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Be it land, apartments or commercial realty, every investor wants to own a property on which he can get attractive returns. But, investing in <keyword id="6354553" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="real-estate">real estate</keyword>, especially in cities and metropolitans, is an expensive affair.<br />
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In such a scenario, investing in offbeat locations, which require modest investment, could prove to be beneficial. It is the fringes of the cities that are giving attractive investment options today.<br />
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The potential is being tapped by developers, who are  offering better options to investors in these suburbs. If chosen wisely, these offbeat options can offer significant returns over low investments.<br />
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Earlier also, we had highlighted few offbeat locations in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu that could be a great investing option. Here are few more places that have great scope for investment.   <br />
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<strong>Nagpur, Saswad, Raigad- Maharashtra</strong><br />
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These three places in Maharashtra are well-connected with rest of the Maharashtra and are becoming popular among investors. Let’s start with Nagpur.<br />
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<strong>Nagpur</strong>: It is the third largest city of Maharashtra and as per a recent survey, conducted by ABP News-Ipsos, Nagpur has been identified as best city in India.<br />
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Nagpur is one of the emerging metropolises and has registered significant growth, making it an attractive destination for real estate developers. There are several development projects underway here.  The multi-modal International Cargo Hub and Airport at Nagpur (MIHAN) is the biggest development project, which aims to convert airport into a cargo hub with integrated road and railway connectivity. <br />
TCS, one of the India’s largest IT company, is building campus in the city and Infosys has also started construction of its Nagpur campus. The city has several prestigious educational institutes as well.<br />
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Nagpur will soon have its own metro. Recently, the Maharashtra government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Cisco for making Nagpur a smart and safe city.<br />
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Also, Nagpur is a few hours away from Mumbai and Pune. Besides the economic and infrastructural developments, the city also has various public attractions. Sitabuldi Fort and Seminary Hill are few of the attractive tourist locations in Nagpur.<br />
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<strong>Saswad</strong>: Saswad is just 31 km away from Pune railway station and is well connected via city buses too.<br />
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The area is in proximity to Jejuri MIDC and Lonand MIDC, amongst others. Saswad also has a number of educational institutes such as Saint Joseph English Medium School, Waghire High School and Waghire College.  <br />
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Saswad is an ideal location for tourists and is a weekend getaway. The area has many attractive tourist destinations like Jejuri, Malhargad Fort  and Purandar Fort amongst others. The place is a perfect match for trekking and exploring.  The area has a rich history and cultural heritage.<br />
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The location will be viable for land or second home investment. The city is still developing and owing to its proximity to Pune, it has the potential for growth. You can enter with low investment and end up getting profits. The prime benefit in investing in this area is in close proximity to industrial areas, metropolitan city and tourist spots. The infrastructural development in and around the area makes it ideal for investment especially in land.<br />
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<strong>Raigad: </strong>Raigad, a district in Maharashtra, is 84 km away from Mumbai and 110 km from Pune.  Panvel, Alibag, Mangaon, Roha, Pen, Khopoli, Kharghar, Taloja, Khalapur, Uran, Patalganga, Rasayani, Nagothana, Poladpur, Alibag, Karjat and Mahad fall under this district.<br />
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Raigad is connected to Mumbai through Sion-Panvel Expressway and is accessible via Mumbai-Pune expressway, NH-7 and NH-17. The Maharashtra government is working on a proposal to develop a private smart city at Pen in Raigad district.<br />
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Raigad is close to places like Lonavala and Khandala and the presence of Adlabs Imagica, Ballaleshwar Ashtavinayaka temple in the vicinity makes it an ideal location for a getaway.<br />
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The area has institutes like Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University, which is the only technical university in Maharashtra. The location has tremendous growth potential making it a promising investment destination.<br />
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<strong>Trichy, Tamil Nadu</strong><br />
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Tiruchirappalli, also known as Trichy, is on the smart city list. Located 322 km south of Chennai and 379 km north of Kanyakumari, it is the fourth largest urban agglomeration in the state.<br />
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The city was ranked second cleanest city, according to recent Swachh Bharat Abhiyan survey.<br />
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Trichy is a major engineering equipment manufacturing and fabrication hub. Industrial units such as Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), Golden Rock Railway Workshop and Ordnance Factory Tiruchirappalli (OFT) have factories here. This has lead to significant rise in employment opportunities.<br />
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The city is well connected with government owned buses and auto-rickshaws. Trichy is located in close proximity to two prominent National Highways, NH 45 and NH-67. The Railway Heritage centre was inaugurated in 2014 and International airport is only five km away from the main city.  The city has various reputed educational institutes like Indian Institute of Management, National Institute of Technology amongst others. Buying land or second home in the city or at the outskirts will be beneficial because of the infrastructural growth in and around the city.<br />
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All in all, adding these destinations in your investment portfolio can be a wise decision.  Apart from selecting the right location, it is equally important to choose a well reputed developer. It would be ideal to select a developer who has lot of projects in the outskirts and considerable knowledge to manage such investments.<br />
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<strong>(</strong>Author of this article is  Lansel D`souza, Senior Vice President, Expat Projects and Development Pvt. Ltd.)<br />
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(Image: Thinkstock)<br />
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Investing in these offbeat locations can promise huge returns. Find out

