From kids’ disco parties to global tech company: AmazingCo secures $2.3 million cap raise

From Anthill Magazine

Silvia and Jeremy

AmazingCo, a data-driven experiences platform, recently announced a $2.3 million raise led by Rampersand VC, including Macdoch Ventures, Aconex’s founders Leigh Jasper and Rob Phillpot, Luxury Escapes co-founder Adam Schwab and Richmond AFL captain Trent Cotchin.

AmazingCo creates and manages experiences that help people connect and spend their time in a meaningful way. 

From kids entertainment to wine tours, date night activities and team building events, each experience is created and customised based upon personal preferences and a unique set of interactive planning and booking tools.

The first iteration of AmazingCo was founded by Silvia Hope, Jeremy Cox, Nick Brozovic and Daniel Cox in 2012 as a traditional kids entertainment company. After delivering more than 6,000 events a year they realised they had more data and insights into consumer preferences and desires – and in particular unmet demand.

What is AmazingCo looking to achieve?

“Traditional entertainment businesses don’t scale well, so it has remained largely a cottage industry. With our combination of experiences across entertainment, data and technology, we were able to take a different view,” Ms Hope said.

“We developed a centralised platform that understood what people wanted and, as a result of our scale and search traffic, identified where demand was not being met. And because of our scale we could build solutions, quickly, to meet those demands.”

“Not only did that turbocharge our ability to scale, it also allowed us to expand into new verticals and new geographies. We’re now a leading provider in multiple categories across Australia and have also launched in 8 US cities in the last 8 months,” she said.

The entertainment and recreation industry is one of the largest in the world, with data group IBIS World estimating it as more than USD 450 billion in the US alone, including the performing arts, events and food & entertainment industries.

Paul Naphtali with AmazingCo co-founders Silvia Hope, Jeremy Cox and Nick Brozovic

Rampersand VC cofounder Paul Naphtali commented: “We watched as Silvia and Jeremy grew their team and business and were struck by the clever way they are able to use the data and bring technology to a previously analog industry. It is remarkably similar to how Netflix uses data to create content, AmazingCo uses data to create experiences. The true magic is the ability to do so at high margins, with off the charts customer satisfaction.”

What is AmazingCo doing differently?

AmazingCo is the first to tackle this highly fragmented, antiquated market in the way Netflix approached digital content production.

“No one saw the opportunity to operate as a holistic experiences platform in this huge industry before, as events companies traditionally don’t scale or manage well across multiple types of experiences,” Ms Hope said. “We now have proof our processes and platform can operate successfully across very different verticals. So we’re uniquely positioned to be the first company to do so and to scale globally.”

Jeremy Cox, Silvia Hope and Nick Brozovic

After the successful initial expansion of the company’s experience offering, AmazingCo is turning its focus to international growth and expansion.

Part of the company’s aggressive growth plan is to expand its operations across the US, already having launched in 8 major cities, including Los Angeles, Boston and most recently Philadelphia. The decision to raise capital was made to support the company’s aggressive growth plans, and to keep evolving the AmazingCo experience portfolio and proprietary platform.

“Having run a sustainable business for a few years meant that raising capital wasn’t imperative to sustain the business as it was,” Mr Cox says.

“But with our proprietary platform and data-driven processes we have found ourselves in a unique position to help people spend their most important free time in a more meaningful way. We have the chance to help people build stronger connections and improve their quality of life, and that’s way too exciting to not put in a higher gear. So we made the decision to raise capital to accelerate our global expansion and growth.” Mr Cox says.

6 Traits that make Millennials different

Inspired from Contena

Millennials are different from the Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers who have a specific set of skills and value systems that have been purposely built for the gig economy ( In a recent study, it was noted that 38% of millennials are freelancing, which is higher than any other age group. )

So what makes the Millennials different?

1. They are “The Connected Generation”

They are digital natives - who are the masters of the technology and social media age.

They have the ability to be in constant communication around the globe with ease, connecting daily with peers, co-workers and industry leaders from their phone.

