With founder and CEO Jeff Bezos at the helm, Amazon forgoes profits, endures slim margins, and relentlessly prioritizes customers.

Just finished another great interview on Growthhacker.tv, this time with Dick Talens. Dick is a co-founder of Fitocracy, which is a mobile social network for people into fitness that helps them achieve their goals by using a combination of community and gamification. Fitocracy has the 2nd best user engagement rates after Facebook out of all social networks. To put it short, the people that use Fitocracy love it. And they?ve got stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger using it. So how did they get there? Well Dick shared some awesome tips.

In 2008, my study partner Hern

2013 was a record year for the Israeli high-tech sector as the value of M&A deals and IPOs reached an eight-year high of $7.6 billion. Although there were several exits in the hundreds of millions of dollars (the average exit was for $170 million, the highest in decades), most of that sum was for a small number of mega-exits in high-tech.

Amazon has a tendency to polarize people. On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that?s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almost 20 years after it was launched, it has yet to report a meaningful profit. This chart captures the contradiction pretty well – massive revenue growth, no profits, or so it would seem. But actually, neither of these lines gives you a good sense of what?s really going on.

Times have changed pretty dramatically since I started my first business in 1999, and I thought for throwback Thursday it would be interesting to share with the young?uns what Series A fundraising looked like back in 1999.

An excellent piece on the ?social operating systems? being put in place by the likes not only of Facebook and Twitter, but by the ?sharing economy? services like Airbnb. ? And, a clearly articulated warning to the developers/perpetrators to consider the impact of their businesses.

Frank Luntz has ?engineered some of the most potent political and corporate campaigns of the last decade.? His wordsmithing helped Republican Rudy Giuliani get elected twice in New York ? a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1.

SAN FRANCISCO ? The GamesBeat 2014 conference came to a close on Tuesday by announcing the winner of its ?Who?s Got Game? Innovation Showdown ? and it was a narrow decision.

We?re incredibly excited to announce that Narrative has received $8M in a funding round that was led by Khosla Ventures and followed by existing investors True Ventures and Passion Capital.