Rip Empson
Rip Empson is a writer, explorer, eager learner and part-time rabble-rouser — whatever that means. He’s worked as a senior associate at Morgenthaler Ventures and Canvas Venture Fund, and before venture capitalizing, Rip spent nearly four years at TechCrunch, the leading technology publication and media dynamo, where he covered startups.
Within the Whacky World Of Startups, Rip focused most of his attention on chronicling the rise of technology and ambush of innovation on health and education.
But between you and me, I hear he’s especially passionate about any and all forms of disrupting — particularly those that are disrupting the disruptable disruptions — and anyone or anything that can quench his insatiable thirst for disrupt-a-lutions.
Rip has been quoted by various people at various times – some of them publications and probably super wicked famous people referencing his work – some of them people mistakenly re-tweeting him thinking he’s Rip Torn.
Is he a budding national treasure? You said it, not him.
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.
Crunchbase profile →Featured Picks from Rip Empson
Latest from Rip Empson
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IAC-Backed Skyllzone Launches A New Fantasy Sports App That Lets You Play “The Machine” In Quick, Byte-Sized Contests
Spurred on by its entry into the digital and mobile age, the fantasy sports world is booming. From the fact that a hilarious and increasingly popular show based on fantasy sports is about to enter its sixth season to Yahoo’s increasing investment in fantasy sports products as part of a new mobile strategy that comes all the way from the top, the signs are everywhere that fantasy sports… Read More
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One Week With Whistle’s New Activity Tracker For Dogs
Considering we humans now have a slew of gadgets, apps and products at our disposal that allow us to track and monitor our health and daily activity, it was only a matter of time before our best friends got one of their own. Last summer, we introduced you to Whistle, a newly-launched startup on a mission to bring Fitbit-style activity trackers to the wagging tails of the canine community. Read More
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Smarterer Lands $1.6M To Bring Its Skill Testing And Assessment Technology To The Enterprise
In an effort to usher in the post-resume era and make the job application process less of a headache, Smarterer developed a platform that provides job searchers with an easy way to show off their skills to employers. Through its crowdsourced, online quizzes, candidates can measure their skills across a range of subjects, from engineering to music, see how they stack up against their peers and… Read More
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Meet Oppia, Google’s New Open Source Project That Allows Anyone To Create An Interactive Learning Experience
Google has become an increasingly active participant in the world of education, particularly when it comes to exploring the role technology can play in re-imagining the way we learn. With Google Play for Education, Android and Play-powered Samsung tablets for the classroom and its work with MOOCs and online courseware, the company is expanding its presence both in traditional academic… Read More
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With Box, Yelp And Palantir On Board, Piazza Lands $8M From Khosla To Bring Recruiting To Its Social Q&A Platform For Students
As free online social tools now play a central role in how we communicate, interact and manage our interpersonal relationships, and as consumerization sweeps through IT and learning, the traditional boundaries between the tools we use to learn, for work and to socialize are becoming increasingly blurry. It’s only natural, then, that students have begun to use many of the same tools… Read More
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Fast-Growing 2U Files For $100M IPO, But Is It Poised To Be The Next Big Education Company?
When 2U emerged in 2008, online education was still struggling to be taken seriously. Despite steadily increasing online enrollment, many remained skeptical. Both fairly and unfairly, online education was seen as a world of simple micro-correspondence courses, limited in quality, incapable of producing outcomes truly commensurate with on-campus education and therefore merely a supplement, not… Read More
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Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups, But Don’t Expect Him To Launch His Own
After a long tenure at the helm of Y Combinator — during which a summer “bootcamp” for undergrads turned into a Silicon Valley institution, pioneering the “seed accelerator” model and inspiring a new league of tech-focused business incubators — Paul Graham announced last week that he will soon be passing the baton to the next generation. Taking the reins… Read More
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Service That Lets You Order Food Naked, GrubLess SeamHub, Quietly Files For IPO
In May of last year, we broke the news that Seamless and GrubHub — two of the largest players in the online and mobile food delivery space and “arch rivals” — were coming together as part of a blockbuster merger. My, how fast they grow up. Not nine months later, the merged food-ordering giant has begun to take the next step in its development. Read More
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An AT&T For Dentistry? Y Combinator-Backed Weave Launches To Bring Modern Telecom To SMBs
Small businesses, by definition, are lean. With a price tag that includes license renewals, maintenance and upgrades to servers and IT support, the costs of adopting enterprise-grade software and services has been prohibitive for most SMBs, posing a potential threat to delicate profit margins. More recently, however, thanks to increasing access to broadband, the proliferation of connected… Read More
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AWS For Life Science? With $4.1M In The Bank, Transcriptic Wants To Reinvent Scientific Research And Bring Labs Into The Cloud
As a biomedical engineering student at Duke, Max Hodak became intimately familiar with the sterile tedium of life in a research lab. Like many others who’ve spent wasted hours of their lives in white coats, he found the fact that most labs still look and operate as they did thirty years ago frustrating. Beyond the fact that many labs are disconnected and aren’t networked… Read More
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With $225M Raised Across 400K+ Campaigns, DonorsChoose Is Using Data To Illuminate Educational Inequity In The U.S.
