Captain401: 希望帮助企业更简单地创建 401K 计划
周四,从创业孵化器 Y Combinator 毕业的 Captain401 正式上线,这是一项帮助小型企业创建 401K 计划(译注:一种由雇员、雇主共同缴费建立起来的完全基金式的养老保险制度)的服务。Captain401 的目标是让管理 401K 计划像运营公司其他业务一样简单,而且像 Zenefits 或 Zenpayroll 一样更加聚焦于数字技术。
该公司首席执行官罗杰·李(Roger Lee)说,Captain401 寻求创建一套流程,避免投资那些收取高额手续费和跑不赢市场的基金。他表示,Captain401 的投资服务是自动化的,能够帮助员工做出更好的投资决策,并且对最佳选择拥有更深入的认识。
“像 ADP 和 John Hancock 那些老牌公司,它们要求大量的文书工作、缓慢的信件邮寄、各种文件填报和签名。”李说,“一些公司,比如富达投资集团(Fidelity),根本不跟小型企业合作。我们认为,我们可以在那方面做得更好,我们的解决方案是网络和无纸化。企业只需要 10 分钟就能创建自己的计划,我们让持续管理实现了自动化。对员工来说,他们免除了搞清楚自己该怎么做的麻烦。”
尽早创建 401K 计划是很重要的,这有几方面的原因,如果说哪个最重要,那就是展示雇主关心自己员工的未来。李此前曾运营一家创业公司,他的员工问起了 401K 计划的事情。李想创建一套,但整个过程缓慢而又过时。举例来说,那些提供此项计划的机构仍然需要大量的文书工作,需要签名、邮寄和传真文件。
“它看起来是一个麻烦,花的时间很长,我们认为,我们可以利用更加现代化的技术做得更好。”李说,“多年来,我个人帮助过 100 多名亲朋好友检查他们的 401K 计划,并协助他们进行投资。我意识到,他们 401K 计划的投资分配都不够理想。他们不知道该如何选择自己的投资对象,我们希望在 401K 领域引入 Wealthfront 那样的在线理财平台。”
与此同时,Captain401 的另一位联合创始人保罗·萨瓦亚(Paul Sawaya)是来自 Mozilla 基金会的一名软件开发者。该公司创建了一套 401K 计划,但整个流程很难管理,员工也没有被教授最佳的投资方式。“我只登进过系统一次,当时我还是那里的员工。”萨瓦亚说道。两人通过一个共同的好友——Clever 的泰勒·博斯米尼(Tyler Bosmeny)——结识,他们最终谈到了 401K 计划,他们觉得自己可以提供一种更好的体验。
Captain401 的 401K 计划跟数十个先锋指数基金进行了对接,李表示,此举将能带来高于其他基金的业绩表现。“那是人们喜欢的沃伦·巴菲特(Warren Buffet)式做法,经济学家认为,这是员工的最佳选择,能够取得最多的投资回报。”
Captain401 毕业于今夏的 Y Combinator 培训班,有趣的是,Y Combinator 自己将成为该公司的客户。
“员工能够在自己的养老金计划中得到更好的投资选择,并能够就个人情况制定合适的投资策略,如果我们能够朝着那样的世界迈进,那么比之单打独斗的做法,效果能够好得多,而且能够为员工提供更多的帮助。”李说,“显然,这里面还有大量的工作要做。”
YC-Backed Captain401 Wants To Make Creating A 401k Easier For Businesses
Captain401, a service that helps small businesses set up a 401k, is launching out of Y Combinator today. The goal of Captain401 is to make managing 401ks as simple as other services are for other functions within companies — and in a more digitally focused manner like Zenefits or Zenpayroll.
Captain401 seeks to create a process that avoids funds that have higher fees and fail to beat the market, CEO Roger Lee said. The investing service is automated, helping employees make better decisions about their investments and become more educated about the best choices, he said.
“Incumbents like ADP, John Hancock, they require tons of paperwork, snail mailing, filling out and signing,” he said. “Some companies like Fidelity don’t work with small businesses. We think we can do a lot better there, our solution is online and paperless. “It takes companies 10 minutes to set up their plan, we automate the ongoing administration. For the employees it’s that education and investment experience where the existing 401k companies leave employees to figure out what to do on their own.”
401ks are important to set up early for a number of reasons, if only is to show that employers care about the future of their employees. Lee had previously run a startup where his employees were asking about a 401k. Lee wanted to set one up, but the whole process was slow and outdated. Institutions, for example, still required stacks of paperwork that required signatures and had to be mailed and faxed in.
“It seemed like a hassle, it took way longer, and we thought we could do a lot better with more modern tech,” he said. “I personally over the years helped more than a 100 friends and family look at their 401ks and help with their investments, and realized without fail that each was sub-optimally allocated. They didn’t know how to choose their investments. We wanted to bring a Wealthfront into the 401k space.”
