May 2012
21 posts
“The network is rapidly displacing the hierarchy and with it the virtual...”
– Brad
WatchIt was a big week for social networks.
But the term itself seems to have lost some of it’s impact. Over time we’ve come to associate social networks with Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Sorkin and blue pixelated Fonzy thumbs.
This afternoon, at our Foo Health event in Boston, Nicholas Christakis broke me out of that metaphorical mental rut with a session on the role and impact our social...
“What are the consequences to trying? I could f up really bad and lose my savings...”
– KAWS
“We can’t keep designing as we used to if we want people to engage with our...”
– Zeldman
FDIC for Startups
When the banks started melting down in the midst of the 2008 financial crisises, suddenly a little sticker that had been placed at their front doors and teller windows took on new meaning. The sticker contained four letters: FDIC
The FDIC was established in 1934 to protect the customers of its member banks against loss should the bank fail or become insolvent. Next to the four letters on the...
The Hamster Wheel
When VCs get together conversation often tends towards what we’re working on, what companies we’re excited about and swapping lessons learned from building our own companies that help build companies. As the headlines suggest, the pace of activity in our little corner of the world has been accelerating at a pace that many are struggling to keep up with. The metaphor one friend recently...
“The success rate of a first-time venture-backed entrepreneur is about 18%. If...”
– Joe
A Hippocratic Oath For Software Engineers?
Think, for a moment, about the time it takes from when you wake to when you have a screen in your face?
If you’re anything like me that, time has dropped from hours, to minutes to seconds in the last few years. And tho we, as a startup community, celebrate apps as addictive the effects of these addictions are beginning to mark indelible train tracks across the soft tissues of our...
When someone says the word 'pivot', I'm like
runningastartup:
Swear I had nothing to do with this.
“VCs are just sacks of meat with the same cognitive biases as everyone else. They...”
– Who you callin’ rational?
“We used to rely on the public making dumb investing decisions,” one well-known...”
– With greater-fools-as-a-service, things start getting interesting.
via slavin
The Ballerinas of Silicon Valley
Sorry Eric, but I hate the word pivot.
Somehow, over the last year or so Pivot has managed some literary slight of hand in which it has transformed (pivoted?) itself from a verb to a noun. Crossed over from a series of actions taken out of necessity in achieving an objective to becoming the objective itself. From founders to investors there seems to be a carelessness in the air with Pivot being...
“Over the history of the institutional VC business (the past 40 years) the number...”
– Fred
April 2012
33 posts
Grub With Me in NYC
I still get notified when people follow me on Twitter. I find it interesting to see who everyone is, where they’re from and what they do. Unfortunately, I can’t follow everyone back, but I’m always curious who these people are who follow along with me across Twitter, Tumblr and the web at large.
I know many of you have fascinating stories to tell and experiences to share. And I...
“Data saved my life.”
– Stories from a life quantified.
“And there will be failures. Andrew, there will be times during practice when you...”
– Nate Jackson’s letter to this year’s top NFL draft picks.
“We are living in an everyone-is-special-and-there-are-no-losers society. As a...”
– Worth a read.
“I don’t think crowdfunding is good for startups. For startups, having...”
– PG
A Mountain Climber Who Plays an Electric Guitar
I came into the venture business in 2001.
What I saw in those first years I could only liken to being in an emergency room at 3 AM on a Saturday night. It was chaos. Money was drying up, companies were hemorrhaging cash, and VCs were in full time triage mode. VCs looked and acted very differently back then. Many were bankers, or consultants or big company executives who couldn’t really...
“I don’t really think I spot the future; I spot the things in the present...”
– Tim
The OATV investment thesis in a nutshell.
Rationalizing the Irrational
Lots of public discourse in startupland these days about some irrationally sky high valuations being paid for relatively young companies. Is Quora really worth $400M? Is Pinterest really worth $1B? In general I avoid this type of chatter, but there’s a different conversation going on in private that I think is more interesting and worth highlighting.
Whether these companies are really worth...
“You want to know what’s weird? Spending hundreds of dollars on clothes and...”
– Joe Peacock
“Our world is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and...”
– Joi
“If you try something very ambitious and fail, you’ll learn a lot, grow a great...”
– Peter Thiel
Code for America Wants You!
I wrote a piece a while back bemoaning the state of government IT spending and shining a light on the absurd amount of waste baked into system that relies on an archaic procurement process which elevates a chosen few vendors to a cartel level of status. This strangle hold is one of the many choke points for waste that is killing our country. Much of this waste is perpetuated by people...
“One could argue that Amazon.com has had more impact on the startup community...”
– and one would be correct.
Sins of Omission
The more I work with startups, the more I’m convinced that they rarely die from the things they do; rather, they die from the things they know they should, but don’t.
Doing the wrong stuff is fixable. If your action isn’t getting the results you want you can always tweak it, or stop doing it altogether.
But, not doing never did anything. And not doing is the most deadly of...
Giving Location A Place
It’s Foursquare day in NYC and in many other cities around the world. In celebration the company is trotting out some new user numbers and usage metrics. As of today, there are 20 million Foursquare users who’ve checked in 2 billion times. And both of those numbers are accelerating.
There’s a lot to say about a service we’ve watched grow from 30,000 members at the time we...
WatchIt wasn’t long ago that the billion dollar Instagram boys set out to debunk 8 startup myths to a room full of Stanford Mayfield fellows. At the time of this video, the service had about 4 million users. Earlier this week they announced having added that many users in just a matter of days. My how time flies.
But the advice and insights shared here are really timeless. From the “bar...
“Facebook is a corporation with a database in which they would like to record...”
– Webb
Visiting The Island of Misfit Toys
In that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer movie of my youth, there was a place where imperfect or unwanted playthings were sent called the Island of Misfit Toys. These were toys that the average kid wouldn’t fall deeply in love with right out of the box. They weren’t fit for placement under the tree on Christmas morning, so they were exiled to this distant island where they...
“Price is a fundamental element that drives our returns, albeit not the only one...”
– Josh Hannah
“Every company has a social media strategy whether they know it or not. You can...”
– Rushkoff
WatchMy alarm goes off every morning at 5am.
I’m usually out the door and on my way to the train station by 6am. I do this for one primary reason- I want to get home for dinner with my kids. It’s a conscious decision to give up breakfast with them, but with my schedule, being present for both just isn’t an option.
Throughout the course of my career I’ve seen many friends and...
Be Careful What You Wish For...
…because someone might actually build it.
For years I told anyone that would listen how much I wanted an app that let me snap a picture of my meal and would tell me how many calories were on the plate. Seemed pretty simple to build and, with M-turk, pretty simple to do the calculation.
So when Meal Snap was announced last year, I was thrilled.
I quickly paid my $2.99 and downloaded the...