Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 14, 2013

'I’ve been involved with technology product design in one form or another for nearly 25 years and seen one mistake consistently repeated. The single biggest mistake most product teams make is building technology for what they believe the user would want rather than what the actual end-user needs. From the experience in my earliest days of designing products for Windows and OS2 machines in the early 1990′s I developed a product philosophy, “Design for the novice, configure for t

advice 408

advice education VC technology 408

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 4, 2013

'Nothing. Yeah, it doesn''t mean anything. Chill out. General Assembly isn''t really a coworking company. It''s been an education business for quite a while now, if you haven''t noticed--and it''s a business they''re damn good at. By professionalizing startup education in NYC, GA has made a huge impact in the community. By number, most of the people who pass through its doors are there for classes, not to work.

coworking 271

coworking coworking spaces education venture capital 271

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 1, 2013

'Over 13 years ago, in March of 2000, I wrote a blog post titled “ The Most Powerful Internet Metric of All. ” The key thesis was this: if an Internet company could obsess about only one metric, it should be conversion. No other metric so holistically captures as many critical aspects of a web site – user design, usability, performance, convenience, ad effectiveness, net promoter score, customer satisfaction – all in a single measurement.

peer-to-peer 93

peer-to-peer venture capital SaaS sustainability 93

Berkonomics

OCTOBER 10, 2013

'Many CEOs have asked me if I felt an investment banker adds value if the buyer has already been identified. Investment bankers sometimes slow the process by requiring a “deal book” to be prepared containing considerable information about a company to help a buyer. Deal books are expensive to create. Other investment bankers insist that the company create competition for a deal, even if the buyer has already submitted a letter of interest to the seller.

investing 83

investing investment real estate 83

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strategy

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Intent to purchase is the engine of the consumer web. Creating and capturing intent motivates almost every dollar invested into ecommerce and advertising. Intent is also the fuel for the Internet’s most successful business model, Google’s AdWords + Search. As the internet has evolved, so have the ways of creating and capturing intent. From display to search to retargeting to collections, each new technique has leveraged data in a novel form to discover consumers’ wishes.

innovation 40

innovation opportunity technology investment 40

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 20, 2013

'Most people suck at presenting to big groups. It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential employees, customers and VCs. So I thought I’d write a piece on how not to suck when you give a presentation. 1. Show some energy!

creativity 399

creativity education advice support 399

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 23, 2013

'A lot of money is being put into trying to figure out what I do when I walk into a store. Nomi just raised $10M and Prism Skylabs just raised $15M. These efforts aren''t new. Path Intelligence raised a million bucks to do this years ago. Given the time I spent a decade ago doing not only venture capital, but investing in private equity funds that buy retail companies, I find this data collection fascinating.

venture capital 381

venture capital data collection capital ventures 381

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 17, 2013

'Early this year Amie Fineberg, who has been my amazing assistant for over 10 years, mentioned that she and several other employees at Benchmark had fallen in love with a new ecommerce service, and that I might want to check it out. The company, which the founder cleverly named “Stitch Fix,” had a remarkably unique offering compared to other women’s fashion experiences.

board 62

board opportunity venture capital capital 62

Berkonomics

OCTOBER 17, 2013

'Now you have worked for months to get this deal to the closing, anticipating the wire transfers to the shareholders that will come any minute. This could change your life style and give you that much needed pause in your life you have been looking forward to. All the documents were signed in a rolling series of emailed scanned signature pages during the past week or more, with each party signing their own set, never having to be in the same room to sign the single signature page for each agre

investment 78

investment investing 78

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startup

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2013

In the past 24 months, something extraordinary has happened. The value of publicly traded SaaS companies has grown by 200 to 400% while the underlying customer unit economics of those businesses hasn’t changed. Below is a chart of the ratio between enterprise value to revenue for two segments of SaaS companies. The All Segment contains 36 publicly traded SaaS companies.

SaaS 40

SaaS accelerator startup investing 40

Venture Hacks

OCTOBER 26, 2013

I do the onboarding for all new AngelList team members. Part of it is asking them to read the following (many candidates have read these before they even come in for an interview). Culture. Startups are here to save the world. Things we care about at AngelList. Doing the wrong things the right way. Execution. Ask forgiveness, not permission. 1-(wo)man startups.

culture 70

culture strategy founder startup 70

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 9, 2013

'Look, if you had, one shot. Or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted. In one moment. Would you capture it, or just let it slip? [ Eminem, Lose Yourself ]. I’ve often said that to run a startup you almost have to abstract yourself from the daily stresses and grind just to exist. You almost have to have an out-of-body experience as though it’s not really your life but it’s just a game you’re playing in order to not be buried by the burdens of your decisions.

advice 405

advice VC creativity opportunity 405

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 7, 2013

'Some financing rounds seem to go really fast. Others drag on for months and months. The problem with dragging it on is twofold--. a) The entrepreneur is distracted from doing what they need to do--i.e. running the business. b) There really isn''t any more actual information to pour over--it''s just a lot of thinking and talking about the same things over and over again.

