We kick off our podcast series in conversation with Charles Hugh Smith, author of A Radically Beneficial World.

  The tag line for this site is “True Fact: Funding rounds are not revenue”, except in India, where a new tax code law has deemed that funding rounds that take place “at above fair value” are indeed income. The new rule applies to startups that have undergone a down round. If the preceding round was not from a VC firm registered with the Indian securities regulator (in other words it was from an angel...

In a $40 million dollar funding round at a lower share price (a.k.a “a down round”) Glassdoor CEO went on record to say “We view this as a slight up round” (I guess you can add diluting shares to inflate market cap to the alchemical bag of tricks in this wonderful New Economy). Still, with shares down 6.3% in this round, they are still clobbering their publicly traded Unicorn peers such as LinkedIn and Yelp....

They were working on a spinal chord treatment but their clinical trials have failed. Bay area biotech “StemCells” (I was surprised they didn’t “invest” in the .com version of their name) which was publicly traded  will wind down operations. They are hoping to see what can be salvaged for investors and skirt a 100% loss. At their peak: $74 million market cap. Now, not so much. ($6 million) They also raised 32 million in two...

Publicly traded memory maker Violin Memory (VMEM) has posted another quarterly loss in excess of $20M (this is the third or fourth in a row), begging TheRegister to wonder aloud “can they avoid a trainwreck?” Keep in mind, the market cap of the entire company is $36M, which means they are successively putting up quarterly losses worth roughly 2/3 the company’s market cap. This, after 7 funding rounds totalling $187M, their Series D valued them at...