Launch Pad

Republic is, in founder Ken Nguyen's words: "an investment platform that allows everyone, not just millionaires, every day people, irrespective of your income of net worth, to actually invest in private companies, may it be crypto or equity. It's a relatively new thing. It's only been legal for a little bit less than two years."

This means that you--yes YOU--can go on Republic.co right now and invest as little as $10 and as much as 10% of your income in the startups that Republic has vetted and decided are a good fit for equity crowdfunding. Then if they get rich, you get a piece of the pie. Listen to Karl and Ken talk about the benefits for both investors and companies, the legal and technical difficulties of making it all work--and a bonus primer on "initial coin offerings" or ICOs.

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As an analyst at a big Wall Street bank, Wharton Executive MBA grad Jack Kokko spent a lot of time digging through information, and he vividly remembers the feeling of “fearing that you're missing something critical that's putting a billion dollar deal at risk.”

Other analysts need no longer suffer as Jack did, thanks to Jack himself, CEO and founder of AlphaSense. In Jack’s words, “AlphaSense is an intelligent search engine for knowledge workers in corporations and financial firms. We're doing to business information what Google did for the internet. We're organizing it and making it really fast and easy to find the information you need as a business professional.”

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Karl Ulrich does a great job of summarizing what Kabbage, founded by Kathryn Petralia, does, after several minutes of intense conversation around APRs and credit lines: “I can get a reasonable amount of money in ten minutes, at not-onerous interest rates, with you guys doing the work of filling out the forms based on access to my financial records.”

Here’s how Kathryn puts it: “Kabbage is a data and technology platform, enables real-time lending just to small businesses. We do this both directly in the US, and deployed over $4 billion to 130,000 small businesses in the US, and we also operate internationally, through partnerships with large institutions that licensed our technology to do the same thing abroad. We partner with big banks like Santander, ING, and Deutsche Bank. And our customers are able to, using our automated platform, get through the entire application process for a small business loan in less than ten minutes, and actually in many cases have funds in their accounts.”

Listen to their half hour conversation for a deep dive into small business lending and how Fin Tech—and especially Kabbage—are changing how it happens.

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When it comes to finding patterns in huge quantities of data, computers are way better than the human brain--at least once they're properly trained. (This is the hard part.)

Zebra Medical Vision is training computers "how to detect malignant tissues in breast mammograms, how to detect brain bleed in head CTs, how to detect vertebral fractures in chest and abdomen CTs, and how to detect opacities and congestive heart failure in chest x-rays and many others." Because not only are computers better at this than people--they can handle the huge quantities of data, as we do more and more scans to diagnose disease.

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