Stripe, Twillio, etc. provide access to commodities.
The "API as a marketplace" concept postulates that there are situations in which the supply is differentiated and you care about with which supplier you get connected.
Unlike restaurant delivery, grocery delivery services are right now operating mostly on non-exclusive contracts with the upstream chains (because the chains are big and have a lot of negotiating power; and because the chains have a real need to partner with different delivery services in different markets, because no delivery service exists everywhere the chains are yet.) There's no real market for delivery from mom-n-pop produce markets, and so there's nobody for grocery delivery services to bully into accepting an exclusive contract with them.
If you can get the same groceries from the same store no matter which portal you order through, then the portal itself is a commodity.
On the Postmates App, yes, you definitely care about where you're getting your food. The marketplace here is between eater (buyer) and restaurant (supplier).
However, if you are a business that wants to offer delivery directly and don't want to create your own delivery network, you would use Postmates API. In this case, the business (buyer) doesn't care about each individual supplier (i.e. the fleet is a commodity).
As we mention in the intro to the guide, we don't address product-market-fit questions in the handbook (or other things you need to figure out in the earliest stages of your company creation) - we are really focused on the time between seed and Series B and hiring is a key aspect of that phase.
One of the things that people objecting to the US adopting healthcare policies that are successful in the rest of the developed world often cite is the desire to keep the US from being as regulated as other developed countries in healthcare.
The idea that the US is more regulated than "the rest of the world" in healthcare seems only to be generally held if you exclude the rest of the developed world from consideration; Third World healthcare may be more ripe for disruption, but disruptive business seem to not target places where there is merely low barrier to disruption, but also places where there is money to be made by disruption.
My (anecdotal) experience is that the success rate of female founders to convert a pitch to funding is significantly higher - might be due to the fact that only the most talented female founders have currently the courage to think about starting a company.
Why do you think that? Compare it to the type of customers you attract at different stage of building a product: your first customers are always the most passionate, most valuable customers. As you broaden the customer base, you attract people that are way less into your product. Female founders are still a very small group, only the most passionate, most courageous, most talented ones are currently considering becoming entrepreneurs. Once being a female founder is the new normal, pitch to funding rates between males and females will be much closer again. Having said all that, this is just a theory based on anecdotal experience.
That would only be potentially true if more males in this industry are pitching as a percentage than females. I have not seen anything to suggest that this is the case.
I might be biased as I run a venture fund myself (Version One Ventures) but I think there are a handful excellent investors up here in Canada, most of which invest across North-America. Here is a good overview: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/state-of-venture-capital-in-ca...