Social media, across all platforms, has blossomed into an indispensable business tool. becoming the key avenue for businesses to market themselves, their products, and their services.

There are apps by the dozen to help network with professionals in your field. (Referron being up there with the best ;).

Those who understand social media hold the keys to the gig economy.

Millennials value connections, are adept in all things Internet, and have a deep understanding of social media, putting them in an excellent position to lead the way for the future 

2. Millennials are Self-Starters, self empowered and entitled 

They are capable of (and willing to) follow their passions, go into business for themselves , and make a living doing so.

Starting your own business is easy - (will a laptop, wifi and a few dollars - you can connect with the world and start trading, but running one successful can be daunting.

Millennials will need the skills necessary to build successful businesses - and will need to build on their soft skills, emotional intelligence, connections and relationships.

3. Millennials Put a High Value on Quality of Life and balance 

Millennials are leaving the “9-5 grind” in droves, not because they are unhappy with the pay, but because they are dissatisfied with the culture. As a generation marked by wanting to make a change, they have started with their own lives.

Commuting, office politics, and strenuous work hours may be for some people, but Millennials seem to be looking for a better work-life balance than us baby boomers.

How better to break the monotony of office life than with the flexibility and freedom of the gig economy.

4. Millennials Don’t Shy Away From Uncertainty

Millennials have watched the world change (9-11, war, the Great Recession of 2008) and have learned how to adapt.

That sense of a firm financial footing that generations before us have had is something Millennials will not have the luxury of, with the average Millennial having 14 changes of career over their working life.

The education system needs to change - with a focus of continual - on the job learning. 

Millennials will take in a gig to learn and gain experience rather than hoping for a long term job of financial stability. 

They have to thrive on uncertainty, and make a path for themselves. They are the new entrepreneurs that need to be adept at pitching for new jobs and clients - understanding the need for leads proposals and sales.

5. Millennials Have Multiple Passions

Millennials are also defined by their interest in a diverse number of areas, and unprecedented knowledge of subjects gained from the connected world.

The flexibility of the gig economy affords Millennials the opportunities to pursue different avenues of interest, while still focusing on their careers. 

Being pigeonholed into one field in which you’ll stay until retirement is a distant memory of the elders.

Gigsters can control their work schedules, not the other way around.

The beauty of being in the gig economy is that you can do it full-time, part-time, or even just on weekends. It’s all up to you! 

One thing is clear - the gig economy is the future of the workforce.

6. It’s all about Education

Heidi Kaye - A Rudolph Steiner school teacher says that Schools for kids past 16 years old will be "co learning spaces" for three hours per day and the rest of the day will be spent doing practical things.

Practical Such as movement (sport, gym, dance) art (paint, design) , building (textiles, wood, metalwork) or other software skills.

It's so obvious that kids leave school without a sense of who they are, their capabilities, What life is really like, or what they can and can't do, and school needs to reflect the innovation/entrepreneur mindset of future work / life.

Continuous Learning programmes that fit with the psychie of the millennial is key. E’learning, short bursts, gamification, collaboration is the future of education.

This is an exciting time!

AI is not all bad for jobs

AI is not all bad for jobs say PWC UK - source https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/17/artificial-intelligence-will-be-net-uk-jobs-creator-finds-report

(Thanks to Vint for the find) 

A report from PWC UK suggests that artificial intelligence, robotics, drones and driverless technology is set to create more than 7m new UK jobs in healthcare, science and education by 2037, more than making up for the jobs lost in manufacturing and other sectors through automation.

The report estimated about 20% of jobs would be automated over the next 20 years - in factories , retail and services - and no sector would be unaffected, however, employment could increase by nearly 1 million on a net basis, equivalent to more than a fifth of existing jobs in the sector.

Professional, scientific and technical services, including law, accounting, architecture and advertising firms, are forecast to get the second-biggest boost, gaining nearly half a million jobs, while education is set to get almost 200,000 extra jobs.

Healthcare is likely to see rising employment as it will be increasingly in demand as society becomes richer and the population in the UK ages. 

While some jobs may be displaced, many more are likely to be created as real incomes rise and patients still want the ‘human touch’ from doctors, nurses and other health and social care workers.

