STARTUPS CENTRAL

He slept on a friend’s living-room floor to make it to an industry show. Years later, he can’t walk through that same convention center without people calling his name. Mike Bausch, the founder of Andolini’s Pizza, parlayed a single shop into a wider hospitality enterprise and a distinctive public persona — and he says independent restaurateurs need to rethink how they sell themselves if they want to grow. Bausch’s early trips to Pizza Expo were a soak-in experience: long day

I built a luxury ecommerce business that sells to shoppers in 19 European countries, and one lesson kept repeating: national markets send their own signals about conversion, returns, checkout and regulation, and those signals matter far more than broad “Europe” strategies. Start where acquisition is cheap and the market tells you whether your product truly resonates before you try to win the major economies. Do that and you learn unit economics with less burn and fewer painfu

Kyle Fraser and Kamilla Karthigesu, who formed a close alliance on the CBS reality series, are turning their partnership into a startup. The two announced Tuesday the launch of Paprclip, an app that pairs users to track progress on personal objectives through short video updates and collaborative tasks. The founders have opened a Kickstarter to raise an additional $40,000 to push the product through further development and early distribution. Fraser said his own post-show lif

A partnership between the pared-down Light Phone and Noble Mobile, the carrier launched by entrepreneur Andrew Yang, will put 500 Light Phone III handsets into customers’ hands right away — provided they sign on to a two-year Noble Mobile service plan that costs $50 a month. The arrangement spreads the phone’s cost across 24 monthly payments, totaling $1,200 for the contract, and includes a Light-specific plan that provides 5 gigabytes of data and the chance to earn up to $5