<p>The day after Thanksgiving in 2020, on the American bacchanal of consumerism known as <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/black-friday">Black Friday</a>, a post appeared on WallStreetBets with a short video filmed in the parking lot of a nondescript strip mall.</p><p>A middle-aged guy came out of a GameStop store carrying a big white box containing a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-founder-gary-kusin-family-following-reddit-frenzy-closely-honor-2021-1">PlayStation 5</a>, the newly released video game console from Sony. As he walked across the parking lot, the person holding the camera ran at the customer and pushed him to the ground, knocking the box out of his arms.</p><p>An accomplice of the cameraman, a young blond man in sweatpants and a red headband, swooped in from behind and, laughing, snatched up the PlayStation box and ran away at full speed, repeatedly spitting out the word PlayStation with deranged joy as he raced off.</p><p>The cackling of the thief made it a particularly sordid scene to watch. But in the inimitable style of WallStreetBets, the video, which had first appeared on Twitter, was pulled into a post and described amorally as a trading signal, and a very bullish one, for the store that sold the PlayStation 5—<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-gamestop-stock-reddit-wallstreetbets-2021-1">GameStop, or GME</a>, as the company was known in the stock market.</p><p>The title and only words in the Reddit post put the thesis simply: "PS5 robbery outside of Gamestop, BULLISH long GME."</p><h2 id="215ad517-7ea7-41d6-8b2c-8cb9cdf7785b"><strong>'Get in asap, we're going to Pluto'</strong></h2><p>GameStop was in some ways an <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/meme-stock-explosion-suspicious-option-trading-activity-gamestop-amc-gme-2024-5">odd stock for the subreddit</a>, which had tended to go for futuristic technology companies like Tesla and Virgin Galactic. GameStop was more like a remnant of the past, and it was getting eaten alive by tech companies such as Amazon.</p><p>Since the era of the original Nintendos and Segas, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-ceo-cfo-reveal-plan-stock-price-2019-9">GameStop had fallen on hard times</a>. The video-game industry was booming, but much of the growth was coming from digital downloads and iPhone games, which didn't require going to a store.</p><p>The surviving GameStops were somewhat notorious for their stained carpets and musty smell. The video of the robbery captured the seedy feel of the outlets, which were often a few doors down from liquor stores and check-cashing depots.</p><p>As digital game downloads became more popular, many people assumed GameStop would go the way of Blockbuster, which had filed for bankruptcy after its physical videotapes lost out to the digital offerings on Netflix.</p><p>But on Black Friday, GameStop seemed to be getting an unlikely bump due to those new video-game consoles from Sony that had just been released and that were selling like hotcakes.</p><p>Sony had decided to include a slot for a game disk in the new PlayStations, which suggested that GameStop's physical stores might not be dead yet.</p><p>Everyone on <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/revenge-of-the-apes-3-reddit-wallstreetbets-stocks-that-could-pop-next-1033427684">WallStreetBets</a> seemed to be aware of all these dynamics, thanks to the video-game-loving tendencies of the guys who hung out on the subreddit. Now they aimed their memes and their Robinhood accounts squarely at GameStop.</p><p>"Get in asap, we're going to Pluto," <a target="_blank" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/k0k0q6/gme_gang_gang_gang_gang/">one longtime member wrote</a> under the title "GME Gang Gang Gang Gang." The post showed a picture of a portfolio with $225,000 of call options on GameStop.</p><p>Part of the reason that GameStop had not broken out on WallStreetBets before this weekend was the rule Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of the subreddit, had put in place the previous spring banning posts about penny stocks and companies worth less than a billion dollars. GameStop had thousands of stores, but it was struggling so much that the whole company had essentially been valued as a penny stock.</p><p>On Black Friday, though, the company had broken through the one-billion- dollar threshold, and when the ban was removed, it was like a dam had broken.</p><p>The company surged past Tesla that day to become the most talked about stock on the subreddit. As the stock went up, Jordan Zazzara, the most active moderator on the subreddit, stayed glued to his desk, trying to contain the flood of posts about the latest meme stock.</p><p>"I've been literally staring at the sub and spamming things since market opened," Zazzara wrote a few hours into the day. "We're sending a message with dozens if not hundreds of temporary bans for low quality submissions. I've been banning since 9 a.m.," he added.</p><p>The posts coming in about GameStop reflected a remarkable degree of research and knowledge about the company. There were <a target="_blank" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/k4csaa/the_real_greatest_short_burn_of_the_century_part/">lengthy</a> <a target="_blank" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/k2tg4h/how_to_ride_momentummeme_stocks_like_pltrniocrsr/">write-ups</a> about the company's recent history, especially the news that a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-billionaire-chewy-founder-ryan-cohen-ceo-2023-9">young billionaire named Ryan Cohen had bought a significant chunk of GameStop shares</a> with an apparent interest in taking control of the company.</p><p>But there was also a lot of talk about how GameStop looked like many of the other big names that had broken out on WallStreetBets, given its unpopularity among hedge funds. Like Tesla and Palantir, GameStop was a popular stock to short among hedge funds, though GameStop took it to a whole new level.</p><p>Back in February, when <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-price-rally-burned-another-hedge-fund-who-shorted-2020-2-1028904327">Tesla</a> had been one of the most heavily shorted stocks on Wall Street, hedge funds had borrowed around 20 percent of the company's shares to short them, a common way of measuring the degree of short interest or pessimism toward a company.</p><p>With GameStop, the short interest was five times as high, around 100 percent, which meant that hedge funds had borrowed essentially every single share of the company to short it. The early posts about these figures suggested that there was something offensive about the way Wall Street could borrow every single share a company had issued in order to bet on its demise.</p><p>The anger that began to pick up played right into the fury toward hedge funds that had emerged the previous month after Andrew Left of Citron Research had criticized and bet against the most popular stocks among retail investors.</p><p>GameStop seemed to offer a perfect opportunity to get some revenge.</p><p>If the crowd could push GameStop's stock up, they could make the hedge funds lose money on the big bets they had placed against GameStop. One popular post recalled the recent fight with Left and Citron Research to get the crowds riled up.</p><p>"How many times has a short screwed over your calls or positions because of a single Tweet <em>ahem</em> Citron/PLTR <em>ahem</em> or manipulated your stock to the point where you bought high and sold low?" one post asked.</p><p>"Well, here's a chance to redeem yourself."</p><h2 id="75556e0f-088c-4cb3-93f6-064491c20e3a"><strong>'We're just trying to be careful'</strong></h2><p>Zazzara <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wallstreetbets-reddit-sub-stock-moderators-want-to-start-new-community-2021-3">did not like the direction this was going</a>. He had just cracked down on the efforts to take down Citron Research for fear that they would give Reddit an excuse to kill the subreddit. Now Zazzara went into action again, deleting posts that talked about pumping or squeezing GameStop.</p><p>"You know when you love your cat but it won't stop going on the fucking table and that's literally the one place you don't like it to be?" Zazzara asked. "That's how I feel about these GME posts that are using the 'P' and get in so we can cause an 'S' words that are no-nos."</p><p>He once again tried to convey that this was not about censorship: "We're not removing them because we want to impinge on your freedoms. We're just trying to be careful."</p><p>But in the days that followed, the stream of material about GameStop kept coming, and as Zazzara watched it all pour in, he could see that this was not just some pump-and-dump scheme orchestrated by a handful of people. There was a lot of very smart and detailed due diligence on GameStop, arising out of what looked to be a new kind of crowdsourced research effort unlike anything WallStreetBets had seen before.</p><p>The most visible new character on the subreddit was a guy who went by the username Uberkikz11. He wrote detailed posts arguing that GameStop had a much more promising outlook than the views coming out of Wall Street would suggest. To support his argument, Uberkikz11 relied on information he pulled from GameStop's financial filings and other data sources. Uberkikz11 had put what he said was a "majority of his net worth in GME" and he was eager to use social media to get the word out about the company's potential.</p><p>"I'm here to provide as much boots on the ground $GME intelligence as one man can deliver. Clearly I'm not doing all this financial modeling and scraping for nothing. I enjoy helping others here."</p><p>In real life, Uberkikz11 was a 31-year-old who lived in Tampa, Florida, and worked in middle management at the truck rental company Ryder. He said his odd username was from when he had been a tween soccer freak with the number 11 on his jersey.</p><p>Unlike most people on Reddit, who embraced the anonymity of social media, Uberkikz11 often mentioned his real name, Rod Alzmann, and his rather fuddy-duddy tastes, like the 2014 Chevy Bolt he drove and the Vanguard retirement account where he kept his GameStop options.</p><p>"I'm an 81-year-old man in a 31-year-old body," Alzmann joked.</p><p>But Alzmann emphasized that he was trying to do something very modern with his GameStop investment by harnessing the crowds on social media to pool their knowledge and resources so that they could compete against the hedge funds that always seemed to have such an edge over ordinary people.</p><p>Alzmann's most impressive project was an effort to estimate GameStop online revenues by collecting receipts from all the GameStop customers he met online. Alzmann had noticed that GameStop, unlike most stores, numbered its receipts sequentially. This meant that if he had receipts from the beginning of the day and others from the end of the day, he could estimate how many transactions the company had done.</p><p>During the Black Friday weekend, he had gone around asking everyone to send in their receipts as they bought their new PlayStations and Xboxes from GameStop.</p><p>"GME ORDER NUMBERS! SHARE YOUR ORDER NUMBERS HERE!" he had bayed on social media like some carnival hawker.</p><p>Alzmann used the data he gleaned to put together estimates on the company's quarterly revenues, which he frequently updated and promptly shared with his online followers.</p><p>The other person who came up in all the online conversations about GameStop was a character who went by the name <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-stock-price-soars-roaring-kitty-schedules-youtube-livestream-gme-2024-6">Roaring Kitty</a>. He appeared to do most of his work on YouTube, where he ran a regular livestream show that brought people together to talk about the latest news and data on GameStop. He had been ramping up the YouTube channel over the fall and by December he was holding court a few nights a week for several hours each time.</p><p>Roaring Kitty pulled up charts and documents as he spoke, but he also interacted frequently with the people who gathered in the live chat that ran alongside his video stream. Alzmann joined in the live chat and talked with Roaring Kitty and the others in attendance about their latest findings, constantly challenging them to find any detail that might make them reconsider their investment. They did not want to be bullish if being bullish was not supported by the evidence.</p><p>As they did this work, <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-stock-price-roaring-kitty-keith-gill-livestream-return-gme-2024-6">Roaring Kitty constantly made fun of himself</a> and the others for their obsessive interest in this offbeat company.</p><p>"Who the HELL can talk about a single stock for 5 hours straight?!" he asked.</p><p>"I'll tell ya who . . . the Roaring Kitty crew."</p><p>Before December, because of the ban on posts about companies worth less than a billion dollars, most of the conversation about GameStop had been happening on other social media networks.</p><p>Roaring Kitty was one of the many online personalities who had been making a name on YouTube by talking about stocks and investing. There was even a new name going around for the financially focused influencers who were popping up in response to the post-COVID trading mania: finfluencers.</p><p>Another hub of conversation about GameStop was StockTwits, a Twitter-like messaging platform focused on investing. StockTwits had been founded during the financial crisis and now had around three million active accounts, about twice as many members as WallStreetBets.</p><p>StockTwits was often the butt of jokes on WallStreetBets because the unmoderated nature of the service made it overwhelming and attractive to scams and spam. But StockTwits offered some advantages over WallStreetBets, like allowing users to filter the conversation for particular stocks. This made it easy for fans of GameStop to find each other and chat.</p><p>Alzmann and a handful of other GameStop-obsessed investors had come together on StockTwits over the course of 2020 and used it as a place to meet up and chat during the day. This group, whose members began referring to themselves as the GME Owls, had hatched plans on StockTwits to get GameStop in front of the much larger masses on WallStreetBets around Thanksgiving.</p><p>These conversations about GameStop showed the way that a whole new media ecosystem dedicated to investing was growing up far beyond the bounds of WallStreetBets as the COVID lockdowns continued.</p><p>But in the conversations on YouTube and StockTwits, there had been increasing recognition that WallStreetBets exerted a kind of gravitational pull that none of the other sites could touch.</p><div type="image" title="The Trolls of Wall Street book cover" height="2775" width="1838" msid="110883885" hostid="261" sizebytes="82302"></div><p>"If 1% of the active traders on WSB picked up 20 shares for shits and giggles, there's literally nothing left," one of the regulars on StockTwits wrote as the GME Owls began fanning out onto WallStreetBets after Black Friday.</p><p>In the week after Thanksgiving, the GME Owls from StockTwits put up a survey on WallStreetBets so they could get a sense of how many people from this rowdy crowd were buying the stock.</p><p>The 2,400 people who responded suggested that they had, as a group, bought 3.4 million shares of GameStop. That was enough to make WallStreetBets the seventh-largest holder of GameStop stock, ahead of some of the big Wall Street investment firms that had shown interest in the stock.</p><p>Some of the guys in StockTwits were skeptical of the attention span and staying power of the Reddit crew. But during the week after Thanksgiving, GameStop took a dip, and it seemed only to strengthen the resolve of the growing hordes on WallStreetBets.</p><p>"It turns out that with a culture can come strong convictions," one of the leading GME Owls wrote on StockTwits. "They actually ditched their option gambling ways and most have made a bid for shares to help the greater cause."</p><p>The most useful information that the GME Owls had uncovered in the fall of 2020 was about Ryan Cohen, the young billionaire who had purchased millions of GameStop shares earlier in the year. Cohen had not said much about his purchase publicly, but in regulatory filings he indicated that he was looking to buy enough shares so he could join GameStop's board and encourage the company to embrace the possibilities of e-commerce more fully.</p><p>Cohen had made his fortune by founding and running Chewy, an online pet store that was one of the only e-commerce start-ups that had successfully taken on Amazon. If Cohen could work his e-commerce magic on GameStop, the company might not be doomed by the rise of downloadable video games.</p><p>Alzmann and the other GME Owls obsessively tracked every new filing and bit of information from Cohen to see if he was moving ahead with his plans to remake GameStop. Alzmann went so far as to reach out to Cohen's lawyers to let Cohen know that the people gathering on WallStreetBets were behind him.</p><p>On <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wallstreetbets-reddit-history-gme-gamestop-stock-dow-futures-yolo-2021-1">WallStreetBets</a>, Alzmann shared the growing evidence that Cohen was indeed planning to take a more active role at GameStop. This led to a surge of memes that portrayed Cohen as the hero of the ordinary guys in their battle against the villainous hedge funds.</p><p>This crowdsourced research and cheerleading paid off mid-December when Cohen made his latest filing, a letter he had just sent to the GameStop board. The letter indicated that Cohen was getting much more aggressive in his effort to change the company and was not going to take no for an answer. When the filing was made public, the stock shot up and the subreddit celebrated the news as vindication of all their hard work.</p><p>On CNBC, Jim Cramer had been watching and talking about the rise of GameStop warily as part of his long-standing fascination with the rise of retail investing.</p><p>At first, GameStop reminded him of the February gamma squeezes when the crowds had manipulatively seized on silly stocks like Virgin Galactic.</p><p>But when Cramer dug into the conversation happening around GameStop on WallStreetBets, he saw that something new and more sophisticated was happening.</p><p>"What I say to myself is 'Do not be a snob,'" he told his viewers. "If they're running GME, then do some work on it. Make sure that you know GME."</p><p>He said Wall Street was likely to continue viewing the Reddit and Robinhood crowds with the disdain that had marked most of the professional commentary to date. But <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2btHX8vAfNM">Cramer said he was taking a different tack.</a></p><p>"The bottom line? I think it's time to stop disrespecting the younger investors who've nailed 2020 every step of the way. Start taking them seriously, even at this incredible run. It's not too late to join them."<br /><em><br />From the book </em><a target="_blank" href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-trolls-of-wall-street-nathaniel-popper?variant=41108938194978"><em>THE TROLLS OF WALL STREET</em></a><em> by Nathaniel Popper. Copyright © 2024 by Nathaniel Popper. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.</em></p><p><em>Nathaniel Popper is the author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.</em></p>

