Day: July 13, 2020

Robinhood raises another $320 million at an $8.6 billion valuation

wayne July 13, 2020

Investors are adding hundreds of millions more to Robinhood’s coffers as the pandemic ushers in new customers.

On Monday, the stock-trading app announced that it had raised yet another $320 million from new and existing investors, bumping its valuation up to $8.6 billion. New investors include TSG Consumer Partners and IVP.

The fresh funding comes via subsequent closings of a $280 million Series F round led by Sequoia Capital which valued the firm at $8.3 billion in May. At the time, co-CEO Vlad Tenev noted that Robinhood experienced a surge as new investors flocked to the platform amid the market’s coronavirus-induced ups and downs: Robinhood added 3 million funded accounts between the start of the year and early May, he said.

While Robinhood’s team declined to comment on the most recent raise, two months later, the app’s name is perhaps more visible than ever as the pandemic has enabled strange moves in the public markets thanks to retail investors that were once seen as marginal and unlikely to shift the market.

For instance: Shares of Hertz, the car-rental company, soared in June after it filed for Chapter 11 protection in June, a move that many attributed to nonprofessional …

10 Women Entrepreneurs Who Are Shattering the Glass Ceiling

wayne July 13, 2020


8 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.


As an entrepreneur and established businesswoman, I’m often asked if females still have to face the sort of obstacles and hurdles that males do not have to contend with. In other words, is it still a struggle for a woman to succeed in the world of business, an environment that many still consider to be male-dominated?

As is often the case with big questions, the answer is complicated. We’ve made positive progress in recent times when it comes to equality in the workplace. Still, the adversaries and struggles a woman has to contend with, particularly while growing a startup, cannot be underestimated. Having said that, I’m a firm believer in the adage that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. 

An entrepreneur of any gender needs a determined belief in what they’re doing and a cast-iron resolve to get things done if they’re to succeed in a highly competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, the evidence still seems to indicate that if you’re a female, you need that little extra something to break through the proverbial glass ceiling.

Here’s a list of 10 female entrepreneurs, in

…

This bank refuses to pay out lavish banker bonuses, and it’s doing just fine

wayne July 13, 2020

A Swedish bank may be about to change perceptions of how bonuses affect performance.

Dennis Campbell, a Harvard Business School professor, has been studying how companies design compensation strategies. His work led him to the biggest bank in Sweden, Svenska Handelsbanken AB, which he says uses a model that raises serious questions about how well bonuses drive results.

Handelsbanken caught Campbell’s attention about five years ago. Since then, he’s written two case studies on the Stockholm-based lender, and his conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom.

Campbell says staff at Handelsbanken were highly motivated despite the absence of bonuses for all but a tiny group. What struck him was 1) how flat Handelsbanken’s corporate hierarchy is, and 2) how important branch managers are.

“Handelsbanken just stood out as a really interesting example because they have really unusual levels of empowerment,” Campbell said in an interview via Zoom. What’s more, he says the Swedish bank has “had these really unusual performance outcomes that normally don’t go along with that level of decentralization.”

The Bonus Debate

Banker bonuses have become an increasingly thorny subject since the global financial meltdown of 2008. More recently, governments and regulators have put pressure on the industry to …

On the COVID-19 front, the U.S. has had a massive leadership failure

wayne July 13, 2020

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

Good morning.

The notion of a trade-off between opening the economy and protecting public health has always been a false one. But in the U.S., we are now seeing proof of that in spades. Many of the states that rushed to reopen are now reporting exponential growth in new COVID-19 cases–and the inevitable, but lagging, increase in deaths as well. That will either lead them to shut down again, or, more likely, create massive uncertainty that continues to depress travel, bars, restaurants, retail shopping, school reopening, and more. For the economy, that may not lead to a second downturn, but more likely a very slow upturn, as Fortune’s Anne Sraders explains here.

When the history of the pandemic is written, the U.S. rightly will get credit for the unprecedented scope and speed of its economic policy response, but blame for the massive failure of its health care response. One small data point: As of this morning, it’s been nine days since I was tested for COVID, and still no results. (No symptoms either, fortunately.) That undercuts any notion that …