Just the thought of online dating elicits a collective groan among anyone who’s done it. And that’s precisely why Dawoon Kang and her two sisters founded Coffee Meets Bagel: They wanted to improve one of the most anxiety-filled stages of people’s lives with technology that makes them forget the pain points.
Your future summers may include far fewer wedding invites, and it won’t be because you’re less popular. The wedding industry, long overdue for disruption, is trending smaller and more affordable as millennials rethink costs and strict traditions that were once considered mandatory.
There was a time when I nearly succumbed to the siren song of #vanlife. My wife was working as a travel nurse—I tagged along as a writer/entrepreneur—which meant that, for two years, we moved to a new city every three months. I thought about purchasing an RV on numerous occasions. It would’ve made a ton of sense over short-term apartment rentals, but I couldn’t bring myself to put down the cash—or take showers under a bag with a hole poked in it.
This year Away, a suitcase startup, raised $100m in new funding at a staggering $1.4 billion valuation. The company has raised a total of $181m and is rumored to have over $125m in revenue. The stats alone are quite amazing.
Joe Speiser started his first business when he was still in middle school. The New York-based entrepreneur has had his hands in many industries, from DVD review sites to an ad network that brought in $200m in annual revenue. And that was just in his 20s.
Young people crave stimulus — and the modern world obliges. Mobile phones and the internet provide constant streams of them: bright banner ads, colorful games, bingeable TV shows, infinitely scrolling content feeds. A text message buzzes and dopamine receptors in the brain respond with a quick biological fix.
A decade ago, billboards were relics of the past, reserved for Cracker Barrels and gas station exits. Today, they’re one of the fastest-growing ad commodities on the market.
I was in a band until my early 30s. But my real passion in music was composing, and so I started writing film scores. And writing film scores, it’s a very particular kind of discipline where you sort of deconstruct music and you first try to figure out what a film director wants for a movie, which is part of the art of being a film composer.
Americans spend $48B a year on plants. But there are few direct-to-consumer (DTC) retailers that do $10m+ a year in sales.