#kanyi

If you are about to lose hope due to the economic situation in the country, bookmark this day and say on 10/8/2027 I will carry my head with me as I go to vote for issues not personalities. So help me God!

Download Kanyi Me Nau – Irene Benjamin Mngutyo

Kanyi Me Nau by Irene Benjamin Mngutyo

Irene Benjamin Mngutyo – Kanyi Me Nau (Free Mp3 Download)

Irene Benjamin Mngutyo is out with two amazing singles titled Kanyi Me Nau and You are off her forth coming album. ‘Kanyi Me Nau’ is beautifully rendered and it’s a song that will definitely bless you.

Songs produced by Charles Creation for Creation Studios.

About Irene Benjamin: Irene Benjamin Mngutyo…

Download Kanyi Me Nau – Irene Benjamin Mngutyo

Kanyi Me Nau by Irene Benjamin Mngutyo

Irene Benjamin Mngutyo – Kanyi Me Nau (Free Mp3 Download)

Irene Benjamin Mngutyo is out with two amazing singles titled Kanyi Me Nau and You are off her forth coming album. ‘Kanyi Me Nau’ is beautifully rendered and it’s a song that will definitely bless you.

Songs produced by Charles Creation for Creation Studios.

About Irene Benjamin: Irene Benjamin Mngutyo…

by Kanyi Maqubela Venture Partner at Collaborative Fund

Image Via

Lately, crowdsourcing is almost a dirty word. It wasn't too long ago that crowdsourcing was all the rage, but more recently, online communities have become much more sophisticated. They increasingly want to be participants in the experiences they contribute to online, not just products.

Lyft drivers have self-organized on Facebook, over the airwaves using Voxer, and their voice has great agency in how the corporate team makes business decisions. Peers catalyzes Etsy sellers, AirBnB hosts, and Getaround drivers to lead public policy. Amazing businesses we look up to like Kickstarter, GitHub, and Meetup are member-powered companies today; marketplace decisions made by their management teams consider those members as citizens, rather than simply users, or worse still, as the product itself.

As I've considered marketplaces and peer networks as Internet cities, I've realized that tools to empower the citizenry of these cities is one of the most exciting opportunities and challenges we face today. We have invested in Guild to insure platforms that face underwriting challenges in p2p transactions, in Modria to create infrastructure for dispute resolution on these platforms, and in a few very exciting other projects that we will announce soon.

And here's the exciting part: we're just getting started. If new online communities are Internet cities, we will increasingly see the crowd have formal agency, and even stake, in the platforms where they work. Crowdfunding is only at the tip of its iceberg, and has already affected culture across categories, and will continue to do so. One can imagine where Alphaworks takes their product. The concept of a mutual company, provocatively described by some friends across the internet, will get more air time in the coming years.

There is a path forward where genuine crowd participation in every business will be the norm, rather than an experimental feature. That path is an exciting one, indeed.

by Kanyi Maqubela Venture Partner at Collaborative Fund

Picture Via

There are a number of ways to connect hardware to the internet. Each of them has its pros and cons. Understanding the differences between them is useful for makers, manufacturers, and it will soon be useful to you, too. I'll list them briefly below.

First, there is cellular. You know what this is. This technology is remote, tends to always be on, and requires a high revenue stream to justify the cost of service. The technology requires pinging the nearest cell towers, which send data packets to satellites for global positioning system (GPS) and geolocation, which are obviously fairly expensive functions.

Second, you have mesh networks. The best way to understand a mesh network is that each device on the network has a couple of radios, which tether to the other radios on the network to create a closed connected system. Wireless mesh technology costs have plummeted in the last 10 years, thanks to military technology advancements, so the applications of this technology should increase soon. The problem, however, is that each device on the network needs to be enabled, so it requires fixed, closed systems in order to work well.

Third, you have WiFi. WiFi requires a network access point, like a router, to connect it to an internet network. You can use WiFi to create an ad hoc network between two devices, but if you want to use WiFi to connect to a server, or to the cloud, you need a router connected to ethernet for this to be most useful, so mobility is limited.

Finally, you have Bluetooth. This is similar to a WiFi adhoc connection, allowing you to connect two devices that are a relatively short distance from each other (measured in feet). Lately, Bluetooth low energy, a protocol that uses the same technology but in a low-power mode to protect battery life, has become a popular application of this technology, connecting phones to other devices. This only connects one device to another at a time, and also needs additional hardware to connect to the cloud.