There’s a lot of debate swirling these days over the best and most effective ways to fix the U.S. education system. With high costs, disappointing outcomes and high drop out rates now rampant across age groups, at the very least, it’s become clear that something needs to be done. Many circles are looking to technology and young tech companies to help fill the gap, improve learning… Read More
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Despite High IPO And Solid First Quarter, Chegg Plummets As Investors Worry Over Long-Term Prospects
In November, eight-year-old education company Chegg debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CHGG.” In the days prior, Chegg had priced its initial public offering at $12.50/share, high above its expected range of $9.50 to $11.50, and raised about $187.5 million in total at a valuation of close to $1.1 billion. One of the first to bring textbook rental… Read More
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TrueVault Launches To Bring Easy HIPAA Compliance To Startups And Health Apps
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: In an effort to jumpstart the U.S. economy amidst the runaway blight of the “Great Recession” and financial crisis beginning in 2008, Congress scrambled to enact and then distribute its unprecedented and controversial $787 billion economic stimulus package. Among other things, the Stimulus Bill acted as a vehicle for another… Read More
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5K Videos And Counting, Curious Lands $15M From GSV To Help Teachers Monetize Bite-Sized Lessons
Thanks to the proliferation of smart devices, cloud-based services and more fluid content creation and distribution systems, technology is fundamentally changing the way we learn. Not only is it easier and cheaper than ever before to find, create and consume learning content, but with better digital video solutions storming into every classroom, learning is actually becoming an enjoyable… Read More
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MyHealthTeams Lands $3.3M To Bring Mobile-Friendly Social Networks To Those Living With Chronic Health Conditions
Today, the CDC estimates that there are more than 130 million Americans currently living with a “chronic disease” — in other words, the many types of long-lasting conditions that “can be controlled but not cured.” With Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, arthritis diabetes and heart conditions among the most common (and costly) examples of chronic conditions… Read More
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With $20M Raised Among Grads, Israeli-American Accelerator UpWest Unveils Its Latest Cohorts Of Top-Notch Transplants
Depending on whom you ask, Silicon Valley and Israel have either had a long and prodigious symbiotic relationship when it comes to technology and technology companies, or Silicon Valley wouldn’t be able to find Israel on a map. Either way, one thing is for sure: Gil Ben-Artzy and Shuly Galili launched UpWest Labs because they saw a need to help Israeli entrepreneurs level the playing… Read More
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Fast-Growing Duolingo Caps Off A Big Year With The Crunchie For “Best Education Startup”
Language learning software has never been particularly “sexy,” nor have its makers managed to produce a bounty of memorable user experiences, for that matter. While it might not be quite ready for the former, Duolingo is fast-becoming the poster child of a new generation of language learning products that are actually enjoyable to use, and able to combine fun with function. In… Read More
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IBM’s Watson Group Makes First Startup Investment In “Social Health Management” Pioneer, Welltok
Remember Watson? Yes, the artificially intelligent, question-answering computer system developed by IBM that trounced two former champions on Jeopardy like they were a couple of kindergartners. That Watson. (He blends right in.) While IBM has since looked expectantly to Watson to become its next cash cow, it appears the brainy computer is still struggling to find regular work. To fix that… Read More
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McGraw-Hill Buys Engrade For ~$50M As It Moves Away From Textbooks, Towards A Future Of SaaS
This week, Engrade put the finishing touches on an emblematic story in the world of education startups. In 2003, high school student Bri Holt decided he’d heard enough griping from classmates (and teachers) over the lack of a quick, easy way to view their grades online. So, like any budding web developer, he decided to build that simple, online gradebook for his high school. While… Read More
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LinkedIn Snatches Up Data Savvy Job Search Startup Bright.com For $120M, In Its Largest Acquisition To Date
Today, alongside a fourth quarter earnings report in which it beat Wall Street estimates yet again, LinkedIn announced its intentions to acquire data-savvy job search startup, Bright.com, for $120 million. The deal, which was 70 percent stock and 30 percent cash the company said, will be completed during the first quarter of this year. In a statement today, LinkedIn said that… Read More
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