio than Benchmark’s — e.g. GE, GM, Marmon, Honeywell, Mastercard, Verisk, John Deere Train thoroughbreds, don’t hunt unicorns. Nine-figure exits are OK for a small fund like Cantos, though I do need conviction you’ll be able to raise Series A. Seed is less affected by bear markets due to lower burn and valuation. As NEA Co-Founder Dick Kramlich once said, “Good ideas don’t go on strike.” Companies seed funded in ‘08-’09 include Airbnb, Twilio, Dropbox, Slack, Credit Karma. v.) Financing Risk (5pts) Since I will write smaller checks, my co-investors must be able to carry the day. My $50–100K check will buy a seed-stage startup only 1–2 months… …Or the company must be riding a wave/in a market/run by a CEO that I’m confident up-stack VCs are likely to fund. Note: I know enough VCs to have a fairly good read on this ;) If the latter is the case, I want to be familiar with the metrics that will be required for a strong Series A and confident the CEO can hit them I want the round I’m participating in to buy the startup at least 12 months of runway. In this wary market, 18+ is preferable. Note: I always test companies against a few friendly VCs at larger funds before writing a check. I’m showing my hand here but if I introduce you to another investor I’m not being 100% altruistic. [Shout-out to some of my usual suspects… Arianna Simpson , Shivon Zilis , Zavain Dar , Vaughn Blake , John Komkov , Nan Li , Katherine Boyle, Ela Madej , Zal Bilimoria , Michael Berolzheimer , Trae Stephens , Anya Schiess , Mo.ElBibany , Howie Diamond , Alastair Trueger , Ryan Gembala , Seth Winterroth ] vi.) Additive Business (10pts) The company’s product or service is “additive” to the world, i.e. contributes to: Health (e.g. , , ) Patch Recursion Enlitic Financial Inclusion & Private Sector Accountability (e.g. Robinhood, , ) Qwil Ethic Democratization & Public Sector Accountability (e.g. OpenGov, ) Vendor Registry Environment, Waste Reduction, & Food Security (e.g. , , ) Opus 12 Tri Alpha Energy Arable Education (e.g. Duolingo, AltSchool, Treehouse) Quality of Worklife (e.g. Slack, WeWork, ) Ambition Notes: I acknowledge this is highly subjective but hey, it’s my fund! This may read as an ‘impact investing’ filter but is in fact a financial decision. IRR stems from value-creation, and I believe the most valuable companies are created by solving the largest pain points. This is also a meaningful differentiator in hiring talented Millennials… as sometimes even getting away with under-paying them (until you can afford market rates). vii.) Gut (5pts) The indescribable feeling that you should invest despite non-obvious reasons Note: I believe what we call “gut” is the brain’s own deep learning. It is a complex layering of so much information as to feel intuitive when it is in fact deeply logical. While it has an explicit 5% here, it affects all of the scores above. Criterion 2 of 2: Binary (e.g. technical risk, market risk, funding risk, competitive risk, hiring risk, retention risk, co-founder fallout risk) I typically frame this by asking, Then I attempt to give a % likelihood for each over 5- and 10-year timeframes. What risks am I taking, specifically , and am I willing to take them as a fiduciary? What assumptions must hold true for this company to succeed? Or, as one veteran VC put, “Ask yourself, ” What price glory?

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