January 2010
32 posts
Did Steve Jobs Drink Steve Blank's Milkshake or...
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on planes this week and as a result have had a chance to catch up on a few books that I’ve been meaning to read. In my stack for this trip (yes, stack, I actually carry real books in a real bag) was one I’ve been hearing great reviews and implementations of called 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank. Admittedly, its a fairly dry read so...
Tripit
Love to see love for our portfolio co’s on Tumblr. I’m with you Daryn- don’t know how I lived without it. And, its just going to keep getting better, so stay tuned…
daryn:
I first heard of Tripit when they launched a couple years back, but though people raved about it, I didn’t really see the need. I had my own system for tagging all of the emails related to a trip in my...
WatchI have Steve’s book tee’d up for a long day of travelling tomorrow. I look forward to digging in a bit deeper on his themes and thinking.
robgo:
Great summary of evolution of Steve Blank’s work and where it’s going.
“The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look...”
– The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak (via mikehudack)
Its not the size of your market, its what you do...
One of the most pedestrain of questions that arise in many VC meetings is that of market size. How big is your market? Really. I’ve found that should this question arise more than once over a series of meetings, you’re better off looking elsewhere for funding than the blue shirt and khaki MBA staring at you pointedly from across the table.
If history is a guide you will not be able to...
“Entrepreneurs and developers don’t have to move to Silicon Valley to chase...”
– Fred Wilson
“If you are here, your network will be using all of the latest tools – Twitter,...”
– From a post titled “Why You Need to be in Silicon Valley”.
In general I hate posts like this. I don’t live in SIlicon Valley, but I do spend quite a bit of time there. I want to believe that twitter streams and blog comments allow anyone, anywhere to follow and make connections...
“Yelp has a million users of their app. With the Foursquare user base north of...”
– YelpSquare | Jon Steinberg
Rafer sez:
Specifically, Yelp won’t spend the goodwill with their users to make them act in a way that is unnatural on Yelp. When you force users to act in a new, inorganic way, you lose some of them. The more unnatural the act, the greater the leakage. For Foursquare,...
“In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I...”
– Paul Graham
“The quickest way to get deleted and filtered as permanent spam is to send me an...”
– Mark Cuban
Features As Companies
Over the holidays I spent some time reflecting on the applications I use and why I use them. Part of this excercise involved revisting when and how I discovered the applications I now use as part of my everyday life. One use that fell out of this analysis provided an interesting story for me as it relates to that age old VC question- is something a feature or a company (the former being...
“From the outside, it looked like it was a great acquisition, $265 million, but...”
– This has to be one of the best reasons I’ve heard for selling your company- you hate working there. Quote taken from an interview with Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, on how to build infectious company culture.
I love the backstory of “overnight...
Excellent, data dense, post from John Borthwick on... →
“The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the...”
– Napoleon (Bonaparte, not Dynamite)
What Website?
I’ve had a few conversations recently that have brought a question to my mind that I wanted to pose to the group:
Which services do you use exclusively on your phone?
These could either be as apps or mobile websites.
Not that they don’t have traditional websites, but I find I prefer to access these services via my phone and can count on both hands the number of time’s...
SEOmoz's Venture Capital Process →
A huge service for entrepreneurs by an entrepreneur to shed light on what its “really” like to raise a round of funding.
daryn:
Fantastic post from Rand about SEOmoz’s fundraising experience.
“Despite this remarkable success, history will also show that Apple intentionally...”
– There’s that D word again surfacing in this thoughtful post from Bill Gurley contrasting the business models and incentives of Apple and Google.
“What we see then is a collision of paradigms, perhaps as profound as the...”
– Tim O’Reilly
“Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first...”
– As I sift through the pundits and VCs predictions for what will be HOT this year I can’t help having quotes like this resonating in my ears. Yes, there will be successes that ride the waves in gaming and mobile and cleantech, but the really big game changers are going to come out of the blue...
“Politics will evolve much faster than in the past due to the Internet and social...”
– 10 thoughtful predictions for the world from Paul Buchheit. I’m certain he’s right about this one.
“While the world started 2009 in a daze, we were very lucky to have committed...”
– A great post from Will Price on how WidgetBox navigated the uncertain waters known as 2009.