On the other hand, as driverless vehicles roll out across the economy and factories and warehouses become increasingly automated, the manufacturing and transportation and storage sectors could see a reduction in employment levels.

PwC estimated the manufacturing sector could lose a quarter of current jobs through automation by 2037, a total of nearly 700,000.

Transport and storage are estimated to lose 22% of jobs – nearly 400,000 – followed by public administration and defence, with a loss of almost 275,000 jobs, an 18% reduction. 

Clerical tasks in the public sector are likely to be replaced by algorithms while in the defence industry humans will increasingly be replaced by drones and other technologies. 

Impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. Illustration: PwC analysis

London – home to more than a quarter of the UK’s professional, scientific and technical activities – will benefit the most from AI, with a 2.3% boost, or 138,000 extra jobs, the report said. The east Midlands is expected to see the biggest net reduction in jobs: 27,000, a 1.1% drop.

Regional analysis from PWC

Response from Kartik Garda 

At the moment, there are 6.5 million open positions in the US.  This is even after the fact that never in a century have immigrants been such a large share of the population.  But there are still at least 3 million who are underemployed.  As jobs become more fragmented, this mismatch will widen.   

A few elements of terminology that people should start internalizing :

i) Vertical Skill Gap : A truck driver cannot become a software engineer, especially in just 3 months of training. 

ii) Horizontal Skill Gap : A dermatologist cannot become a software engineer after just 3 months of training.

The solutions, of course, are :

i) There has to be a huge focus on lifetime retraining, and funding this should be one of the primary functions of government.  Expect 20-25% of the workforce to be in training for new careers at any given time.  

ii) There has to be a cushion in the form of a UBI, funded through the monetization of technological deflation.  

iii) There has to be a phaseout of income tax, because that is the single biggest job killer.  The aforementioned safety net is funded by the monetization of technological deflation which has to be done anyway.  

iv) There has to be a more favorable regulatory (and tax, as in 0% income tax) climate for entrepreneurship, because the elimination of jobs via technology is exactly proportional to the amount of free money that agile entrepreneurs that no longer have to hire humans to get certain work done, can make.  

Any job eliminated = the employer is pocketing that money, so become an employer positioned to capture all those savings at scale. 

 This is the first thing I tell all of my investment banking clients and all of my students at Stanford, in the hopes of getting the gears turning in their minds.  

Thanks,

-Kartik

From Curt Carlsson 

It is interesting that in America there is now more jobs than advertised than in the work force.  That should tell us something.  

As Jack Ma points out there are still 4B people left to be served so how bad could it be?

I have always looked at:

1.  Is there opportunity for new businesses (never been a better time)

2.  Are there unserved markets (most of the world of 7B people still poor)

3.  Can we create new innovations (entering a whole new generation of amazing technologies)

The issues are elsewhere — government, education, and immigration (we should aggressively be recruiting the super achievers).

Millenials…walking around like they rent the place

Micromobility is the key disruption taking place. 

Download a “mobiapp”, find a scooter to unlock, and you’re ready to start riding.  It’s really as simple as that

We’ve had a taste in Australia with the rental bikes infesting our pavements in Australia....  OBike, Ofo, mobibike, redygo and  others infesting the streets and pavements, and then being banned or going broke. 

In the USA there is now “Scooter wars,” the “scooter invasion,” and “Scootergeddon,” where city streets are flooded with thousands of rentable dockless electric scooters. The major company so far is Bird, founded by former Uber and Lyft executive Travis VanderZanden.

Already valued at $2 billion, Bird is part of a new trend known as micro-mobility. For as little as $0.15 a minute and just $1.00 to unlock, Bird represents great value.

 

 
The companies carry a high risk, with scooters already being banned or impounded in San Francisco and Denver.  Already valued at $2 billion, 

And then there’s the ride hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft  the beginning of the “carshare”  revolution. 