An inside look at the weekend the GameStop frenzy began on WallStreetBets

<p class="source"><span>Anthony Robb</span></p><p class="caption">Anthony Robb, 22, is the founder of Instagram startup Imjustbait</p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Anthony 'Antz' Robb has gained millions of followers on social media for his razor-sharp mix of memes, music, and viral video clips.</li><li>The global influencer market is currently valued at around $8 billion, a figure that looks set to rise over the next few years. </li><li>Imjustbait, launched in 2014, outranks some of the best known influencers in the UK online, which has led to Robb signing promo deals with the likes of Uber and ride-hailing rival Kapten.</li><li>Robb, 22, told Business Insider about his plans to launch a music festival in Barcelona this summer, a new record label backed by Sony Music, and a host of online TV shows.</li><li><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/prime?module=article&amp;area=summary">Click here for more BI Prime stories</a>.</strong></li></ul><p>Back in 2012, Anthony Robb couldn't afford a smartphone.</p><p>Raised by a single father on a conveyor belt of grimy west London council estates, Robb knew money was in short supply, and that owning a phone with a camera attached was "not a priority."</p><p>But when friends introduced him to Instagram, which had just been acquired by Facebook for a hefty $1 billion, Robb very quickly realised he wanted a piece of the action.</p><p>"I saw all these accounts and how many followers, likes, and comments they were getting," he told Business Insider. "I was fascinated ... Very quickly, I was like: 'I could do that.'"</p><p>He recalls one friend quickly batting away the idea, laughing: "How're you gonna do that mate? You ain't even got a phone."</p><p>Almost a decade later, the global influencer market is <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/influencer-marketing-report?r=US&amp;IR=T">valued at around $8 billion</a>, a figure set to rise over the next few years - and Anthony "Antz" Robb, now 22, is the voice behind one of the best known Instagram accounts in the UK: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/imjustbait/">Imjustbait</a>.</p><p class="source"><span>Anthony Robb</span></p><p class="caption">Robb didn't own a smartphone when he first heard of Instagram</p><p>A hodgepodge of music, memes, and offbeat viral videos, Imjustbait keeps a finger on the pulse of urban British culture, mixing the silly with the serious: sobering reports of racial abuse and rising knife crime are seamlessly mixed with music videos and viral clips from "Love Island" and "Eastenders."</p><p>At 3.7 million followers, the page outranks other British influencers like Joe Wicks, the fitness guru better known as the "Body Coach," and TV personality Alexa Chung.</p><p>After setting the page up in 2014, Robb says he "worked day and night" to boost his follower count, quickly garnering a reputation among his peers as "that bait [meaning blatant or obvious] kid off Instagram." He said: "It's literally just me. From day one, nobody else has ever even had the password."</p><p class="source"><span>Instagram</span></p><p class="caption">Imjustbait currently has around 3.7 million followers</p><p>The page's success soon got him noticed. First, Uber approached him about a promotional deal, gaining him a commission on every follower using his unique code. And as his reach continued to grow, he started word of his influence on the world of music - news that spurred him to set up his own record label.</p><p>"I would feature clips from underground artists on the page, then next thing I'm hearing is they've been signed," Robb said. "I won't name names but I've heard stories of A&amp;R guys going into meetings, literally saying: 'Imjustbait just posted these guys, we have to sign them.'"</p><p>On the advice of his manager, Robb sought investment from Sony Music, who backed his new label, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/weareblkofficial/">"We Are BLK,"</a>18 months ago. He has now signed seven urban artists and plans to showcase their talent, alongside established acts like Krept &amp; Konan and Dappy, at his Summer Crush festival in Barcelona this summer.</p><p>Robb laughs: "I just wanted to stop being the middleman and actually do something myself ... Why should I be doing all the hard work for them?"</p><p class="source"><span>Getty</span></p><p class="caption">Krept and Konan are set to play Robb's Summer Crush festival in Barcelona</p><p>Beyond the world of music, he expresses an interest in journalism and reality TV. Imjustbait's sister Instagram feed, Imjustnews, has gained 667,000 followers since launching in 2018, resharing the latest headlines to keep them abreast of current affairs.</p><p>"That one's going well," Robb says. "I'd like to have someone come in and write original stories for it one day."</p><p>Meanwhile on YouTube, Robb says his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP0UNQtDOnAsy4qOQWFWnEA">Imjustbait channel</a> will soon host a slew of original shows, including "Love Locked Down," a Love Island-style reality contest set inside a prison.</p><p>"We've got some big plans man, I'm excited to see what people think."</p><p>After six years of work, Robb admits it feels strange to have asserted his place as a focal point of the culture he grew up loving.</p><p>"A lot of people I know from back in the day can't really believe it's happening," he says.</p><p>"What can I say? It's a madness." </p><p class="tagline"><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/intelligence/stories-slide-deck?IR=T&amp;itm_source=businessinsider&amp;itm_medium=ctgr_bii&amp;itm_term=ctgr_leadgen&amp;itm_content=instagram&amp;itm_campaign=stories-slide-deck"></a></p>            <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-make-submit-your-own-emoji-start-finish-2019-8">62 new emoji and emoji variations were just finalized, including a bubble tea emoji and a transgender flag. Here's how everyday people submit their own emoji.</a></h3>

This 22-year-old influencer runs one of the best-known Instagram feeds in the UK. He told us how he cut deals with Uber and Sony Music.

