It is December 2020 and a tumultuous year is coming to a close. COVID-19 made 2020 a historic year and forced just about every organization globally to alter or adapt their ways of doing business. The sudden but necessary shift to distributed, remote work has only served to aggravate data privacy concerns and highlighted the need to develop new data privacy guidelines and regulations.

Some of the most important regulatory updates include:

· In its judgement on July 16, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“EJC”) invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield framework with major implications for international…

Arbor portfolio company, Lufax, rang the opening bell at the NYSE when the company went public on Oct 30. While a lone staff member of the NYSE stood at the podium in NY due to pandemic induced safety concerns, at least 15 people, without masks, social distancing or fear, gathered to celebrate halfway around the world in Shanghai.

While most of the western world remain consumed by the coronavirus pandemic and faltering economies, China recorded 4.9% GDP growth in the third quarter this year. According to the IMF, it will be the only economy to experience positive growth this year…

Today, the United States battles a confluence of unprecedented challenges, including Covid 19, as well as natural and manmade disasters, in the form of wildfires, record-setting temperatures, and “superstorms”. At the same time, the U.S. suffers from a culture of degenerating social discourse, intensifying political polarization, and increasing policy confusion. In the past, ingenuity has bailed the U.S. out of crises, but will that be true for the next decade?

Many of the brightest minds globally have been educated in the U.S. and chosen to remain in the U.S., but the option to do so has been revoked in many…

Selling into an enterprise in the best of times requires patience due to the complexity of the sales process. In most established enterprises, there are silos between internal groups, and they can be extreme. The people that understand the benefit of your product, those that are in charge of implementation and those that control the purse strings are all different. On average, an enterprise sale requires buy-in from 3 or 4 groups. You will need buy-in from 2/3 to bring the 4th person along. Until they are all aligned, it is almost impossible to get a contract signed. …

While the world has been embroiled in the containment of COVID-19, China launched two game-changing initiatives at the end of April that not only have massive implications for the Chinese economy and international trade and finance but also the entrepreneurial community. They are the Blockchain Services Network (BSN), providing backbone infrastructure technology on top of a myriad of underlying blockchains, and Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC).

BSN is the manifestation of China’s desire to lead in the next generation IT infrastructure that will power applications like smart cities, financial services and data storage. Touted…

COVID-19 is deeply and profoundly changing the insurance industry, compressing trends that may have taken years to play out into a matter of months. Changing end-user demand, a much more challenging environment for insurers, and the emergence of new technologies are fundamentally upending the underwriting and claims management processes that power traditional insurance. The opportunity is ripe for startups with the vision to reimagine this infrastructure.

The effects of the current health crisis have woken many up to the reality of an uncertain world. Businesses and consumers are becoming aware of a whole range of risks against which they have…

There will be a “new normal” in Enterprise Sales. Products will need to address real pain points and be remotely integrated in days not months. As the entire FinTech infrastructure is digitized, accelerated by COVID-19, these are both opportunities and challenges for innovators. At Arbor, we manage a largely B2B Fintech portfolio and I have been asking all of our CEOs “How are you going to sell to company X if you are at home with kids crying and a dog barking?” My conclusion is that nice-to-have products will struggle as many enterprises will only purchase solutions that solve an…

A recent article by Julia Carpenter on money.com captured my attention. While “hostile sexism” takes many forms that we have come to expect — snide comments, rude jokes, sexual harassment — “benevolent sexism” is a bit more difficult to spot. I have personally experienced and shrugged off sexual bias. I built a career in spite of it; however, I don’t want other women to have to fight against it to succeed.

Over the last 12 months and despite recent events in Silicon Valley, sexual harassment and benevolent sexism are not declining in venture capital. At Arbor, sadly, we have experienced…