Technology

From the earliest moments of boot camp, budding soldiers learn about entrepreneurship. They learn how to operate in unknown terrain, how to listen to signals and, perhaps most importantly, how to make things happen with extremely limited time and resources.

Yet, when soldiers return home following a deployment, the transition to civilian life can be jarring. Even with those valuable soft skills, there aren&t many obvious jobs in the private sector for a combat engineer or a fire support specialist. Perhaps even more challenging, according to Josh Carter, is their lack of connections. &The biggest thing that veterans are facing is network — they don&t have a big network,& he said.

Carter is working to change that situation through Patriot Boot Camp, a series of programs under the Techstars banner that gives veterans the tools and connections they need in order to launch a startup. The nonprofit, which was founded by Taylor McLemore, Congressman Jared Polis and Techstars founder David Cohen, hosts multi-day &boot camps& in cities across the country that are designed to quickly immerse participants into the life and thinking of startups. Since its founding in 2012, the program has held nine boot camps in cities like San Antonio, DC and Austin, with its next program in Denver later this year.

Carterown experience making the transition from the navy to the private sector is telling. He joined the service when he was 17 in the mid-90s, and over the following three years, traveled to 30 countries. The experience matured him, he explained, and on his return, he joined the telecom industry, starting his career climbing poles and eventually joining Twilio as an escalation manager and early employee. Twilio changed Carterlife, encouraging him to pursue startups as his own career. &During that time I really got the bug to create something,& he said.

He tried to build his own startup called Brightwork, which was a developer microservices API founded in 2015. The company went through Techstars Chicago, and Carter was hoping to build the kind of company he had seen at Twilio. But growth challenges early on proved insurmountable. &We were really struggling to figure out our target market and struggling to find investors, so it just sort of died,& he told me.

During this period, Carter had been participating in Patriot Boot Campprograms, and liked what he saw. Following the dissolution of Brightwork, he eventually joined the program as an executive, first as chief operating officer last November, and then as interim CEO earlier this year when his predecessor, Charlotte Creech, stepped down to join USAA.

Carter has big ambitions for the program. While today the boot camp has been focused on one-two multi-day events per year, he wants to build the program into a full-fledged growth accelerator that would target startups in addition to budding entrepreneurs. He also hopes to increase the number of boot camps per year to three. Healso investigating raising a fund, now that there is a cohort of more than 750 entrepreneurs who have gone through the program. Ultimately, his goal is to &build better founders& and give them the resources they need for victory.

One aspect of the program that I found interesting is that it isn&t just limited to veterans, but includes military spouses as well. Networks are incredibly important for founders, and Carter points out that spouses have &this special tenacity about them& and need to know &how to build a network quickly in a town where she knows nobody.& They often face just as much challenge in returning to life outside the base as the veteran themselves, and startups could prove to be an important avenue to make that transition.

As its numbers and successes swell, Patriot Boot Camp hopes that it can serve as a beacon for soldiers returning home, telling them that startups aren&t the sort of crazy risk that they first appear. Indeed, after what many of these men and women have just been through, it may not be all that daunting of a next mission after all.

You&re either a Chrome bag person or you&re not. And if you&re not a Chrome bag person, it might be time to give the newly Portland-based bag maker another look.

I&ve been a fan of Chrome Industries bags for a long time, but over the years I&ve only owned two: the discontinued Mini Buran, a 15L, extra-small messenger by Chrome standards, and the Niko camera pack. I still use the latter periodically but I traded the messenger away early on because, in spite of being Chromesmallest pack and the only one that didn&t look cartoonishly big on my 5′ 4″ frame, I could never get the weight quite right. There are two reasons for that: 1) Chrome bags are huge and designed for huge hulking men and 2) I&m just not a messenger bag person.

Taylor Hatmaker/TechCrunch

Chromelineup of industrial-strength messenger bags has typically appealed to hardcore bike types and dudes big enough to hoist its famously burly packs, but the company is branching out with a few new offerings that should excite anyone like me who covets their designs and build quality but just can&t make most of their stuff work.

The Chrome Vega Transit Brief, part of Chromenew work-centric Treadwell collection, is one of those new bags. The Vega is made to appeal to professional types who maybe need to keep their look away from the &I&m a bike messenger who lives in a punk house& kind of vibe, but itstill made of the pretty much indestructibleballistic nylon that gives Chrome bags their iconic look and feel.