<p class="financial-disclaimer"><i>When you buy through our links, we may earn money from our affiliate partners. <a href="https://www.insider-inc.com/commerce-on-insider-inc/">Learn more.</a></i></p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Working out at home is more popular now than ever as interactive <keyword id="24256" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="workout">workout</keyword> equipment like bikes, treadmills, and rowers allow people to maintain a high level of <keyword id="18974" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="fitness">fitness</keyword> without going to the gym. </li><li>Adding to a growing lot of home workout gear is the Ergatta Connected Rower, a smart row machine that offers a full-body workout via video game-based exercises and races as opposed to trainer-led courses. </li><li>Though it's cheaper than machines from NordicTrack or Hydrow, the Connected Rower delivers an equal — if not better — experience led by a combination of thoughtful design, motivating and engaging content, and ease of use.  </li></ul><p><em>Updated on 7/1/2020 by Rick Stella: Checked the availability of the rower via Ergatta and updated relevant purchase links, as well as the formatting and pricing information throughout. </em></p><p>Thanks to brands like NordicTrack and Peloton, highly interactive at-home workout equipment is ubiquitous. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/best-exercise-bike" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bikes</a> and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/best-treadmill" target="_blank" rel="noopener">treadmills</a> offering libraries of on-demand workouts are now the norm — not the exception — and the fitness industry as a whole continues to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tonal-review-home-fitness-startup-2019-11" target="_blank" rel="noopener">embrace this new normal</a>.</p><p>With the popularity of these exercise machines rising sky-high, so, too, is brand competition. After all, a term like Peloton Killer doesn't exist for nothing. The goal is to create the next great interactive piece of workout equipment capable of attracting those go-to brands' active customer bases. Garnering even a sliver of similar acclaim wouldn't be so bad, either. </p><p>But as a slew of startups tinker with bike and treadmill concepts, a Brooklyn, NY-based company called Ergatta took a different approach by innovating on something a bit more old-fashioned: The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/best-rowing-machine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">at-home row machine</a>. Its idea was to bring row workouts into the 21st Century and to forge its own interactive path separate from what already exists. </p><p>Born from that vision is the <a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?id=35871X1550380&amp;isjs=1&amp;jv=14.0.1-stackpath&amp;sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insider.com%2Fpost%2Fpreview%3Fpost_id%3D5e90b9a9dcd88c68440d1844%26mode%3Ddesktop&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ergatta.com%2Fproduct%2Fthe-ergatta-rower%2F&amp;xguid=01DW82HZBXD53M4EZNADWYW5DJ&amp;xs=1&amp;xtz=240&amp;xuuid=11f45a15dab8f39630a45dda8bec2e63&amp;xjsf=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5Df=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5D" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">Connected Rower</a>, a $2,000 smart row machine that promises a full-body workout via a video game-like experience. With the rower, there are no high-energy instructors teaching a class from a dimly lit studio; just the machine, the person rowing, and an ecosystem of uniquely designed workouts combining the stimulus of "Mario Kart" with the benefits of cardio exercise.</p><p>That imaginative approach works. At a press event in New York City, I took the Connected Rower on a few digital races to see how capable it is of elbowing into an increasingly crowded market — a market that already includes stiff competition from other row machine manufacturers like NordicTrack and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hydrow-rowing-machine-review" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hydrow</a>. </p><h2>On your mark, get set, GO</h2><p>What seemed simple enough on paper turned out to be a thrill in practice. In a matter of minutes, I was strapped into the machine, fluidly syncing my row technique to the rhythm displayed on screen while the seat glided smoothly along with me. As I rowed, the monitor displayed my real-time output stats of calories burned, distance traveled, and row wattage. </p><p>After getting a feel for the proper cadence, I loaded up one of the machine's designated races, effectively pitting myself against the rest of the Ergatta community. Though it was a short, 45-second race, it was easy to feel the kind of intense workout the rower is capable of delivering. It also favors correct technique over frenzied, uncoordinated rowing. </p><p>When the timer ticked down from three to one, I didn't exactly fly out of the gates. That learned rhythm I thought I'd nailed just seconds prior disappeared completely; be it the adrenaline of a real event or a different interface, my tempo was offbeat and lacked any real oomph. The field surged ahead as I attempted to retime my stroke and get back on beat. </p><p>A few seconds of erratic rowing turned into a stronger, more measured pace. Finally putting it all together felt like getting the timing right in Double Dutch — and I started gaining ground on the digital competition as a result. As each row felt slightly more comfortable, I inched closer to hitting my true stride. </p><p>With the end of the race in sight, I was only a few paces behind the leaders. Understanding the circumstances (there were no silver medals being awarded, I presumed), the last two strokes were my most powerful; the first brought me about neck-and-neck with the competition while the second propelled me across the finish line, a mere hair in front of the now second-place finisher — but I was victorious.</p><h2>Ergatta's endgame </h2><p><div type="image" title="ergatta rower 2" height="2671" width="3562" msid="76739064" hostid="261"></div></p><p>Spelling out the race like this isn't to sensationalize the <a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?id=35871X1550380&amp;isjs=1&amp;jv=14.0.1-stackpath&amp;sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insider.com%2Fpost%2Fpreview%3Fpost_id%3D5e90b9a9dcd88c68440d1844%26mode%3Ddesktop&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ergatta.com%2Fproduct%2Fthe-ergatta-rower%2F&amp;xguid=01DW82HZBXD53M4EZNADWYW5DJ&amp;xs=1&amp;xtz=240&amp;xuuid=11f45a15dab8f39630a45dda8bec2e63&amp;xjsf=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5Df=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5D" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">Connected Rower</a> experience but rather to spotlight its intended purpose. In that room, I was just an ordinary person rowing away on my own, looking like anyone else who's strapped themselves into a row machine. And while an analog rower may deliver a similar full-body workout, that's not the only outcome Ergatta's after.</p><p>What the company wants is to gamify the workout experience in order to motivate people to strive to do better, to set personal records, and to feel the rush of competition. It intends to create excitement around working out and breaking a sweat — something that's often seen as mundane. </p><p>This isn't unlike the way a simple fitness tracker urges people to excitedly track their daily steps or calories burned. It pushes them to do better tomorrow by building on what they accomplished today, using the perceived stimulation of playing a game as underlying, and sometimes subconscious, motivation.</p><p>That end goal is apparent the moment you strap into the rower. Ergatta captures the competitive spirit of video game racing while delivering a full-body workout at the same time. No matter how grueling a race might be, if you feel like you could do better the next time around, that next time around becomes right then. </p><p>It's exactly what I did after that first race but it wasn't because I wanted to replicate my bumbling first-place run from before. Instead of eking out a victory, my goal was to win by several boat lengths while logging an even better finish time (each of which I accomplished with relative ease now that I had the experience of just one race under my belt).</p><p>The fact I even had that mentality about an easy, 45-second race shows how powerful a motivator gamification can be. The satisfaction of exiting a race you feel comfortable with doesn't just mean you get the bragging rights of seeing your name on a leaderboard, you also walk away having completed a challenging cardio workout — and both are vitally important to the overall experience. </p><h2>A calibrated challenge </h2><p>To Ergatta, that balance is key. Creating a level playing field for everyone, regardless of their fitness level, required the implementation of what it calls active intelligence. This means that as you row, the machine adapts to your skill level and capability, recalibrating everything from the level of resistance and row timing to the accuracy threshold of each stroke. Real-time feedback clues you in on your progression along the way, too. </p><p>Active intelligence also scales the difficulty of its on-demand workouts. As you improve, races become just that much more challenging and the goals of each interval workout just that much harder to accomplish. Races you've done before look familiar from point A to point B but the actual path proves more demanding than you remember.</p><h2>Sit down, be humble</h2><p><div type="image" title="ergatta rower 1" height="2686" width="3581" msid="76739068" hostid="261"></div></p><p>After notching yet another first-place finish, I figured I'd had enough of the imaginary fanfare of digital confetti and unstrapped from the Connected Rower. With a pep in my step, the Ergatta team broke some hard news to me: The rower's race calibration was on one of its lowest settings. </p><p>Since there were two full days of scheduled press previews, the company wanted to be sure everyone who gave it a spin could jump over a purposely low hurdle. After all, we weren't there to <em>actually</em> race. </p><p>Though the news humbled me, it also made me want to jump right back on, crank up the resistance, and go for another gold — there was that gamification in play again. I'd only completed a few races and a short tutorial but I clearly got caught up in the allure of this interactive row machine. From a software perspective, I was hooked. </p><h2>The cherry on top</h2><p>As enticing as its two-pronged approach of game-style racing and full-body workout is, the rower's physical design deserves heaps of praise, too. Constructed of gorgeous Cherry wood, Ergatta managed to make something as funky and cumbersome as an at-home row machine pleasant to look at. </p><p>But even if you aren't keen on having it take up permanent residence in your home, the <a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?id=35871X1550380&amp;isjs=1&amp;jv=14.0.1-stackpath&amp;sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insider.com%2Fpost%2Fpreview%3Fpost_id%3D5e90b9a9dcd88c68440d1844%26mode%3Ddesktop&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ergatta.com%2Fproduct%2Fthe-ergatta-rower%2F&amp;xguid=01DW82HZBXD53M4EZNADWYW5DJ&amp;xs=1&amp;xtz=240&amp;xuuid=11f45a15dab8f39630a45dda8bec2e63&amp;xjsf=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5Df=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5D" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">Connected Rower</a> also folds into an upright position for easy storage. Instead of having a long horizontal footprint, it's able to stand just over 7 feet high when folded up and features wheels so you can push it against a wall, slide it into a tall closet, or move it into a garage space. Strategically placed cutouts on the machine act as handles and one person can move the machine alone if need be.</p><p>The actual rowing mechanism itself is just as polished as its finish. Instead of using flywheel, hydraulic, or magnetic resistance technology, Ergatta's Connected Rower features a water-powered instrument created in partnership with the Rhode Island-based manufacturer, WaterRower. Not only does it better simulate the feeling of a gliding boat but it delivers the calming sound of whooshing water with each stroke — a detail I found to greatly improve the overall experience. </p><h2>The bottom line</h2><p><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?id=35871X1550380&amp;isjs=1&amp;jv=14.0.1-stackpath&amp;sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insider.com%2Fpost%2Fpreview%3Fpost_id%3D5e90b9a9dcd88c68440d1844%26mode%3Ddesktop&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ergatta.com%2Fproduct%2Fthe-ergatta-rower%2F&amp;xguid=01DW82HZBXD53M4EZNADWYW5DJ&amp;xs=1&amp;xtz=240&amp;xuuid=11f45a15dab8f39630a45dda8bec2e63&amp;xjsf=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5Df=other_click__contextmenu%20%5B0%5D" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">Ergatta's Connected Rower</a> checks many of the boxes of what people look for in an effective and enjoyable at-home workout machine. It features an interactive user experience that creates and maintains constant motivation, a reward system that pats you on the back while still pushing you to be better, and a design that's as tasteful as it is practical.</p><p>Compared to upper echelon peers like Hydrow, NordicTrack, and Peloton, it's roughly the same in terms of initial investment, too, sporting a price tag of $2,000. Even its monthly subscription cost of $29 for access to the game-centric workout platform is cheaper than what the rest of the field offers — Peloton and NordicTrack are both $39 a month, while Hydrow sits at $38 a month.</p><p>As the at-home fitness boom continues to gain steam, it's easy to see that there's room for more interactive workout equipment than just bikes and treadmills — and Ergatta has delivered an attractive alternative with the Connected Rower. </p><ul><li><strong>Should you buy it? </strong>If you're in the market for an at-home workout machine and can afford the investment, then yes. Interactive stationary bikes or treadmills don't offer as dynamic a workout as a row machine and often cost more than the $2,000 Connected Rower. Between software that motivates you to push harder, a clean design that won't stick out like a sore thumb, and an effective full-body workout, this rower offers exactly what most people want from at-home workout equipment. </li><li><strong>What are your alternatives?</strong> NordicTrack and Hydrow are the industry bests when it comes to at-home rowers, and for good reason. NordicTrack has designed and manufactured row machines for years and its latest, the RW900, features immersive interactive workouts led by world-class trainers. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hydrow-rowing-machine-review">Hydrow</a>, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer but immediately succeeded by offering its own version of on-demand, full-body workouts. </li></ul><p><strong>Pros: </strong>Delivers an effective full-body workout, video game-based workouts keep routines fresh and engaging, calibration via active intelligence adjusts the difficulty as you increase in skill, $29 monthly fee for access to the game platform is cheaper than the competition</p><p><strong>Cons: </strong>Requires a large footprint for use, $2,000 price tag is a big investment </p>

This at-home row machine uses video game-style races to deliver an effective full-body workout — I found them just as motivating as a high-energy instructor

