#68 - Lessons about Chance the Rapper, tech and music + FREE prototype tool
Backstage Capital announced a London accelerator
The biggest news this week is that Backstage Capital announced the Backstage Accelerator and one of the chosen cities is London! Operating like your Y Combinator’s and TechStars; but with a focus on underestimated founders. This is big and they’re also continuing the mission of cutting the cheque for black women
Afrotech Fest
Excited that Afrotech Fest will be back next April. Click here and checkout the highlights. Follow them on Insta, Twitter, etc. Stay tuned - no doubt I will plug it.
When the hate don't work they start telling lies
Box plots, or box-and-whisker plots, are fantastic little graphs that give you a lot of statistical info in a cute little square
Let's Build Great Products
What Really Kills Most Startups
Great read on recognising the human reasons your business failed is the only way to prevent it from happening again.
Why our big companies aren’t innovating
Investors put money into big companies because they expect a steady flow of profits and dividends. They fear that money invested will be squandered. So don’t be afraid to start small and find a small community to grow carefully and iteratively.
Sunday Reads
Black Young Professionals Recruitment Fair tomorrow
So the BYP Diversity Recruitment Fair is happening tomorrow and is a chance for black students, graduates and experienced hires to meet and learn more about the UK’s top employers who are also committed to diversity
It’s FREE, and there’s a limited number of tickets so don’t miss out.
Lessons about the music biz from Chance the Rapper
Great thought piece looking at how Chance the Rapper took the indie route and owns his masters and royalties.
It also talks to the value chain and how clued up artists can work with their peeps and have ownership.
Timely as a friend on mine looks at an alternative view on how content creaters, VC’s and tech teams could use blockchain technology to solve the music industries broken model.
Also, Spotify has started making direct deals with independent artists 👀
Time Management in the Future of Work
Harry Mclaverty - incredibly talented 23+ year old black VC from the UK tells his story about how he grts deep work done
Tesla, Tech & Cars
This is a really detailed analysis of car and technology and I personally believe it would be an interesting read for an engineering mind that cares about both.
For the geeks, this is my fave quote:
Instead of many stand-alone embedded systems each doing one thing, we’ll have cheap dumb sensors and actuators controlled by software on a single central control board, running some sort of operating system, with many different threads (there are a few candidates)
Tech is used for good
Don’t let the headlines gass you. Tech get’s used for good a lot of times.
Ever felt depressed? Maybe you got design skills?
Checkout some cool UX design to solve depression
Helpful Tool(s)
FREE feedback for your site or app
BetaTesta: Receive feedback for your website, app or prototype in minutes for free.
Register today and get exclusive access to BetaTesta before they publically launch.
Google Introduces New Search Engine for Finding Datasets
Anyone knows that data wrangling is a challenge so this should make it easy to find the datasets that you’re looking for
(currently in Beta)