At first glance, the Vega looks like any generic laptop messenger, but unlike those (boring) you can carry the Vega three different ways. The first mode lets you carry the Vega briefcase-style, with a leather hand strap. The second mode converts the bag into a messenger with a detachable strap. The third mode (my favorite) happens when you pop out two hideaway straps from the back of the bag, turn it 90 degrees and carry the Vega like a backpack. For my purposes, I switched between hand-carrying the bag and putting it on my back to carry a 13″ MacBook and other odds and ends.

Photo via Chrome Industries

At just 15L, Vega is meant to carry small, rectangular stuff — you won&t be throwing groceries on the way home from work in this thing. Itgot two main zippered compartments, one soft padded laptop sleeve that can fit a 15″ MacBook and one all-purpose-stuff pocket lined with its own sleeve and two internal zip pockets that are actually big enough to be super useful for a phone or a wallet and keys. Therea teeny external pocket that can also hold a phone or something small, but that one is tougher to get into so I mostly didn&t use it.

Taylor Hatmaker/TechCrunch

Taylor Hatmaker/TechCrunch

I mentioned it already, but itworth repeating that the Vega is very, very rectangular. Its primary compartment would be best suited to hold stuff like an iPad, a book or paper documents, but if you have anything with much depth itnot going to be well-suited to this pack. Another thing worth noting is that the Vega looks like a big ol& rectangle when itcarried like a backpack. You&ll either like that look and think itkinda distinct and cool like I did or you&ll hate it. One criticism: The leather strap that lets you carry the Vega by its handle doesn&t stow, so it just sort of hangs there when you wear it like a backpack. Itnot super noticeable, but it bugged me a little because the snaps were tricky to open and close — a little flaw I imagine they might modify if they ever update this design.

The Vega isn&t Chromemost inspired design ever, but it isn&t supposed to be. If you want to show up to a meeting looking pro but still cool, like yeah you looked over the slides from the call but you drink shitty beer after work because you&re legit not because you can&t afford some triple-hopped bullshit, the Vega is probably for you.For anyone looking for a well-made bag thatnot too loud to carry to and from work meetings that happens to turn into a damn backpack, ChromeVega Transit Brief is a great fit.

Taylor Hatmaker/TechCrunch

What it is: A bag that looks discreet and professional while keeping work basics close (laptop, papers and the like). Great as a no-frills carry-on bag for travel or a to-the-office-and-back kind of bag.

What it isn&t: A workhorse. With its 15L volume, you&re not going to be hauling big loads around or taking produce home from the co-op with this thing.

Read more reviews from TechCrunch Bag Week 2018 here.

I first wrote about SmartAsset nearly six years ago, when it launched its first product, a tool allowing prospective homebuyers to analyze the rent vs. buy decision and to see what kind of home they could actually afford.

According to co-founder and CEO Michael Carvin, &On the consumer side, our strategy has never really changed. Our mission is to help people make the best personal finance decisions and to build the webbest resource for personal finance decision-making.&

Of course, some aspects of the company have evolved. For one thing, SmartAsset now offers tools, calculators and content in a number of categories, including taxes, retirement and banking.

For another, itannouncing today that it has raised $28 million in Series C funding, bringing its total raised to more than $51 million. The new round comes from Focus Financial Partners (a firm backed by Stone Point Capital and KKR), Javelin Venture Partners, TTV Capital, IA Capital, Contour Venture Partners, Citi Ventures, Fabrice Grinda and others.

Carvin said SmartAsset reached more than 45 million uniques last month, nearly doubling its traffic year-over-year. And 25 percent of that traffic comes from repeat visitors.

As for how SmartAsset makes money from those visitors, it does so partly by promoting financial products like mortgages. But Carvin said the biggest piece is the SmartAdvisor platform, which connects financial advisors with potential investors.

Carvin described it as &the webfirst digital lead generation platform for financial advisors,& and comparedthe SmartAsset business model to Zillow&s, saying both companies have built big audiences that they can then match up with real estate or finance professionals.

In SmartAssetcase, users fill out a questionaire and then work with a SmartAsset concierge to help them find an advisor whoa good fit. Carvin added that the advisors on the platform have been screened by the company, for example to ensure that they haven&t had any criminal violations and that SEC hasn&t upheld any complaints against them for the past decade.

Asked whether this focus on financial advisors has led SmartAsset to change the way it designs its consumer products Carvin said,&We believe the better the user experience, the better our business will work. And so when we&re building a retirement tool, a home affordability tool, a tax tool, we&re building that only with the consumer interest in mind.&

Looking ahead, Carvin said he plans to continue following this strategy.

&We&re going to build out the webpremiere personal finance resources and then leverage that on advisor side,& he said.