Hailo announced it raised a new $30 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures. Here's what that means.

As taxi-hailing-app maker Hailo attempts to tackle the crucial New York City market, it has investor Fred Wilson on its side.

The London start-up announced Tuesday that it finalized a December deal that raised $30.6 million led by Wilson's Union Square Ventures (think: Twitter, Tumblr, Kickstarter). British mogul Richard Branson and Japanese telecommunications company KDDI also chipped in for the round.

Wilson seems to have had his eye on Hailo for a while; last year Jay Bregman, the company's CEO and co-founder casually told me that Wilson had described Hailo as "Foursquare for taxis."

Reached on the phone Tuesday, Bregman laughed when I referenced that phrase. He explained that he'd met with Union Square Ventures twice in December. In the course of pitching his company, and explaining how it differs from other ride-hailing companies in the aggressive and growing space, Bregman said Wilson stopped him, by saying, "I got it, I got it," followed by that line: "It's Foursquare for taxis."

With this latest round of funding from Wilson, Hailo has raised almost exactly the same amount as fast-growing ride-hailing company Uber. Both have about $50 million total invested. But the new round reportedly values Hailo at roughly $140 million--half what Uber was valued at when it closed its last round a year ago. (Hailo operates its taxi-hailing technology in nine cities; Uber offers its taxi-hailing service in five, and its sedan-hailing in more than two dozen.)

Founded in 2010 by a group of four friends in London, Hailo has thrived there. It's reportedly used by more than 10,000 drivers and its app has been downloaded by 225,000 potential passengers. The company raised a series A round of financing last year from Accel Partners (backers of Facebook and Dropbox), Wellington Partners, and Atomico (a fund created by the Skype founders).

Bregman's first dive into entrepreneurship was in London, after he finished graduate school. He founded a logistics company and delivery-business called eCourier, which is recognizable due to its big purple vans.

"We developed some scheduling algorithms to boost the efficiency of the deliveries, and learned a lot of hard lessons about how to create an on-demand transportation marketplace," Bregman says.

But Bregman was born in New York--and couldn't be happier to be home. He's been working for months now out of Hailo's shared office space at WeWork in the Meatpacking District, and planning for the New York City launch of Hailo, slated for the middle of this month.

Uber is likely to start its taxi-hailing service about the same time. Both are part of a year-long pilot program established by New York City's taxi commission to allow digital dispatch of taxicabs. GetTaxi and Flywheel (the start-up formerly known as Cabulous) are other contenders that also provide technology to let passengers locate, secure, and pay for taxicab rides from smartphones.

Wilson noted on his blog that Hailo released data Tuesday, including the fact it has 5,000 cab drivers already signed up in New York.

In cities where cab fares are relatively expensive (say, Dublin and London), Hailo takes a percentage cut--usually roughly 10 percent--of the already-high fare. Here in the United States, however, Hailo plans to simply charge a "Hailo fee."

"It's like tipping the doorman at the hotel," Bregman says. "You know what you're going to pay when you open the app."

Bregman says he considers Hailo more of a benefit to taxicab drivers than to passengers. It's not only a payment platform and fare-finder for drivers, but also gives them maps--and a sort of social-network of other drivers, letting them share tips about locations in real-time.

You know, like Foursquare.

“Practical Steps for Completing Your Master’s Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation”

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (PROMISE Dissertation Coach, The Dissertation House)

Saturday, February 23, 2013

10AM -12 Noon

UMBC Campus, Public Policy Building, Room 206

Directions: http://promisesuccessseminars.wordpress.com/directions-to-campuses/

RSVP: UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here:http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16380

Students from other campuses are asked to RSVP as a comment for this post.

Join the blog for The Dissertation House today! http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/blog-online-challenge/winter-2013-challenge/.  Any student from any school may join.

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Learn more about activities for the PROMISE AGEP!

Related articles

• Feb. 23, 2013 Special Saturday Success Seminars: Thesis/Dissertation Completion & “Radio Research” (promiseagep.wordpress.com)
• The January 2013 Online Writing Challenges Begin NOW! (Dissertation, Thesis, Publications!) (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com) We invite you to join in February!

“Practical Steps for Completing Your Master’s Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation”

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (PROMISE Dissertation Coach, The Dissertation House)

Saturday, February 23, 2013

10AM -12 Noon

UMBC Campus, Public Policy Building, Room 206

Directions: http://promisesuccessseminars.wordpress.com/directions-to-campuses/

RSVP: UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here:http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16380

Students from other campuses are asked to RSVP as a comment for this post.

Join the blog for The Dissertation House today! http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/blog-online-challenge/winter-2013-challenge/.  Any student from any school may join.

————————————————–

Learn more about activities for the PROMISE AGEP!

Related articles

• Feb. 23, 2013 Special Saturday Success Seminars: Thesis/Dissertation Completion & “Radio Research” (promiseagep.wordpress.com)
• The January 2013 Online Writing Challenges Begin NOW! (Dissertation, Thesis, Publications!) (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com) We invite you to join in February!

Want to gain confidence, wisdom, and leadership skills in record time? Go to work for a floundering company.

If you've never worked for a floundering company, you don't know what you're missing.

I'm serious. Nothing will prepare you better to lead. And nothing will prepare you better for life.

I've worked for a number of companies that, at one time or another, found themselves on the ropes and, you know what? I learned more about business, management, and leadership trying to help those companies fight it out with giants like Microsoft and Intel than all the rest of my experience combined.

The truth is that working for troubled companies brings out the best in people. It creates strong, resilient, adaptive leaders. Here's what you'll learn by working for companies that have to slug it out with market leaders while on a shoestring budget:

How to drink from the fire hose without drowning. When you're understaffed, underfunded, and losing money every quarter, nobody's going to wait around for you to figure things out. Your customers have better things to do. So do your competitors. These days, markets are constantly changing. Everything moves at lightening speed. There's always too much information and never enough time to breathe. Better get used to it.

You can find your home. If there's a test for knowing if you're in the right place, it's when the company you work for is in deep trouble and everyone's got to sacrifice, pitch in, and fight. If you still love getting up in the morning and going to work under those conditions, then you've found your home.

You know what great leadership really is. Chief executives don't usually get fired when things are going well. They get canned when times are hard and the board figures out what they're really made of--and it falls short of their expectations. When business is floundering, that's when the rubber meets the road. That's when you can really tell if the company's leadership has what it takes: the guts, the smarts, and most of all, the resilience.

The miracle of market segmentation. One of the most powerful techniques in marketing is called market segmentation. We can't all be market leaders, but we can all find unique market segments and focus on leading those. It's all about positioning your product in a niche you can dominate, and then growing from there.

How to win no-win situations. When you're outmanned and outgunned, you always end up having to troubleshoot seemingly impossible problems. When you're pushed so hard that your back is up against a wall, that's exactly when you'll rise to the occasion and do your best work. That's right: necessity really is the mother of invention.

Guerilla warfare. Let's face it: You don't learn how to be scrappy, how to be crafty, how to do more with less, while working for the industry leader. You learn all that by working for an upstart that has to scrape and claw for every point of market share and every product feature with a fraction of the resources that the big guys have.

How tough and adaptive you really are. More than anything else, working for a company in trouble teaches you about yourself. You learn what you're really made of. What you're capable of doing when everything's on the line and everyone's counting on you. That's why troubled companies really are gold mines. They're opportunities for you to step up to the plate and take risks.

You'll gain confidence from your successes and wisdom from your failures. Most of all, you'll grow into whatever it is you're capable of becoming.