The Avis Budget Group, has bought car-sharing company Zipcar in January 2013. Investors watched shares skyrocket following that purchase, from $21.00 a share to $68.00 a share over a period of just 20 months

To say that  current business models are being disrupted  at an unprecedented scale is an understatement   

The taxi industry after the emergence of ride-hailing apps.  In San Francisco, the average monthly trips per city taxi has plummeted 65%.  In New York City, the price of a single taxi medallion fell from $1.32 million to as little as $230,000 between 2013 and 2018.  And in Chicago, 42% of Chicago’s licensed taxis are now inactive.
 
The  auto industry.  Millennials have a lower rate of car ownership than previous generations did at their age.
 
Big Auto has embraced millennials’ lack of purchase commitment as an inevitability. Volvo has begun offering subscription services for its vehicles. 

It’s kind of like leasing a car, but with much more flexible terms.  The ultimate goal, though, is for auto companies to offer subscription services for automated ride-hailing services. Ford intends to develop an autonomous taxi fleet. Alphabet owned Waymo is launching a hailable fleet of self-driving minivans by the end of the year.

There is clearly a growing trend in consumer habits, particularly amongst millennials and the emerging Gen Z: the propensity to rent rather than to own - for self use. 

This is a transport revolution.... will it evolve to a SAAS model for everything? 
 

Marijuana is here to stay?

The Bob Pritchard Column 

Last week, the Food & Drug Administration, for the first time ever, approved a marijuana-derived drug.

 

The FDA’s press release:  The U.S. FDA today approved Epidiolex (cannabidiol) [CBD] oral solution for the treatment of seizures associated with two rare and severe forms of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome, in patients two years of age and older. This is the first FDA-approved that contains a purified drug substance derived from marijuana. It is also the first FDA approval of a drug for the treatment of patients with Dravet syndrome.

Some points…

 

1.   It was approved for kids as young as two.

That’s a fairly young age to give someone a drug that’s currently illegal nationwide at the federal level. Some logic needs to be reconciled here. If it is safe enough to treat seizures in two-year-olds, it stands to reason maybe it shouldn’t be illegal. The tide of prohibition is ebbing state by state, and it is likely that the dominoes will now fall fast and furious.

 

Remember the cascading effect Massachusetts had on gay marriage. The state legalized it in 2004, and it was legal nationwide via Supreme Court decision 10 years later.  Similarly, Colorado and Washington both legalized recreational marijuana in 2012. It will likely be legal nationwide by 2022, and this FDA decision gives a lot of validity to the legalization movement.

 

2.  One of the diseases the FDA approved a marijuana-based drug to treat is Dravet syndrome, a rare and severe form of epilepsy that begins in infancy and causes frequent and/or prolonged seizures for a lifetime. It’s 2018 and yet all the smartest scientists and PhD medical researchers have been unable to come up with a treatment for this terrible affliction.

 

And what got approved to treat it?  Marijuana, deemed by the Federal Government to be a dangerous, addictive drug.  So the question becomes…what else can marijuana successfully treat that drug companies and universities have spent billions trying to find chemical cures for?

 

3.  The company that developed the drug was GW Pharmaceuticals and in the past few years leading up to this approval, the stock has gone on an incredible run, delivering a return of more than 1,550%.   GW Pharma’s only approved drug in the United States is Epidiolex — the one that was approved last week. On the back of that, and some others in the pipeline, it has a market cap of nearly $50 billion.

 

Marijuana could well be the real deal. It’s here to stay. Legalization timelines are being compressed and expedited. And it’s created hundreds of billions in new wealth.

What do you think?

Huawei supporting Innovation in Australia

Creating hope with connectivity

Great talk by Joy Tan -President of Global Media and Communication , Huawei 

The world feels super connected these days. 

In our industry, we're constantly talking about things like the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. 

But no matter what line of work you’re in, you’re probably tied to your smartphone, reliant on constant connectivity.

It's not like that everywhere in the world. 

There are still 3.8 billion people who are not connected to the internet – roughly half the earth’s population. Five billion people don’t have a smartphone. 

Last year on Single’s Day, China’s biggest online shopping holiday, Chinese spent more than $25 billion dollars in 24 hours timeframe buying clothes, appliances, TVs and anything else you can think of.