The question you may be wondering: Why has BLE (Bluetooth low energy) gotten so much attention lately, when there are other ways of connecting?

If you look at what BLE offers, it is the most simple for mobile app-based solutions, because it can run in the background, sending data between a phone and another device near it, without much of a power drain. So for home locks, fitness tracking wristbands, or car sound systems, bluetooth is the most effective way to connect the data on a mobile app to an outside device.

But if you want to connect a number of devices at once, want to push data to the cloud, or stay permanently connected to the cloud, you may need one of the other use cases. We have had the opportunity to back a number of companies that are experimenting with ways of connecting all sorts of hardware to the Internet, starting with the Karma WiFi device, which creates a local hotspot for devices within WiFi range by creating a cellular connection. It's a very elegant and smart way to create a hotspot on-the-go.

There are obvious implications for the connected home in security, telephony, networking, and so forth, and we are excited about how these tools can bring the offline world online, or the online world offline, so as to impact communities around the world.

Stay tuned for more on this subject!

by Kanyi Maqubela Venture Partner at Collaborative Fund

Artwork by Hiking Artist

It is instructive, when thinking about venture capital, to consider a venture firm as a two-sided marketplace.

On the one side, the firm is selling its capital to entrepreneurs. It has to demonstrate that the brand, services, and relationships that come along with an investment will have a greater material impact on the business than another firm at a similar (and in some cases worse) price. And so they will build platforms, blog, sit on boards of directors, and serve as formal advisers to startups. At Collaborative Fund, we do all of these things to serve our customers on this side of the marketplaces: the entrepreneurs.

The other-side of the marketplace is very important for entrepreneurs to understand as well. Limited Partnerships are structures where everybody, including the General Partnership, invests in a fund, and the Limited Partners hope that at the end of the fund, they will be returned their capital with some gain.

Many, but not all, limited partnerships consist of institutional investors -- endowments, pension funds, fund of funds, foundations, et cetera. For these institutions, there are a number of asset classes where they invest, and venture capital tends to fall under the "alternative investments" asset class. That is, we are lumped alongside hedge funds and later stage private equity. Alternative investments, for most portfolios, are the highest risk in the portfolio, and so often represent only a small percentage of the total assets the institution has under management -- usually less than 10%, and often less than 5%. As an institutional investor, the hope in this allocation is that the high-risk nature of the category will result in a commensurate high-yield. The most successful venture capital investments, then, are those where the yield was abnormally high - and the risk was abnormally high.

These two sides of the equation should inform each other. Smart institutional investors look for venture capitalists who create a support system for their founders, so that they will drive returns by better serving their portfolio companies. And entrepreneurs should seek venture capital when they are building "high-beta" concepts.

These are concepts that, in the early stages, have a very high risk of failure, but by their nature have the ability to become so big as to transform culture.

Software and internet businesses have served as excellent venture capital investments because the barrier to entry for millions (and today billions) of users is incredibly low. The likelihood for the winners to become truly extraordinary, is astronomically low, but far higher than in any other type of company.

To be honest, entrepreneurs (and venture capitalists), in the spirit of mitigating risk in the very early stages, often aim too low in dreaming up their products, or making investments. While there are many ways to make substantial revenue in the medium term, there are fewer ways to change culture through technology. And it is only the culture-changing products -- the Googles, Oracles, Facebooks -- that will keep this industry in balance the way it is today.** 

VC associates are trained to ask: Can a scaled-up version of this vision change culture? Because those are the companies that drive the necessary returns.

The moral of the story, for both the founders and the venture capitalists, is dream big. Make bets. When Josh Tetrick decided that he could invent a solution to replace all eggs in food with Hampton Creek Foods; when John Zimmer heard his urban studies professor at Cornell describe a transportation future that was truly, completely revolutionary, they were making bets. 

They had no idea if they were crazy, and were likely told along the way that their ideas were unlikely to succeed, but they were compelled by their conviction in wanting to change the culture. 

And as venture capitalists, we ought to do the same in backing entrepreneurs such as these. Most of the best early stage venture investments aren't speculative, small, "risk-adjusted" bets, but significant investments, with real allocations. And most of the best early stage venture investments happen when the investor sees an idea that's "so crazy it might work". 

**It is worth noting that as an asset class, the venture industry doesn't perform better than the public stock market, so there is a question as to whether the industry's balance today does make sense.