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div></p><ul class="summary-list"><li>After <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ipo-struggling-to-keep-investors-happy-uber-fiverr-lyft-2019-9">poor public performances by some of Silicon Valley's hottest private companies</a>, venture capitalists are decrying the traditional IPO process in <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vc-investors-ipo-flops-direct-listings-techcrunch-disrupt-2019-10">favor of direct listings</a>.</li><li>The unconventional strategy for going public removes some of the more expensive and tedious processes associated with going public, and allows investors and employees to bypass a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-able-to-bypass-ipo-process-why-thats-rare-2018-1">traditional lockup period following a public debut</a>.</li><li>Many VCs blamed banks for overinflating share prices ahead of an IPO to profit off the fees they collect, but VCs stand to directly benefit themselves from a direct listing because they are able to sell at the opening price.</li><li>Direct listings are marketed to founders as a cheap, fair alternative to founders looking to make a public exit, but that is not always the case.</li><li>Some investors told Business Insider that a direct listing would be ideal for founders that want to avoid the scrutiny of an investor roadshow that precludes a traditional IPO.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/founder-frenemies">Check out Business Insider's special series - Founder Frenemies - for more stories on Silicon Valley's changing landscape for startup funding. </a></li></ul><p>With his long hair, proclivity for walking around barefoot and reputation for partying, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/employees-inside-adam-neumanns-wework-reveal-a-wild-culture-2019-9">WeWork founder Adam Neumann</a> could have been straight out of central casting for a fictional "tech CEO" in a movie. </p><p>That over-the-top persona is also what made Neumann a liability for WeWork in the eyes of straight-laced, conservative IPO investors. Neumann never had the chance to meet, or spook, investors in a pre-IPO roadshow for WeWork- he was ousted from the CEO job the week the roadshow was supposed to kick off, and the IPO was subsequently shelved.</p><p>WeWork's cancelled IPO is now at the center of a broader Silicon Valley reckoning, as venture capital investors and others obsess over an IPO alternative called a "direct listing." The direct listing has been framed as a way for tech startups to list their shares without being beholden to an outdated process created by Wall Street bankers and designed to benefit their clients. </p><p>But direct listings are still a new, relatively untested concept that may not provide the all-around salvation some expect. And while venture capital investors bash an IPO system they say is broken, their sudden zeal for direct listings is, in at least one major sense, the result of a problem they created themselves.</p><p>The "founder friendly" movement in which VC investors deferred to startup founders, no matter how quirky or extravagant, has produced a crop of richly-valued companies with unconventional executives in the top job. And as many of these companies now look to go public, they're finding that an offbeat founder CEO is not always a selling point during a roadshow.</p><p>A direct listing provides a convenient way to skip that conversation.</p><p>"When you do a direct listing, you don't have to put them up there," said one VC firm founder about inexperienced or unpolished management teams. "There's a negative side that the VCs see, but they can hide it behind the direct listings," he said.</p><p>In a direct listing, a company simply lists its shares on a public exchange and the stock begins trading. There's no banks underwriting the offering, setting a price and selling it to institutional shareholders, as happens in an IPO. And while insiders, like VC investors and early employees, can sell shares right away in a direct listing, the company itself does not raise any capital.</p><p>Lise Buyer, the founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group, describes direct listings as an interesting alternative to IPOs that will work for certain companies but that's currently wrapped in a lot of hype: "It's the new shiny object that is aggressively and brilliantly marketed."</p><h2>"Ride the positive narrative" and avoid the hedge fund questions</h2><p>For now, direct listings exist more in the realm of theoretical and wishful thinking than reality. To date, only two companies - Spotify and Slack - have opted to go public this way. </p><p>But <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-01/airbnb-is-planning-for-direct-listing-instead-of-traditional-ipo">according to a recent Bloomberg report</a>, Airbnb, the home-sharing service valued at $31 billion, is leaning towards a direct listing instead of an IPO when it goes public in 2020.</p><p>That could help the company avoid uncomfortable questions about its management team's qualifications. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-30-billion-startup-2016-8">Brian Chesky, the cofounder of Airbnb</a> who serves as CEO, has a background in industrial design and has never held a high-level role at any other company. Although Chesky has grown Airbnb into a juggernaut, his public company experience, and lack of the traditional engineering or business background, would likely get a hard look during an IPO roadshow, the founder of the investing firm speculated. </p><p>"You could make a case for companies to just ride the positive narrative and just go out there with a direct listing because you don't want to answer all these extremely scrutinizing questions from some hedge fund guys," said Synovus Trust Company portfolio manager Dan Morgan about startups with novice or quirky CEOs.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div></p><p>In years past, a seasoned executive might have been brought on to take the reins as the startup neared its IPO. But with founders now revered, and in some cases calling the shots thank to special supervoting shares, many of the most valuable startups are helmed by founders who may or may not have the chops to run a public company.</p><p>"A CEO/Founder with a quirky personality would be fine to do a direct listing and avoid all the scrutiny of a road show," Morgan said.</p><p>Still, he stressed, everything changes after company's first earnings call as a publicly traded organization. And in the case of WeWork, he believes that even a direct listing wouldn't have saved it from a brutal reception in the public markets: "The model was not sound as there appeared to be no roadmap to profitability."</p><h2>The times have changed and IPO "needs innovation"</h2><p>Of course, plenty of unorthodox founders have made it through the roadshow process and gone on to lead successful publicly-traded companies. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously caused a stir <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-takes-heat-for-hoodie-on-ipo-road-show/">by wearing a hoodie to the pre-IPO investor roadshow.</a> Seven years later, the stock is up 374% and Facebook is worth $514 billion.</p><p>And the two companies that have recently gone public through direct listings were not trying to hide unpolished or inexperienced CEOs from criticism. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-life-of-slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-2015-9">Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield</a> is one of the tech industry's most respected, serial entrepreneurs, with a track record that includes creating photo sharing site <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/23/flickrs-acquisition-9-years-later/">Flickr and selling it to Yahoo for $20 million in 2005.</a></p><p>Slack had an optimal business model and enough brand recognition to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/slack-direct-listing-perfect-ipo-2019-6">pull off a direct listing</a> in June, said Jyoti Bansal, a startup founder and tech investor who is a big believer in the potential of direct listings.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div></p><p>Bansal attended a special, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/benchmark-bill-gurley-valuations-are-causing-disappointing-tech-ipos-uber-2019-9">invite-only summit earlier this month</a> devoted to the merits of direct listings. The event took place in San Francisco and was organized by several VC firms in the wake of the disappointing Uber and Peloton IPOs, and the WeWork implosion.</p><p>"The way the IPO is done today is almost like a 25-year-old concept. It just needs innovation" said Bansal, who is the cofounder and CEO of enterprise startup Harness and cofounder of venture firm Unusual Ventures.</p><p>"Twenty-five years ago the primary purpose of IPO was that people didn't have access to growth capital, so you had to go to public markets to get growth capital. Now, everyone has it," he said.</p><p>Class V's Buyer says the notion that direct listings are a cheaper and more democratic process than traditional IPOs is partially true. Since the company isn't raising funds, it doesn't need to work with a traditional underwriter and thus does not need to pay the associated fees. Still, she noted that a company must pay some banker fees, register with regulatory bodies like the SEC, and participate in an audit, all of which are costly undertakings.</p><p>Spotify paid $32 million in fees for its 2018 direct listing, <a href="https://www.inc.com/guadalupe-gonzalez/spotify-cfo-direct-listing-ipo-slack.html">according to Inc,</a> compared to the $102 million that Uber paid in its traditional IPO.</p><h2>No lock-up is a big benefit - for some</h2><p><span>Clearing the path to a liquidity event is critical for VCs who have sunk tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into startups.</span></p><p>Buyer also noted that direct listings - which allow employees to sell all their vested shares right away, without the traditional several month "lock up" period of an IPO - could incentivize valuable employees to cash out and jump ship.</p><p>"I don't think it helps with [employee] retention. It actually is perhaps the opposite," Buyer said of direct listings.</p><p>And for recently-hired employees with unvested stock, a direct listing can leave them at a disadvantage if the stock sinks.</p><p>In the case of both Slack and Spotify, the companies achieved peak share prices in the first weeks or months of trading, and have only lost value since. That means early investors were able to cash out at near-peak pricing while employees with unvested stock and retail investors were left holding shares that were only becoming less valuable.</p><p>"Those who sold on Day One at Slack got a better price than those that sell today," said Buyer.</p>

Silicon Valley's founder-led startups have lost their shine with IPO investors. But the obsession with direct listings won't fix the bigger problem.