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Meanwhile, his co-founder Paul Sawaya was a software developer at Mozilla. That company had a 401k instituted, but the whole process was difficult to manage and employees weren’t given education on how to best invest, he said. “I only logged in once when I was an employee there,” he said. The two met through a mutual friend — Tyler Bosmeny at Clever — and eventually came to the topic of 401ks, which they decided they could offer a better experience.
The 401k is tied to dozens of Vanguard index funds, which Lee says ultimately leads to higher performance than other funds. “That’s the approach that people like Warren Buffet, economists [consider], it’s the best approach for employees and get to the most returns.”
Captain401 came out of this year’s summer Y Combinator class. Interestingly enough, Y Combinator will be a customer of Captain401.
“Any step closer to a world where employees can get better investment options in their plan and they can diversify and get a suitable investment strategy that makes sense for them and their personal situation, that can just be so much better and help them so much more than the go it alone approach,” Lee said. “Obviously there’s a lot of work to do here.”
来源:techcrunch
硅谷
2015年07月31日
硅谷
企业营销自动化企业Radius完成Peter Thiel领投的5000万美元D轮融资
由 Facebook 的第一个实习生 Darian Shirazi 创建的企业营销自动化企业 Radius获得由Peter Thiel 的 Founders Fund 领投的 D 轮 5000 万美元的融资。 截止到这次融资,Radius 已经获得了总共 1.25 亿美元的投资。但他们没有公开透露目前公司的估值,Radius 的一位发言人表示,该公司价值 5 亿美元。
Radius 围绕大数据分析技术为客户展开 B2B 营销自动化服务。Radius 的“智慧云(Intelligence Cloud)” 可以对客户的众多渠道(社交媒体、合作伙伴数据、销售系统数据、政府公开数据等)的数据进行分析。再利用不同的模型为客户制定营销策略。据称Radius跟踪的企业数达到了 3000 万,可实时收集500亿个数据点,通过公开数据和专有数据的结合为企业生成其最终客户会不会最终购买产品的“信心指数”。
Radius 计划将本轮融资继续用于其“智慧云(Intelligence Cloud)”的开发。而长远的目标就是上市,投资机构也用实际行动表明了对它的信心。Radius 去年 10 月刚刚完成了 C 轮 5470 万美元的融资。上一轮的老朋友 AME Cloud Ventures,BlueRun Ventures Formation 8,Glynn Capital Management,Salesforce Ventures,Yuan Capital 等多家机构都参加了 Radius 本轮的融资。
B2B 的营销工具 Radius 活得不错,B2C 的企业营销自动化工具也开始风生水起,前沃尔玛、高朋高管出来做的 B2C 的企业营销自动化工具 BlueShift 也开始受到关注。
过去的企业营销自动化工具主要围绕 B2B 业务展开。做 B2C 的难点在于,B2C 的商品种类比 B2B 领域多得多,B2C 要做营销自动化,要求服务商提供更多个性化的服务。
BlueShift 和 Radius 一样围绕大数据为客户提供营销服务,他们目前定位在电商客户群。动态分割和动态内容相结合,使得用户的身份数据和操作内容可以更加准确的匹配,以满足商家个性化营销的需求。他们通过利用用户的实时操作数据来建立用户档案,而传统的做法是根据历史操作数据建档。
BlueShift 目前获得了 Nexus Venture Partners 领投的 260 万美元的种子轮融资。
Marketing intelligence firm Radius raises another $50 million
Radius, the marketing intelligence software startup founded by Facebook vet Darian Shirazi, has raised another $50 million led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
With the latest investment round, the six-year-old San Francisco-based company will have raised $125 million to date, following a $54.7 Series C round that closed last September.
Radius is not disclosing its exact valuation, but a company spokesperson says it's north of $500 million. The company has doubled its valuation with every round raised.
Radius investors include Formation 8, Glynn Capital Management, Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Yuan Capital. That's in addition to former Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack and actor/entrepreneur Jared Leto, who participated in Radius's previous investment rounds.
Radius pegs itself as data science company for B2B marketers. Its platform revolves around a predictive marketing software suite and its proprietary data science engine, the Radius Intelligence Cloud, which tracks more than 50 billion data points on 30 million businesses.
The platform connects to a company's CRM platform, and then uses public, government and other partner sources of data to analyze and refine a client's marketing strategy, helping them generate lead lists of their ideal prospects, increase sales or scale to a national campaign. Beyond prospect data, Radius also provides social media activity from the likes of Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Google and Foursquare, all in one centrally configured place.
Radius clients include office supply chain Staples and POS maker Revel Systems. Its most prominent competitors include Infer, Lattice Engines and Six Sense Media.
Radius plans to use the new capital for continued development of its Intelligence Cloud. As for the company's long-term roadmap, a home on Wall Street is certainly in the cards.
In an interview last September, Sharazi said he ultimately sees Radius as a publicly traded company.
"We want to build a public company," Sharazi said. "You need freedom to build something incredible. We built this practice around data science and the appreciation for data science, and in order to do this right and solve the problems of such a large market, we felt like we had to stay independent."
