Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups. Why? Because some of those startups are the next Googles, Facebooks and Twitters of the world, they just can’t afford the office space yet. Plus, entrepreneurs tend to be more insane (and interesting) than the average human. Within the Whacky World Of Startups, Rip focuses on music, social, mobile, sports, health and education – with an emphasis on the latter two.
He’s a really great guy, and you might like him, but only if you call him after 9am PT. Only. Otherwise, he can be a little bit stabby.
He gets a lot of email, most of it Viagra spam, but also a few pitches. So if you don’t hear back from him right away, the first and only thing you should do is take it extremely personally. That usually helps. Then write a strongly-worded email.
Rip has been quoted by various people at various times – some of them publications referencing his work – some of them people mistakenly re-tweeting him thinking he’s Rip Torn. VCs have been investing in the companies he writes about for three years now and still haven’t thanked him. That’s not why he does this, granted, but it still just doesn’t seem very polite, does it?
He enjoys writing about not only startups and things that are disrupting the disruptable disruptions, but ideas that are actually going to change the world. And make it a better place. That’s why he follows book larnin’ tech and next-gen stethoscope apps. Also because he is a hypochondriac and never graduated from 5th grade. HUZZAH!
You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com … but don’t send him copy-and-pasted press releases, or he’ll say mean and nasty things behind your back even if he’s nice to your face.
As to what he’s doing right now? He’s either transferring his life savings from Scramble With Friends tokens to Bitcoin or vice versa. Hard to say, really.
Disclosure: Rip does want you to endorse him on LinkedIn, but don’t tell anyone about it, it’s embarrassing. It also turns out he owns shares in a technology-focused ETF, though he has absolutely no idea what that means. However, Google informs him that it’s an index fund that includes Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Google, AT&T and Verizon. He does not hold any individual investments in these or any other tech companies. Or does he? Just kidding, he doesn’t.
In today’s tech industry, if you ask a startup founder to describe the biggest hurdles that stand between them and total world domination (or at least market penetration), it won’t be long before they begin grumbling about recruiting and the challenging process of hiring top-tier technical talent. → Read More
For pretty much as long as anyone can remember, a relationship triangle, or a “love triangle” if you will, has taken shape between companies and the PR firms that represent them and the press that covers them — existing in some sort of recursive loop. Yet, while that triangle should have come to represent a symbiosis and a valuable communication network, somewhere along the way the triangle broke… → Read More
Rounds, the video chat app and Israeli startup backed by $5.5 million in funding from Verizon Investments, Rhodium and DFJ’s Tim Draper among others, has been slowly expanding across platforms. Originally built as a Facebook-centric experience, Rounds expanded to the desktop last summer, launched Mac and Windows apps to allow its users to send and receive video calls without using their browser… → Read More
Back in August, Lift launched the first rendition of its snappy-looking iPhone app that aims to help people build healthy habits and achieve their goals. Initially incubated and seed funded by Obvious Corp., the hybrid accelerator and seed vehicle created by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone and early Twitter VP Jason Goldman, the startup added $2.5 million from Spark Capital, SV Angel… → Read More
Startup accelerators have gone “niche” over the last year. Instead of simply copy and pasting the Y Combinator model ad nauseam, incubators have started to seep into verticals, tailoring their programs to particular industries. Education technology has been enjoying more attention from entrepreneurs and investors of late, and following suit, a new generation of EdTech accelerators have begun to… → Read More
Ebay is generally credited with being the first company to bring auctions — a system that, for nearly 2,500 years, had exclusively taken place live in noisy, public (and offline) forums — into the Digital Era. But, today, in spite of the fact that eCommerce has become a thriving global industry, with online marketplaces collectively topping $1 trillion in sales last year, one market in… → Read More
Thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree would culminate with its $1.1 billion Tumblr purchase? Well, not so much. In fact, the buy-happy company just quietly made its second acquisition in 24 hours — in two completely different verticals, no less. Yes, Yahoo followed this morning’s purchase of iOS photo app maker, GhostBird Software, by making a play into the enterprise conference calling space. Wait… → Read More
Last summer, word started to trickle out about a young, stealth startup called RelateIQ that was rumored to be one of the more ambitious players among the new (and expanding) class of Big Data startups. Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin had founded RelateIQ the summer before to tackle some enduring problems in the way we manage our professional relationships — the same ones that led to the birth of … → Read More
The tech industry has seen its fair share of acquisition whoppers lately, with Salesforce acquiring ExactTarget for $2.5 billion this month, and Yahoo putting the icing on its acquisition spree by snatching up Tumblr for $1.1 billion. But the news today that Google is buying popular iOS map and navigation app, Waze, (reportedly for around $1.1 to $1.3 billion) is a little different. Here’s why. → Read More
Facebook and Twitter have become stellar venues for brands and small businesses alike to advertise their wares. However, while social-style gift-giving has seen some traction thanks to Facebook, social commerce has been slow to take flight. Chirpify launched in early 2012 to do something about this, offering an easy way for people to make purchases in-stream on Twitter. Late last year, the young… → Read More
Yes, it’s become exceedingly clear that the Internet has entered into a prodigious, lascivious (and hilarious) relationship with cats. But, at the end of the day, when it comes to the title of “Man/Woman/Child’s Best Friend,” it’s the friendly neighborhood pooch that takes the cake. In my own experience, even when The World thinks you’re an idiot, life gets you down and you’ve forgotten to feed… → Read More