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Catalyte</span></p><p class="caption">Jacob Hsu, CEO of Catalyte.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Catalyte is a Baltimore tech company which identifies unlikely potential software developers using AI, regardless of their social or educational backgrounds.</li><li>Catalyte has trained up fast-food workers, truck drivers and construction workers and, on a case-by-case basis, even ex-felons. Some go on to work at big tech firms.</li><li>The company says its revenues have increased seven-fold over a two-year period, from $10m to over $70m.</li><li>Speaking to Business Insider, CEO Jacob Hsu says the company is "seriously considering" going public, adding that it will be "well-positioned" for an IPO in the next twelve months.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.</a></li></ul><p>What do you think when you hear the words 'software developer'?</p><p>The clich<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9"></a>é is someone who's a lifelong nerd or brogrammer type, almost inevitably male, and who has done a stint at Facebook, Google, or another major tech firm. They probably have a computer science or engineering qualification under their belt, and maybe went to an elite university.</p><p>Jacob Hsu is familiar with the pattern. Hsu is CEO of Catalyte, an IT services company, having joined in 2017. Headquartered in Baltimore, Catalyte manages software and digital transformation projects for clients such as Nike, making it much like any other IT services and consulting firm.</p><p>But Catalyte has an unusual approach to hiring teams of software engineers, which the company says results in a much more diverse workforce. To recruit trainee engineers, it uses an algorithm which does not factor in anything to do with applicants' social or educational backgrounds.</p><p>When Hsu first joined, he was sceptical that an algorithm could really result in diverse hiring.</p><p>"When I was just about to join, I thought the hiring process just can't work - I thought it must be impossible," he tells Business Insider.</p><p>Software engineering is a notoriously male-dominated field. In 2017, just 26% of professional computing occupations in the U.S. workforce were held by women, <a href="https://www.ncwit.org/resources/numbers">according to the </a><a href="https://www.ncwit.org/resources/numbers">National Center for Women &amp; Information Technology</a>.  In 2018, the hiring programme HackerRank <a href="https://research.hackerrank.com/women-in-tech/2018">surveyed</a> 14,000 software developers around the world, of whom only 2,000 were women.</p><p><span>But Hsu's experience at Catalyte was different.</span></p><p>"The moment I walked through the door, it hit me. Nearly a third of the programmers [at Catalyte] were African American. A third of the programmers were women. It was like nothing I'd ever seen."</p><p>Catalyte offers a two-year intensive training course in software development. When trainees have finished the course, the idea is that they will be competent enough to work as full-time software developers - whether for Catalyte and its clients or anywhere else.</p><p>The company's recruitment algorithm selects people for the training course, but applicants don't know they're being assessed by an algorithm. Instead, the application process is disguised as a traditional test.</p><p>As offbeat as Catalyte might sound, the company says it has grown seven-fold in two years, with its revenue growing from $10m to over $70 million.</p><p>Graduates of the programme work for companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Paypal, and go from an average salary of $25,000 before to an average of $85,000 within 24 months of finishing.</p><h2><strong>"One-third of our software developers have no more than a high-school education"</strong></h2><p>In Catalyte's Baltimore office (which is also its headquarters), 28% of the office's software developers are African American. The African American population of Baltimore is 29%. The thinking is that Catalyte's local software teams should reflect the cities they work in.</p><p>"One of our programme graduates is an African-American lady who spent 16 years as a public school science teacher," Hsu said. "At one of the schools she taught at, she was asked to teach basic coding, which she had no prior experience of. She realised she had an aptitude for it, and that's what got her interested in our programme. But she said she would have dropped out of our programme were it not for the focus on teamwork."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Maskot/Getty</span></p><p class="caption">Hsu believes the misconception that software development is solitary can put women off entering the industry.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Indeed, Hsu thinks the teamwork required by modern software development is also the reason why Catalyte takes on more female developers. "People often ask me about diversity in tech. I think the reason you see fewer women in software development is because it's viewed as a solitary activity.</p><p>"But modern software development is a team sport. The teams pull each other through. It's like going through the army. Nine out of ten people who undergo our training programme stay on permanently. But if they didn't have a peer group around them, they wouldn't survive our training. If I enrolled on our training programme now, I don't think I'd make it through."</p><p>Hsu claims the training is so thorough that clients assume teams of relative novices are old pros.</p><p>"When Michael [Rosenbaum, Catalyte's founder] was first establishing Catalyte, a company asked a Catalyte team to build some software for them, almost as a Hail Mary, " Hsu explains. "The team built it so efficiently that the company assumed they were ex-Navy Seals with college degrees. But our staff had worked at Taco Bell, or as Park Rangers, or as high-school teachers."</p><p>There are unlikely techies peppered throughout the company, he added.</p><p>"Our current director of training operations joined us eight years ago as a trainee software developer. Before joining us, he spent 20 years as a roofing contractor, but lost everything in the recession, including his house. The leadership skills he learned as a roofing contractor make his work at Catalyte easier.</p><p>"One-third of the developers we train have no more than a high-school education. We re-employ truck drivers, fast-food workers, architects - you name it."</p><p>On its site, Catalyte says it won't recruit people with felonies but Hsu said the company makes some exceptions.</p><p>"We have even hired people with criminal backgrounds. Usually, it's difficult to hire people with felonies, but we have done so on a case-by-case basis," he said.</p><h2>How does an algorithm spot an unlikely but promising techie?</h2><p>At a time when tech firms seem to be having trouble hiring diversely, how does Catalyte pull it off?</p><p>Hsu explained: "We put out ads stating that we're looking for trainee software developers who will ultimately go on to work for major companies, but we make it clear that no prior experience of software development is necessary."</p><p><a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90269298/this-company-uses-ai-to-test-unlikely-engineers-for-their-potential">According to one Fast Company profile</a>, Catalyte posts job ads to Craigslist, a classifieds site more commonly used to find stuff like furniture on the cheap than to find a high-paying software job. Most engineers look in more conventional places for new gigs, like Stack Overflow.</p><p>Hsu continued: "In the test, there's a math section, an essay section, and a values section. But it's not about assessing your answers to those sections. You can score 100% on them and still fail to be selected for our programme.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>BII</span></p><p class="caption">Catalyte's recruitment algorithm takes into account 500 factors when assessing applicants.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>"What we're really assessing is things like your keystroke data, how fast you move your eyes, how you interact with the interface, how many tabs you've got open in your browser ... there are around 500 different factors like this that the algorithm detects and takes into account when assessing candidates.</p><p>Essentially, he said, the algorithm assesses how people's minds work. "Software development is about finding the right information quickly, and changing your thinking on the basis of new information." On that basis, Catalyte tweaks its techie-finding algorithm constantly.</p><h2><strong>"What we do isn't charity"</strong></h2><p>This might all sound very noble, but it probably means very little to most software development businesses unless it actually gets results. Are Catalyte's software development teams really as good as teams assembled using traditional hiring methods? For Hsu, the answer is that they're better - significantly better, in fact.</p><p>"What we do isn't charity," he said. "Our unconventional software teams are outperforming traditional software, development teams. Our teams are ramping up in one to two sprints, not three to four. On average, our teams are three times as productive as traditional, tier one software development teams.</p><p>"We're picking extraordinary people like needles from a haystack."</p><p><em><strong>Read more:</strong> <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/catalyte-bolsters-growth-trajectory-with-two-executive-hires-1027524738">Catalyte Bolsters Growth Trajectory with Two Executive Hires</a></em></p><p>These extraordinary people are not all from Silicon Valley, either. In fact, within the US, they're not collectively from anywhere in particular, which reinforces Hsu's fundamental belief: that talent is not concentrated in the major cities.</p><p>"We're proving that you can build software developments teams anywhere because talent is evenly distributed across society. We're starting up software teams side-by-side with our clients in places like Cincinnati, South Carolina, Ohio… we can generate proximity [to clients] on-demand."</p><p>"People often ask me 'why is your HQ in Baltimore?'," Hsu added. "It's to prove a point. We're proving that software development careers need not be confined to degree-holders in San Francisco.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Sean Pavone/Shutterstock</span></p><p class="caption">Hsu says the company's HQ is in Baltimore "to prove a point" that software development need not be confined to Silicon Valley.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>He continued: "People imagine all software developers are math nerds with four-year degrees. That's not true. They're more like self-taught musicians who have practiced. Whereas other companies have a preconception of what a successful person looks like, and find people to fit that preconception.</p><p>"We've been fast and quiet in terms of growth. Our rivals didn't see it coming, But they're catching on to what we're doing, now."</p><h2><strong>Hsu thinks Catalyte could go public within 12 months</strong></h2><p>Where does Hsu see Catalyte in ten years' time, given its seven-fold growth in the last two?</p><p>Hsu suggests an IPO within the next year.</p><p>"We're seriously considering going public," he says. "In the next twelve months, I think we'll be well-positioned to do so. That's very real.</p><p>"Our ultimate strategy is to blow up pedigree. We want to be like the 'Harry Potter' sorting hat of careers, where we take people regardless of background and assess their suitability for other jobs.</p><p>"Software development is just the first profession we're applying our algorithms to. We want to branch out to other professions, too."</p><p>Of course, whether Catatlyte achieves its goals remains to be seen, but it's already attracted at least one big-name backer.</p><p>In 2018, Catalyte was one of the first companies that billionaire AOL co-founder Steve Case invested in as part of his $150 million 'Rise of Rest' fund, which invests in promising seed-stage companies located outside Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston.</p><p>Catalyte's approach to recruitment is a breath of fresh air in an industry dominated by white men. If and when it does go public, it'll be hoping new shareholders share its appetite for diversity.  </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/game-thrones-season-8-episode-1-premiere-details-you-missed-jon-snow-2019-4">13 details you missed in the 'Game of Thrones' season 8 premiere</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

This company uses AI to turn truck drivers and fast food workers into software engineers, and now it wants to IPO

From a polarising figure to India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is popularly called as NaMo, has built his own brand with a lot of hard work.<br />
<br />
He has sailed in choppy waters with aplomb and today, Modi is the most popular brand in India. The margin of his popularity, relationships, growth and achievements is much higher than his competitors. He is a leader who has been able to connect with global leaders as well as the common man.<br />
<br />
Modi, who can also be referred to as the CEO of our country, has taught us innumerable things on becoming a brand.<br />
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So, on his 65<sup>th</sup> birthday, we jot down seven lessons that can be learnt from his life.<br />
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1. <strong>Optimism &amp; self confidence:</strong> His journey from a tea-seller to a leader of world’s largest democracy teaches us about self-confidence and optimism. His life has inspired and has given very important message to three generations - youth, middle aged and old aged-that family background, elite education and age cannot act as a roadblock to one’s dream to achieve something extraordinary in life.<br />
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2. <strong>Resilience:</strong> Modi drew flak from all quarters during 2002 Gujarat riots, both nationally and internationally. Many business leaders questioned favorable environment for businessmen in Gujarat, and countries like the US revoked his visa. During 2014 general elections, few key leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies were not in favor of his selection as the Prime Ministerial candidate. But, he came out strong from tough situations and surprised everyone with the results.<br />
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3. <strong>Develop faith</strong>: Modi is often criticized for his foreign tours and his government has been through a roller-coaster ride on several issues including black money, Lalit Modi row, Vyapam scam, etc. Still, through counter-attacks and speeches, Modi has instilled a faith in the common man. Also, by pitching India as the best place to invest and highlighting the positives, he has also lead business honchos, worldover, to invest in India. Highlight positives and show your strengths. If you have confidence in yourself, everyone else will also show the same in you.<br />
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4. <strong>Nurture relationships: </strong>NaMo himself has been putting continuous efforts to nurture relationships with various global leaders. The US President Barack Obama attended Republic Day function, Columbia University Professor Jagdish Bhagwati has lauded Modi's Gujarat model of development in his book, yoga guru Baba Ramdev, India’s golden voice Lata Mangeshkar, business tycoon Ratan Tata and many other influential leaders have praised NaMo for his work.<br />
<br />
5.<strong> Think Different:</strong> Ditch the traditional methods and do something offbeat to connect. During the 2014 parliamentary elections, Modi engaged with his target audience using different technologies and innovative campaigns. Through webcasts, data analytics, digitization, 3D holograms, social media, etc, Modi was omnipresent. His ‘chai pe charcha’ campaign was a hit.<br />
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6. <strong>Communication and keep in touch:</strong> It’s not that NaMo, who is an excellent communicator, forgot his audiences after elections. His monthly address ‘Mann ki baat’ is still a rage among Indians. Modi’s speeches are articulate and well-crafted which also touch an emotional nerve. Communication is one of the best tools, which can really build a brand.<br />
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7. <strong>Vision &amp; knowledge</strong>: Modi has great insights on challenges faced by public, his knowledge on historic and cultural facts are also remarkable. Most importantly, he has a vision to make India an efficient and modern country that thrives in various industries and fields. He wants to turn India into world’s manufacturing hub and his ‘Make in India’ initiative has already garnered lot of steam. It is important to targets and a vision and tread of that path.<br />
<br />
(Author of this article is Harsh Pamnani, who is a former Senior Manager of TiE Mumbai and an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur)<br />
<br />
(Image: PIB)<br />