investing 363

investing investment construction venture capital 363

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financing

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 2, 2013

'Mashery is heavily featured at the Business of APIs conference. Their participation has been a huge win for them--leading the company to customers, media visability and an opportunity to help shape the conversation in their industry. So how did they get involved? They started the conference. Duh. Lots of companies struggle with getting the attention of a market, because they don''t take a lead in educating that market.

pitching 327

pitching media venture capital leadership 327

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 31, 2013

'Pitching is all about telling a story. You''ve practiced long and hard on how you tell your story. So why would you allow someone to play it on mute--or, worse, tell themselves your story based on a misunderstanding of your deck. You also won''t get feedback on whether the deck works because you won''t see them going through it. The very fact that someone is asking for a deck before they decide whether or not to meet with you is a fail in many ways.

pitching 303

pitching venture capital energy technology 303

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2013

'It’s stunning to me how quickly we take for granted certain conveniences in our lives that go from Eureka to minimum expectation. Take OpenTable. In the old days we used to call a restaurant to book. The hostess worked from 4-10pm so you had to call during these hours. Between 7-10 she was busy seating guests so had to put your on hold. After hours there was the answering machine.

advice 324

advice pitching media support 324

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 16, 2013

'I had a great conversation with a CEO yesterday who recently realized that she had been too heads down and focused on her day to day tasks to build up her personal brand. It was never something she made a priority until she realized that building up her own brand was part of the company''s marketing. It would create just as many opportunities for her company as it would for herself.

venture capital 315

venture capital pitching opportunity finance 315

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technology

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 21, 2013

'Our notions of what''s possible affect our performance. I had a very specific experience with that this weekend. I ran a half marathon yesterday, but I couldn''t use my Nike+ watch. It has an utterly ridiculous lack of ability to delete old data from the watch itself--you can only do this when it''s hooked up to a computer. So, if you find yourself with a watch full of data, you literally cannot use it.

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Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2013

One number investors use to benchmark SaaS startups across sectors and industries is sales efficiency. There are a handful of variants of this metric, sometimes called the magic number, but ultimately they all aim to provide some sense of the incremental revenue returned by sales and marketing investment. To make it more concrete, if a startup invests $500k in marketing and sales this quarter and generates $1M in incremental revenue, net of the cost to provide the service, for the next 12 months

SaaS 45

SaaS startup networking investment 45

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Every SaaS business suffers from churn. If churn isn’t managed properly, the lost revenue from churned customers offsets new revenue and the business flat-lines or suffers negative revenue growth. I’ve seen startups employ three patterns for offsetting churn: acquiring new customers faster, upselling existing customers to buy more software, or structuring pricing to grow with customers.

strategy 40

strategy SaaS startup frameworks 40

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 27, 2013

There’s a perpetual and roaring debate in Startupland about the ideal founding team. Should the ideal team be entirely computer scientists? How important to success is having an MBA/business person? What about the stories of billionaire dropouts? To answer that question, I’ve aggregated the academic backgrounds of 30 of the top startups of the past few years and analyzed the make up of each of those founding teams.

startup founder 40

startup founder founder startup education 40

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opportunity

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 22, 2013

Financial statements are the Rosetta Stone for a business. They are the most succinct way of communicating how a business operates to management teams and boards, who weigh the trade-offs of different investments. In the early stages of the startup, financial statements aren’t used much as a management tool. They are most often used to keep an eye on monthly burn rate.

board 40

board startup strategy investing 40

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 15, 2013

It’s an important question and one that arises most often as a SaaS startup scales. Churn, masked by growth, becomes a limiting factor of growth. How much should the business invest in managing churn? Our SaaS benchmarks from earlier this week tell us the average public SaaS company has a 3% monthly revenue churn or a 2 year lifetime and a sales efficiency of 0.8, which implies a 5 quarter pay back period on cost-of-sales and cost-to-serve.

SaaS 40

SaaS startup frameworks investing 40

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 10, 2013

If a typical SaaS business loses about 2 to 3% of their customers each month to churn, the business must grow by at least 27% to 43% annually to maintain the same revenue. The idea written as an equation: Revenue Growth = Customers x Avg. Contract Value x (Growth Rate - Churn Rate). At the beginning of a SaaS startups' life, when the company generates $1M in annual revenue, churn in absolute dollar terms is small, about $300k for the year.

SaaS 40

SaaS startup investment investing 40

Berkonomics

OCTOBER 3, 2013

'Maybe you have not heard the term, “deal book.” That’s a comprehensive piece on a company for use by a buyer in determining fit. A “deal room” is an electronic or physical space dedicated to storing the massive amounts of data to be used in due diligence by a buyer, lender or by an investor. Deal rooms contain access to or copies of all significant contracts with suppliers, customers, consultants, and others.

consulting 76

consulting advice board 76

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