 sell your company, go public or take on additional investors and how that would impact the shareholders who currently own shares in your company or have an award.
Finally, it communicates to the investors and the employees exactly what they own or have been granted. What are their holdings in the company? What is the value of those holdings? What documents did they sign? It also gives them an opportunity to do some modeling if the company were to sell at a certain share price and what that mean for them individually. It’s an important tracking, communication and motivational tool.
We are owned by AST, one of the largest public company ownership management and transfer agent firms in North America. We’re very lucky that we haven’t had to bootstrap, and we aren’t dependent upon external investors for our growth. Therefore, we can focus 100 percent of our time on developing our products and serving our clients. It also means that when companies go public, our parent company can continue to support the client through the next stage of the company.
I think it’s really important for people to understand when they start their own companies, what they own and what will happen if they accept investments from professional investors like venture capital, private equity, angel investors or even incubators. It’s imperative to know what that means for the ownership you believe you have in your company. I talk about the modeling so much because it’s important to look at that before you make important, sometimes life-altering decisions in terms of your potential wealth. Employees should understand what they have been granted because many of them have taken a lower salary in order to join your company and they understand their stake in the company and future growth potential.
We support private companies anywhere the world, regardless of size and in a few different formats. We can support both venture backed, as well as private equity owned companies. You can be either a C Corp for U.S. purposes or an LLC. It doesn’t matter for us, we work with new, very small companies. We go up decacorn (a company valued over $10 billion) companies that are ready to go public and worth billions of dollars.
If you’re a small company and you have less than 10 stakeholders in your company (a stakeholder is an employee or a shareholder), Astrella is available for free. We want to encourage you to use Astrella from the day you start your company. Enter the ownership right away, so that as you grow your ownership information is correct. Once you exceed your eleventh stakeholder, there is a monthly charge dependent upon the advanced features you need. If you are a larger company, you’re probably going to need our more sophisticated modeling and financial reporting features; obviously the pricing is different. For larger companies, we charge on an annual basis.
We recently managed a very large decacorn, we helped them ensure that they had all the data needed to go public and their records were correct. Upon IPO, they had to implement a complicated stock split and offer a secondary sale to 500+ shareholders. With Astrella, this was done quickly and accurately before we transferred the records to the AST Transfer Agent group, who supported the company post-IPO.
I would like to make it easier for people to participate in the private market. So, investors can easily understand the opportunities and risks before they invest. I would like to see investment funds that allow people to diversify and put some of their retirement savings into private market company funds without the need to be accredited investors and invest in specific companies. I would also like to see those companies who provide buy and sell opportunities for people to invest in private companies, make it easier for individuals to participate. For example, lowering the minimums required to allow retail investors to participate. You wouldn’t need to be a venture capitalist, know the right people or live in the right place to invest in the private market.
Most CEOs of large global banks understand that the private market is here to stay. They are all trying to understand their strategy in terms of supporting their current clients in this asset class. I want to encourage banks to continue to devote resources and attention to supporting not only the asset classes that are in the public sector, but also those that are in the private sector. They have the financial fortitude to be able to create solutions, like mutual funds or other types of instruments, that allow their clients to participate in private company investments.
What phone are you carrying and why? And what are your go-to ‘fintech’ mobile apps?
I have two Apple iPhones, one professional and one personal. I use many fintech mobile apps, like my banking app, my credit card app and my investment firm apps. I don’t think I have a favorite, but I like to go in and see what my investments are worth. Some of the brokerage firms have great apps and others still need to do some work to make it easier to use! I also like the ones that the 401k or the IRA providers supply. They allow me to very quick check-in to see how things are going with my investments.
I generally start at a macro level with CNN or the Wall St. Journal, then move locally to SFGate.com and Business Insider. At some point during the day, I look at Crunchbase, PitchBook News and Venture Capital Journal Daily. I read many industry newsletters and links my colleagues send me.
You should be following Astrella (@AstrellaHQ), of course and Emily Chang from Bloomberg (@emilychangtv). I also personally like to follow Kara Swisher (@karaswisher).
I am biased, but I truly believe Astrella is the best new fintech product. The work we are doing is changing the private market.
Money movement is a big focus these days. At Astrella, we are the only provider of stock option exercising that allows you to do “real time” private company exercises of stock options that deposit funds automatically into the employers’ bank account. Our competitors still use ACH or accept paper checks and co-mingle employees’ funds, which we believe is an archaic way of supporting the exercise of stock options.
Blockchain is going to become more accepted and use cases will become more prevalent. It’s not only for managing cryptocurrency. People are going to understand the power and why blockchain is so important to manage records in the fintech industry.
Finally, I think we will see regulatory changes in the banking sector that are going to make it much easier for people to move money and to make purchases, including securities, with a simple touch of an app. We’ve seen that with the advancement of firms like Robinhood, E-Trade and others, that will continue to grow and it’s going to be easier and cheaper to invest in the future.
Dictitious is a wild game of made-up words and made-up definitions! Let’s say you get the word Farticulate. What do you think that could mean? Everyone makes something up, and then you all vote on the best definition! There’s no right or wrong answers here, only funny ones! Like the box says, This ain’t your mama’s vocab!
When the first player runs out of tokens, stop the hilarity! Everyone else should count their tokens and the player with the most wins! Woo-hoo!
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from scrapy import Spider
from scrapy.http import Request


class ProjectSpider(Spider):
	name = "project"
	allowed_domains = ["books.toscrape.com"]
	start_urls = ['http://books.toscrape.com/']

	infoBooks = []

	def parse(self, response):
		#Get all links Books
		linksBooks = response.xpath('//*[@class="product_pod"]/h3/a/@href').extract()
		for linkBook in linksBooks:
			finalLink = response.urljoin(linkBook)
			yield Request(finalLink, self.bookInfos)			
		nextLink = response.xpath('//*[@class="next"]/a/@href').extract_first()
		nextUrl = response.urljoin(nextLink)
		yield Request(nextUrl)		


	def bookInfos(self, response):
		titleBook = response.xpath("//h1/text()").extract_first()
		categoryBook = response.xpath('//*[@class="breadcrumb"]/li[3]/a/text()').extract_first()
		availability = response.xpath('//*[@class="col-sm-6 product_main"]/*[@class="instock availability"]').extract_first()
		if availability == []:
			availabilityBook = "No"
		else:
			availabilityBook = "Yes"

		priceBook = response.xpath('//*[@class="table table-striped"]/tr[4]/td[1]/text()').extract_first()

		contentRating = response.xpath('//*[@class="col-sm-6 product_main"]/p[3]/@class').extract_first().split(" ")
		ratingBook = contentRating[1]

		srcImg = response.xpath('//*[@id="product_gallery"]/*[@class="thumbnail"]/*[@class="carousel-inner"]/*[@class="item active"]/img/@src').extract_first()
		imageBook = srcImg.replace("../../", self.start_urls[0])


		descriptionBook = response.xpath('//*[@class="product_page"]/p/text()