7 incredible things that we can imbibe from birthday boy Narendra Modi

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>It's Valentine's Day, which for some might be a reminder of just how confusing&#xa0;dating in the 21st century can&#xa0;feel. We have complicated ways of connecting that didn't exist 20 years ago, and much of our conversation with romantic partners happens via&#xa0;text message.</p><p>Comedian Aziz Ansari has a lot to say about this. In&#xa0;his first book, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Romance-Aziz-Ansari/dp/1594206279">Modern Romance</a>," Ansari worked with sociologist Eric Klinenberg to explore how we date in the digital age. They talked with hundreds of single people across the world, asking how they connect with romantic partners.</p><p>Ansari and Klinenberg discovered the culture of finding love has evolved dramatically, fueled in part by the advent of cellphones and the explosion in online dating.</p><p>They also found that a lot of people have questions about texting etiquette.</p><p>Here are some of their tips&#xa0;from the 2016 book.</p><h2>Don't wait to send that first text.</h2><p>Although the three-day rule has floated&#xa0;around as solid advice for what seems like forever, Ansari&#xa0;and&#xa0;Klinenberg found that's&#xa0;actually a myth.</p><p>After you meet someone you like, the best time to send the first text is that same day. It's better to touch base sooner rather than later, because it keeps the romantic momentum going.</p><p>That person already gave you&#xa0;their number, so chances are they dig you.</p><h2>Avoid "heyyy" and make it personal.</h2><p>Ansari and Klinenberg found one of women's most common texting peeves was the generic "hello" text.&#xa0;</p><p><span>"After seeing hundreds and hundreds of messages in women's' phones," Ansari writes, "I can definitively say that most of the texts women receive are, sadly, utterly lacking in either thought or personality."</span></p><p>Instead, reference something you talked about when you first met that person. Show them&#xa0;you actually listen to what they say.</p><h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Try to be clever.</h2><p>Adding a dose of comedy&#xa0;to your texts can really up your game, Ansari says. It keeps things lighthearted and makes you memorable to the other person.</p><p>At the same time, try not to overdo it, because sometimes sarcasm or offbeat humor can be a little hard to decipher over text.</p><h2>Text at normal hours.</h2><p>It's best to text in the afternoon or evening, not early in the morning or late at night, Ansari and Klinenberg say. Otherwise, you run the risk of annoying someone by waking them up.</p><h2>Don't text back immediately, but don't overthink your response time.</h2><p>In their focus groups, Ansari and Klinenberg found that generally you shouldn't text someone&#xa0;back right away. Texting back immediately apparently gives off the vibe that you're too eager or desperate.</p><p>Waiting an hour or two will make you seem more desirable, because it shows that you have other things going on in your life. That said, don't wait too long, which could show a lack of interest.</p><h2>Use correct grammar.</h2><p>"Plz" and "Idk" may be okay in texts with friends, but Ansari and Klinenberg say you're better off using&#xa0;proper English with your crush.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Bad grammar was a major turnoff in almost every focus group. Texting things like "Hey we shud hang out sumtimez" make the sender seem unintelligent and lazy.</p><h2>Make concrete plans.</h2><p>Ansari suggests avoiding the generic "what's up?" or "want to hang?" texts. Instead, be forward and direct.</p><p>Invite&#xa0;your crush to do something <em>specific</em>&#xa0;at a&#xa0;<em>specific</em> time. It shows that you're interested in actually spending time with them, rather than just penciling them into your schedule.</p><h2>Get to know them in person.</h2><p>Sending a slew of texts&#xa0;isn't a substitute for actually getting to know someone IRL, Ansari says.</p><p>When you do plan that first date, he recommends following what he dubs&#xa0;the "Monster Truck Rally Theory." Don't take your date&#xa0;out to a mundane place&#xa0;like a coffee shop or restaurant - go somewhere exciting like, say, a monster-truck rally. An interesting date helps you see&#xa0;what it's really like to be with a&#xa0;person.</p><p><span>"Don't just stare at each other across the table while sipping a beverage and making the same small talk you've made a thousand times about siblings, hometowns, and where you went to college," Ansari writes. "A person may seem just okay, but if you really invest time in the relationship, maybe they'll be greater than you assume."</span></p><div></div>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dating-expert-reveals-best-ways-find-lasting-relationship-2017-1">A dating expert reveals the best ways to find a lasting relationship</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="ZvOWxxODE65sF1japAT32rPeURaMraVO" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

The best way to text with someone you want to date, according to Aziz Ansari

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Win-Win</span></p><p class="caption">Michael Tauiliili-Brown, founder CEO of Win-Win</p></div><p></p></div></div>Mike Brown's short-lived time in the NFL made him grateful for one thing: that his mom made him keep his grades up in order to play sports.</p><p>Thanks to that, today Brown has another dream job, as CEO of a year-old startup called <a href="https://www.trywinwin.com/">Win-Win</a>.</p><p>But back in 2009, when the two-time all-American linebacker from Duke University got picked up as a free agent for the Indianapolis Colts, he thought his dreams of an NFL career had come true. It didn't. <a href="http://www.wthr.com/article/painter-makes-colts-final-cut">The Colts cut him from the roster </a>at the end of training camp.</p><p>He kicked around for a few years in <a href="http://www.oursportscentral.com/services/releases/mountain-lions-sign-12-more-players/n-4220013">the United Football League</a>, best known for <a href="http://footballgarbagetime.com/2015/06/what-the-united-football-league-who/">its fast failure and low salaries.</a> UFL went defunct after a few years.</p><p>"I didn't play football for as long as I wanted to. I didn't make it to retirement/pension. I was there for a Hollywood second, bounced around. Never able to get to big contract," he told Business Insider.</p><p>In 2013, after four years, he was done as a pro player. He planned to go get his MBA. That's when he, quite literally, got the calling to go to Silicon Valley and do a tech startup instead.</p><p>"I was getting ready to go to Rice University and a friend of mine in the Bay Area told me about this program that he heard about called Draper University. I didn't know anything about Silicon Valley. All I knew that Facebook was here," he said.</p><p>On a lark, he applied to the program but didn't think he'd really do it.</p><h2>Tim Draper comes calling</h2><p>Soon after, billionaire VC Tim Draper personally called Brown. Draper is known for his eccentric, boisterous, confident personality. He's hard to say no to.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Business Insider</span></p><p class="caption">Tim Draper</p></div><p></p></div></div>"If anyone else would have called, I probably would not have changed my plans to go back to school. But he said, "Hey, Mike, this is Tim. We loved your application. You're in. Full scholarship. We'll see you in March. And I was like, "Uh. I guess I'll change my plans."</p><p>Draper University, as the program is called, isn't a university but a two-month boot camp for wanna-be tech entrepreneurs. It had launched the year before as Draper's brainchild to teach people leadership skills in unconventional ways.</p><p>While other accelerator programs focus on building a product, Draper U does things like military survival training (Draper calls it "hero training") where students spend days in the wilderness foraging for food and shelter. They compete in offbeat contests too, like "to sell something embarrassing, or go to San Francisco and come back with a job offer, on paper, in 24 hours," <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-draper-expands-his-entrepreneur-school-2016-5">Draper previously told Business Insider.</a></p><p>At one point, Draper even turned his university into a reality TV show, Startup U, that aired on ABC Family, though it only ran for one season.</p><p>Brown loved it.</p><p>"I came out of Draper very confident," he says. "Ideas are coming out Draper's head like crazy. As wacky as the program seems to be, it changed my life."</p><p>He vowed to himself, "I'm going to move to Silicon Valley and I'm going to start my own startup.'"</p><h2>Cold calls and working hard</h2><p>But he didn't have a job in the expensive Bay Area, so he went back to Houston, determined to return.</p><p>"Life was also happening. I got married. We had a child," he said. "During that time, I taught myself how to code, how to design. Knowing how to code or at the very least know how to talk to developers is important. So all day, all night, laying in bed, I was cranking out HTML/CSS, Javascript, jQuery all of it."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Kiip</span></p><p class="caption">Kiip founder Brian Wong.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Brown's wife finished up her master's degree in education (while she was pregnant) and got hired at California State University as a counselor.</p><p>"My wife believed in me. We moved to the Bay Area the next year. My job was to get a job," he said.</p><p>Once in the Bay Area, he contacted everyone he could think of. He sent a cold email to a guy at a startup called Kiip who graduated years after him, but remembered the star football player.</p><p>Kiip is a mobile advertising company known in its early days for its young founder, Brian Wong, who landed $200,000 of seed funding at age 19. He <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/06/betting-venture-capital-on-an-unproven-19-year-old/">was one of the youngest people to ever land funding</a> back then, in 2010.</p><p>Brown was offered an entry-level, cold-calls sales job. He worked his way up to a full sales job within four months and started making "good money," he says. He also had another kid on the way. "We moved to a bigger place. I became the tech guy for my friends. They started pitching me ideas. It was funny. I was in a really good place."</p><p>While at Kiip, his co-workers talked him into joining their Fantasy Football sports league, his first time playing. They convinced him it wasn't about winning the money at the end of the season but about teasing each other all season long.</p><p>That was the same season that FanDuel and DraftKings were smothering the airwaves with ads, which got Brown thinking. Why weren't the players tweeting about the daily fantasy?</p><p>"I called players that I knew and they told me two things: they didn't care enough to have an opinion or they flat out didn't like it," he said. One player, Pierre Garcon of the Washington Redskins <a href="http://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/14011070/pierre-garcon-washington-redskins-leads-class-action-lawsuit-fanduel">even sued FanDuel </a>for using his image repeatedly on an infomercial without permission or compensation. (<a href="http://www.si.com/fantasy/2016/01/19/washington-redskins-pierre-garcon-fanduel-settlement">They settled out of court</a>.)</p><h2>Replace gambling with charity</h2><p>It gave Brown a "light bulb moment," he said. If fans were really just playing for fun, not money, why not let the money go to the player's charity, something "that is more impactful and more important to an athlete? And in exchange you would be able to win something that money can't buy," like hanging out with the athlete.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Mike Brown and Arizona Cardinals Patrick Peterson</span></p><p class="caption">Mike Brown and Arizona Cardinals Patrick Peterson</p></div><p></p></div></div>He asked the players if they would be willing to donate their time or other stuff if it raised money for their causes and "100% of the time, 'Hell, yeah' was the answer. Because they didn't even have to do anything. They didn't have to host a golf tournament or a benefit dinner," he said.</p><p>Brown was laid off from Kiip in November and founded his company, Win-Win in January, just in time to attend the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) conference in Dallas.</p><p>That's where he pitched his startup idea to a panel that included Mark Cuban.</p><p>Cuban didn't invest, but the exposure helped him land a bunch of other angels who put in about $1 million, he says.</p><p>"Within nine months, I had built a small team, raised a good chunk of money for a first time founder and launched on time," Brown says. Win-Win currently employs four full-time people and three contractors, he says.</p><p>The first tournament was launched in September at the start of football season. The prize was a trip on a private jet with Arizona Cardinals cornerback Patrick Peterson to watch the LSU vs. Alabama game with him. The tournament raised money for the Louisiana flood victims via the Baton Rouge Area Foundation on behalf of Peterson.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Win-Win</span></p><p class="caption">Win-Win winners jet ride</p></div><p></p></div></div>Other tournaments gave away sideline tickets to Cardinals and San Francisco 49ers games, and prizes ranging from signed jerseys to discounts at the sports retailer, Fanatics. Brown wants everyone who plays to win something.</p><p>Currently, Win-Win makes its money by taking a small percentage of the entry fees but he says he's exploring other fees, too, perhaps on the marketing/advertising side.</p><p>For his first year, he's attracted about 3,500 players and had over over 65 athletes express interest. He's now ramping up to launch for the NBA season and launching other ways to play, like bracket games.</p><p>While there's no telling if Win-Win will ultimately succeed, the concept is intriguing. Because all the money goes to charity, Win-Win may not face the kind of "is-this-gambling?" scrutiny that originally plagued FanDuel.</p><p>And Brown is living his second dream of being a tech entrepreneur.</p>     <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/fanduel-founders-daily-fantasy-sports-craze-2015-10">How FanDuel, the billion-dollar New York City startup, launched the now-controversial daily fantasy sports craze</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="8waWM4eDqD9-ixpIztKtsAYltXR0yPeQ" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