The Learning Management System market is a wild and wooly place — relatively speaking, of course. “LMSes,” as they are known, are software applications and platforms that allow educational institutions and businesses to deliver courses, training, content and, really, manage every aspect of the learning process. Over time, the market has bifurcated, with one side catering to corporate clients with… → Read More
In 2011, Steve Schoettler left Zynga, the company he had co-founded four years earlier, to devote himself to a new project, called Junyo. With interest in education technology beginning to take hold, Shoettler and his co-founders at Junyo set out to leverage the growing capabilities of Big Data tools and analytics to tackle some of the deep-seated problems in K-12 education. Chief among those was… → Read More
Ijad Madisch started ResearchGate in 2008 to change the scientific method, and depending on where you sit, that either is or isn’t as ambitious as it sounds. Madisch isn’t on a crusade to overturn the techniques scientists use to investigate and systematically observe phenomena, so much as the tools. Today, there’s an incredible amount of scientific research taking place, whether it’s in… → Read More
Riding the growing demand for DIY website tools, Wix has grown into a sizable company and now employs nearly 400 people in its offices in Tel Aviv, New York and San Francisco. The Israeli-American startup is backed by just under $60 million from investors like Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark, DAG Ventures and IVP and has a user base of more than 27 million registered users who have created… → Read More
It was just about two years ago that Jake Winebaum (who had previously sold Business.com for $360 million) quietly launched Brighter.com, an online marketplace for discounted dental care. Within a few months, Winebaum and Brighter, which had launched with $5 million in its coffers, added another $8 million from Benchmark, Mayfield Fund and a few others. → Read More
Back in 2007, Adam Bellow launched a site called eduTecher to aggregate and surface the best educational resources and content on the Web. A high school teacher himself, Bellow set out to highlight new technologies and educational tools that could be used in the classroom to improve the learning experience. When a new generation of community curation tools began to take hold on the Web, like… → Read More
There’s a lot of exciting and head-turning technology out there today, and it’s changing our world in a multitude of ways, some more obvious than others — and at a fairly astounding rate. But many of these services, while making our lives more convenient or connected, aren’t necessarily helping people or having an impact at a more fundamental level. There are, of course, many exceptions, and … → Read More
Launched in late 2011 by Stanford grad and ex-Facebooker Ishan Gupta, Delhi-based EduKart is on a mission to bring online education to India and the developing world. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $500K in seed capital from a handful of institutional and angel investors. Participants include Kima Ventures, AKM Systems, Vibhor Mehra and Stanford alumni. The investment adds to the… → Read More
500 Startups appears to be on a mission to take over the world. With about 20 percent of its capital going to international companies, the seed fund and accelerator has expanded its scope to include India, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Brazil and last year it snatched up LatAm startup accelerator, Mexican.VC, to aid with its efforts south of the border. → Read More
Thanks to the increasing consumption of digital video — and the fact that many of the largest content providers now force viewers to watch ads within those videos (Hulu, YouTube) — the growth of digital video continues to be one of the fastest growing areas of the online advertising market. Naturally, that rising tide (which is expected to continue) has begun to carry a handful of the veteran… → Read More
Nobody’s quite sure when (and if) Bitcoin will go mainstream, but plenty of investors and entrepreneurs have begun to place their bets. The snowball is off and rolling.
If this post doesn’t make it clear why venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, just in the last two months, we’ve seen the Winklevosses admit they have a crush on Bitcoin, Liberty City Ventures launch its own… → Read More
Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives — mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying… → Read More
Pandora has had a busy quarter. In March, the social radio company saw its long-time CEO Joe Kennedy abruptly step down, leaving the board to scramble to find a replacement. On the bright side, Kennedy’s exit, while likely a result of stress, followed relatively good times for Pandora. And it’s continued to push forward since. → Read More
It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and acquired document embedding service and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own. → Read More
Practice Fusion has made a name for itself over the past few years by tapping into enormous demand for digital health information — particularly health records. From its inception in 2005, the startup has been on a mission to disrupt the slow-moving, archaic world of Healthcare IT by providing a free, web-based electronic medical records (EMR) platform to doctors and their practices. → Read More
In November, Jive Software acquired Bay Area cloud-based, collaborative task manager, Producteev, to boost its social business platform. Going forward, as Alex wrote at the time, Salesforce.com and Jive will increasingly butt heads as they compete for mindshare in the enterprise. With Producteev’s multi-platform task-management system, which allows users to create tasks from emails and collaborate… → Read More
Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing of its kind. → Read More
When it comes to diagnoses and the possibility of undergoing serious medical procedures, we want second opinions (and trustworthy referrals) whenever we can get them. With 30 to 40 million Americans slated to receive insurance for the first time next year thanks to Obamacare — and with millions expected to experience higher costs and reduced coverage as a result — the system is in for a shock. → Read More
It’s easy to forget that Yahoo has had a long on-again-off-again love affair with online video. Remember Broadcast.com, which kicked off the Mark Cuban Era? But you might not remember that, because other online video platforms long ago left Yahoo in the proverbial dust. Today, as Yahoo streamed its Flickr product and Tumblr acquisition announcements, we were given a demonstration of why Yahoo has… → Read More
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