But elsewhere in the developing world, 1.7 billion adults do not have any access to banking services. For them, being connected isn't about getting a great deal on a new big screen TV; it's about basic economic inclusion. It is a path out of poverty. 

Then there’s education. In the US, 90% of kids in the US use a digital device at home to supplement their school work.

Two out of three start at age five. 

But in countries like Zambia, one computer will support more than 500 students. Earlier this year, a teacher in Ghana went viral for teaching his students how to use Microsoft Word using a chalkboard: he would draw each screen on the board, and walk through the functions one by one. 

Last year, in the developed world, Netflix users watched more than a billion hours of streaming video every week, or an average of 10 hours per user per week. In emerging markets, by contrast, the average mobile data consumption per person is about 10MBs a day. That would support about 5 minutes of streaming video each week.

So, although the world may feel super connected, the gap between the Haves and the Have-nots is still huge. 

For those people in distressed regions of the world, connections are a lifeline. They let you send, spend, and receive money. They give you access to healthcare and health-related information. Connections give farmers the ability to access market place, and children the chance to get an education. 

For those people, connections create hope. 

To bring hope to as many people as possible, we need to ask ourselves: 

• What can we do better? 

• What specific aspects of connectivity can we address – what problems can we solve – in order to bring hope to more people?

 Four major challenges get in the way of better connectivity in developing regions. 

1. Coverage, or infrastructure – the most basic challenge we need to overcome
2. High costs for carriers and for users
3. Digital skills – meaning both awareness of digital technology and the skills to get the most out of it
4. Applications and local content, which help drive adoption. 

At Huawei, we are innovating to solve two of these challenges: coverage and cost. 

In Ghana, nearly a quarter of the population has little or no internet access. That’s a problem of coverage. 

And in a village with 1500 inhabitants, a telecom operator would have to wait 10 years to recoup the cost of a single base station. Building a base station in these villages costs more compared to deploying one in a city, due to the lack of adequate electricity and transmission networks. In some rural areas, only about 40% of the population is connected to the power grid. Each household gets several hours of electricity every day. And without fiber or microwave links, transmission would need to use satellite, which is prohibitively expensive.

To help telecom operators go the last mile, Huawei developed a solution called RuralStar. It uses special equipment to cut down the power to about 200 watts, equivalent to the power of about five regular light bulbs. This allows it to use solar panels in areas with little or no electric power. 

Additionally, it uses LTE self-backhaul instead of microwave to connect to the networks. That means you don’t need a direct line of sight to the next base station. You also don’t need a 30-meter tower made of metal. It's compact, so you can build a cell tower with a simple wooden pole. 

This solution gave Ghanaian villagers connectivity, solving the problem of coverage. And for operators, the solution cut in half their total cost, while reducing deployment time by 70%. The carrier was able to break even on its costs with only 1,500 subscribers instead of 5,000 – and to do so within three to five years, instead of 10.

Another Huawei cost-cutting solution is called PowerStar. In many emerging markets, energy costs can account for up to one-third of a carrier’s total cost of ownership. As we deploy more base stations and radio access technology for better coverage and user experience, energy costs is becoming a huge limiting factor.

Powerstar uses AI to analyze patterns of data traffic and reduces energy consumption during periods of low traffic. It helps operators lower their energy costs by 10% to 15% and makes it more economical to provide connections. 
At the same time, costs for the end users come down as well. And of course, the lower carbon output delivers real environmental benefits. If only 10% of all Huawei base stations used PowerStar, we could reduce carbon emissions by 600,000 tons each year. That’s equivalent to planting 15.5 million trees and letting them grow for 10 years. 

The great South African leader, Nelson Mandela, talked about a concept called Ubuntu. It says, 

“We are human only through the humanity of others.” 

It’s a reminder to all of us that bringing hope to distressed parts of the world will always be a collaborative undertaking. 

Huawei is committed to playing a part in this process, and I know all of you are doing the same. 

It’s a long-term effort, but together, we can make a difference – and make the world a better connected, and more hopeful place.