How a crazy tech 'university' and fantasy sports saved this former pro football player

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Business Insider</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Amazon <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hbo-2014-4" target="_blank">recently announced a new deal with HBO</a> that will give its Prime members access to a large selection of the network's classic content, making Amazon's Instant Video catalog a whole lot more attractive to potential subscribers. </p>
<p>This new deal - plus the company's recent influx of original content - are making Amazon a realistic contender in the TV and movie streaming service wars. So, it's time for a throwdown: Which streaming service should rule your screen, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or Hulu Plus? </p>
<p>Let's dive into some of the details:</p>
<h2><strong>Price</strong>:</h2>
<p><strong>Netflix</strong> subscriptions currently cost $7.99 per month, but that price <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-price-increase-2014-4" target="_blank">will rise by $1 or $2</a> for new members later this quarter. Existing members will keep their current price for a "generous" period of time. Assuming the $2 increase, Netflix will soon cost $119.88 per year. </p>
<p><span><strong>Amazon Prime</strong> membership costs $99 per year (or about $8.25 per month), but also includes unlimited, free two-day shipping on many items. You also get access to the company's growing selection of streaming TV shows and movies.</span></p>
<p><strong>Hulu Plus</strong> costs $7.99 per month or $95.88 per year. We haven't heard of any upcoming price increases and don't expect to since <a href="http://www.hulu.com/support/article/20356372" target="_blank">Hulu can keep prices low</a> by showing advertisements along with its programming. Netflix and Amazon don't show you ads.</p>
<p><span><strong>Cheapest option</strong>: Hulu Prime is the cheapest streaming service, though only by a smidge. </span></p>
<h2>Interface:</h2>
<p>We decided to compare the desktop interface of each of these services, even though they each have a their respective apps for phones, tablets, smart TVs, streaming boxes, etc.</p>
<p>One of the best parts about <strong>Netflix's desktop UI</strong> is how visual and personalized it is. One of the first categories you see is "Top Picks" for you, which makes it easy to find new content. Plus, Netflix lets you create different profiles, so if you share your service with a roommate or family member, you can make sure that your recommendations are true to what you actually watch. Although you can only sort by genre from the menu, scrolling through your home-page will reveal some of Netflix's signature quirkily-specific recommendation categories, like "Romantic movies featuring a strong female lead."</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Netflix " title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/535a917f6bb3f71e41505e1d-960/screen shot 2014-04-25 at 12.41.37 pm.png"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Netflix </span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p><strong>Amazon's Prime Instant Video</strong> interface isn't the best for quick, easy discovery. On the one-hand, you have more way more ways to filter your content options: You can search by genre, mood (like bleak, touching, or offbeat), theme (like tough guys, or obsession), actor, or director. If you have a specific idea or what you're looking for, you'll have no trouble. But, on the desktop version at least, there's no personalized recommendations (though we did get them on the iPad app), so it's harder to find something new quickly when you don't know what you want. Plus, you don't get as much info about each individual show when you hover over it as you do on Netflix. </p>
<p>Finally, because Amazon's catalog includes tons of titles that aren't included for free with Prime, you need to remember to check the "Prime" box when you're searching, or you could be disappointed when you find something that you don't actually have access to. </p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Amazon" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/535a8522eab8eac01a505e1b-960/screen shot 2014-04-25 at 11.46.04 am.png"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Amazon</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Once you sign into <strong>your Hulu Plus account</strong>, you'll be quickly directed to a list of the shows that you usually watch, so diving into your addiction to Modern Family couldn't be easier. Hulu Plus, like Netflix, has a list of top recommendations for you based on other shows that you've shown interest in, though it also puts more of a focus on content that is popular on the site at any given time. The site also lets you sort by network, which is helpful if you know that you really like Comedy Central or CW shows, for example. </p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Hulu </span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Although each of the user interface's had their perks, Netflix wins out because of its ability to support multiple profiles, the amount of info you get about a show just by hovering over it on the home-page, and the ultra-specific recommendation categories.</p>
<h2>Selection:</h2>
<p><a href="http://lifehacker.com/tv-streaming-head-to-head-netflix-vs-hulu-vs-amazon-pr-1536006625" target="_blank">LifeHacker did a really interesting analysis</a> of which streaming service offers the best selection back in March. The site looked at the top 250 TV shows as ranked by IMDB, and checked which service offered which shows. It also highlighted the top 25 most popular shows (none of the top 25 changed in light of Amazon's new HBO deal). Head <a href="http://lifehacker.com/tv-streaming-head-to-head-netflix-vs-hulu-vs-amazon-pr-1536006625" target="_blank">over to LifeHacker</a> to see their infographic, but here's the gist:</p>
<p><strong>Netflix</strong> has more than twice the streaming selection of <strong>Amazon Instant Video </strong>when it comes to the 250 hottest TV shows. Although <strong>Hulu Plus</strong> streams more current-running episodes, it has fewer of the hottest shows than Netflix or Amazon overall. Netflix has the most exlusive content. </p>
<h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>House of Cards/Netflix</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Original shows:</h2>
<p>Here are the original TV shows that you need to sign-up to watch. Although each service also has several "exclusive" shows, these ones are strictly pegged "original." </p>
<p><strong>Netflix</strong>: "Orange is the New Black," "House of Cards," "Hemlock Grove," "Lilyhammer," "Bad Samaritans," "The Ropes," and "Arrested Development" (season four only)</p>
<p><strong>Amazon Prime</strong>: "Alpha House," "Betas," "Mozart in the Jungle," "Wishenpoof!" "The After," "Bosch," "Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street," and "Transparent"</p>
<p><strong style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Hulu Plus</strong><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">: "Quick Draw," "The Awesomes," "Deadbeat," "The Wrong Mans," "Behind the Mask," "Up to Speed," "Spoilers with Kevin Smith," "Battleground," "A Day in the Life"</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Best original shows</strong>: At this point, there is much, much more hype around "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black" than any of the other shows on this list. However, several of Amazon and Hulu's shows are just getting started (or haven't even aired yet), so there's still time for one of them to come out with a huge hit. </span></p>
<h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/71401718@N00/5351266905">Flickr/Wonderlane</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Where are the crowds: </h2>
<p>Want to know what all your friends are watching? Here are the numbers for each service. </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Netflix</strong>:</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/3114609793x0x745654/fb5aaae0-b991-4e76-863c-3b859c8dece8/Q114%20Earnings%20Letter%204.21.14%20final.pdf" target="_blank"> 35.67 million</a> subscribers </span></p>
<p><strong>Amazon Prime</strong>: "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-members-2014-1#ixzz2pfQx3VaN" target="_blank">At least</a>" 20 million people use Prime, but we have no real indication on how many use Prime Instant Video, other than that the company said <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-q1-earnings-2014-4" target="_blank">in its Q1 earnings call</a> that video streams nearly tripled in the last year</p>
<p><strong>Hulu Plus</strong>: 5 million subscribers, <a href="http://blog.hulu.com/2013/12/18/a-strong-2013/" target="_blank">as of December</a>. </p>
<p><strong>Most popular</strong>: Netflix is the most popular service</p>
<h2>Unique Offerings:</h2>
<p>Comparing these services only on the above criteria wouldn't cover the whole story. Each service has something extra on its side.</p>
<p>It needs to be noted that<strong> Netflix</strong> is really trumping the competition when it comes to original programming. "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black" both attracted huge audiences. Not to mention, that the creator of the popular show Arrested Development <a href="http://time.com/73124/arrested-development-creator-mitch-hurwitz-new-netflix-series/" target="_blank">just signed on</a> to do another new Netflix show. </p>
<p><strong>Amazon Prime</strong> membership offers tons of great content, but its biggest draw could still be the free, two-day shipping that it offers for lots of products. If you're a big Amazon shopper, it's almost a no-brainer to sign-up for Prime, because you're canceling out a lot of the shipping costs that could otherwise add up fast. Although the HBO content that Amazon will be getting on May 21 isn't as "hot" as other shows on Netflix or Hulu Plus, there are lots of extremely high-quality, well-reviewed series like "The Wire" and "Flight of the Concords" for viewers to dive into. If you buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, Prime is worth it. And you can't complain about getting a bunch of free stuff to watch to boot.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">If you want to watch the latest episodes of your favorite popular shows, <strong>Hulu Plus</strong> is the place to go. Although you can binge-watch entire seasons of shows, Netflix and Amazon generally have to wait several months before they can stream the latest seasons. For example, on Netflix you can watch all of season two of "New Girl," but you have to wait until the whole third season is released a month or so after it ends, while you can watch the five latest episodes of "New Girl" on Hulu Plus right now. Still, you have to deal with commercials just like you do with regular TV.</span></p>
<h2><span>Conclusion</span></h2>
<p><span>Even with all the facts in front of us, it's hard to make an over-arching statement on which streaming service is best for everyone. Hulu Plus is the top choice for getting the newest episodes, but Netflix has the most entertaining original series and greatest selection of hot shows. Netflix has the best user and recommendation experience overall. If you're just looking for TV and movies, we're leaning towards Netflix as the best choice. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">However, because Amazon Instant Video is just one aspect of Amazon Prime, </span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">and Netflix, and Hulu Plus are still relatively inexpensive, it doesn't have to be a case of either/or. If you spend a lot of money on Amazon and you want to diversify your TV selection, Prime is worth the money. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">One other thing is for certain, too: If you still pay-full price for cable, then you may need to </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cord-cutters-and-the-death-of-tv-2013-11" target="_blank">consider cutting the cord</a><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p><p class="tagline">Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his
personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.</p>

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