来源:ZDNet
YC旗下创业公司GO1,想要挑战企业传统合规培训
美国企业孵化器Y Combinator 2015年夏季主打公司GO1,一家成立于北美的员工培训企业,旨在用更有效更新潮的方法教育和培训员工。
想必在大公司工作过的人都应该体验过完成年度合规培训的挫败感。通常情况下,所谓的合规培训就是要你连续看几个小时的网络研讨会,会议的内容是教你如何成为公司团队的一员,如避免腐败等等。举个简单的例子,你要浏览每张幻灯片的信息,哪怕幻灯片上的内容非常浅显易懂。
GO1的培训教师团队由来自牛津大学的澳大利亚人组成,GO1运用的一些培训理念是经过育智科技企业(比如Coursera和Udemy)实践认证的。
GO1的创始人Andrew Barnes是一位罗德学者(猎云网注:罗德奖学金是一个世界级的奖学金,有“全球本科生诺贝尔奖”之称的美誉,得奖者被称为“罗德学者”。),是牛津大学的教育技术硕士。“对于很多公司而言,合规培训是特定的。”Barnes在采访中说道,“可是走形式的合规培训简直是在滥用员工的时间,造成员工对公司不满;真正的员工培训应该是让员工变得更有实力。”
GO1可为不同的组织机构定制不同的培训计划,它要么根据市场需求给组织机构增加培训课程,要么根据每个公司自身的材料制定计划;而不是随便放50页PPT就完事了,GO1的培训课程会请成功人士为你演讲,比如邀请一位将军,他会留给你两个有多项选择的问题,问题的内容是关于他所讲的故事对你的工作有何帮助。
公司可以上传任意PPT和网页文件到GO1上,它会自动将你上传的资料转换为超级文本标记语言(HTML)格式,以供员工下载。不管你是用笔记本电脑、平板电脑还是其它移动设备上传,员工都能看见这些文件;而且他们还能边看边做笔记,以备后续参考用。
“员工培训是个非常分散的市场,里面有很多小型提供商;这让人力资源管理者和员工很头疼。”Barnes说道,“我们的目标是就是帮管理者和员工解决这个问题,满足公司的培训和学习需求。”
在很多情况下,员工的合规培训是法律所需。比如,加利福利亚所有超过50名员工的公司根据法律要求,需为员工提供有关性骚扰的培训。Barnes在采访中说:“现在有很多公司根本不按法律办事,要么是因为他们没有意识到违法的后果,要么是因为他们觉得按法律办事有点困难。”
一年前,GO1在澳大利亚建立,从那时起,它一共为15万用户提供了培训计划,服务了近百家企业。
GO1为澳大利亚一家大的银行提供有关急救方面的培训,对银行员工和顾客进行应急急救教育。
GO1计划在参加YC项目期间打开在北美的市场,它对那些只有10名以下员工的公司提供免费的服务,对大公司也只收每用户1美元/每月。
YC-Backed GO1 Wants To Make Compliance Training Suck Less
GO1, an employee training startup out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 cohort, is launching in North America to help companies onboard and educate their employees in a more effective fashion.
Anyone who has worked for a large company knows the frustration of completing yearly compliance training. Generally this means watching a couple of hour-long web seminars about being a team player or avoiding corruption, for instance, which require you to click through slides of information that all seems rather obvious.
Founded by an Australian team of educators out of Oxford University, GO1 is applying some of the concepts proven by edtech startups, such as Coursera and Udemy, to employee training.
“For a lot of companies, compliance training is fairly ad-hoc,” says GO1 founder Andrew Barnes, who is a Rhodes scholar finishing up a masters in Education Technology at Oxford. “It’s a really bad use of people’s time and it creates a sense of resentment toward the company, when really, training should be empowering the staff.”
Organizations using GO1 can customize their own white-labelled training portal by either adding courses from GO1’s marketplace or creating their own with company materials. Instead of a generic 50-slide PowerPoint presentation about why listening is important, a GO1 course might feature a TED Talk by an Army general followed by two multiple-choice questions about how his story applies to your job.
Companies can upload any PowerPoint or web document to GO1, which automatically converts it into an HTML format that employees can download. Whether on a laptop, mobile device, or tablet, employees can view the documents and jot down notes that are saved for later reference.
“This is a very fragmented market, there are a lot of small providers and a lot of frustration for HR managers and employees,” says Barnes. “Our goal is to be the solution for both ends of that equation and provide a consistent single interface for all a company’s training and learning needs.”
In many cases, employee compliance training is required by law. All California businesses that employ more than 50 people, for instance, are legally obliged to provide sexual harassment training to their staff, according to Barnes. Currently many companies aren’t abiding by this law, Barnes says, either because they’re not aware of the legal consequences or because it’s too difficult to do so.
GO1 launched in Australia a year ago, and has since provided training for over 150,000 users spread across nearly a hundred companies.
Customers range from the largest ambulance training program in Australia to a major bank that’s using GO1 for both staff and customer education.
GO1 will focus on growing its business in North America for the duration of the YC program. The service is free for companies with under 10 employees, and currently costs $1 per user per month for larger companies.
Source:TC