This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 8, 2015

'To date, I''ve backed three fashion related companies--Refinery29, chloe + isabel, and Ringly--and now I have the pleasure of joining the syndicate of investors in Bradford Shellhammer ''s new company, Bezar. Could I a less likely candidate for such a portfolio? :). Bezar is where you find people who design the kinds of things that I see in other people''s apartments and stop to pick up, inspect, wonder at and think, "That''s awesome.

venture capital 411

venture capital creativity VC finance 411

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2015

'Any reader of this blog for a period of time will know that I’ve been long YouTube for years. Along with Greycroft, I was the first institutional investor in Maker Studios (sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion) and am still the largest investor in Mitu Network , the largest online video producer of Latino content. We have made 5 online video investments in total – some we will talk about later this year.

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abovethecrowd.com

JANUARY 30, 2015

'“Can you take me Higher? To a place where blind men see . Can you take me Higher? . To a place with golden streets”. — Creed, Higher. In their seminal 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies , Jim Collins and Jerry Poras coined the term BHAG (pronounced BEE-hag) — an acronym that stands for “ B ig H airy A udacious G oal.

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transportation leadership energy venture capital 105

Berkonomics

JANUARY 29, 2015

'Investors as a group have a common gripe – almost universal. Information flows from the company irregularly, in fact most often when the company is urgently in need of more money. Investment documents usually call for quarterly reporting by the company to the investors. Less than a quarter of companies receiving early stage investment voluntarily fulfill this promise.

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strategy

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 29, 2015

Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools startups can employ. Blogs are powerful drivers of awareness and creators of purchasing intent which ultimately lead to new customers, new employees or other new opportunities. This is doubly true as buyers are educating themselves before contacting sales teams to a far greater extent than ever.

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strategy education SaaS opportunity 40

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 5, 2015

'I love thinking about career paths and how people get from A to B. It''s my favorite thing to teach as well--and I''ll be giving a class at Startup Institute this Tuesday night about it. They''re a career accelerator, which is a pretty neat concept--doing what YC and Techstars do for startups, but for your career. Anyway, 2015 marks a couple of big career anniversaries for me.

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startup ecosystem VC networking venture capital 342

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 24, 2015

'I was waiting for my son’s basketball game to start this morning and with the morning’s emails all drained I turned to Twitter and saw this Tweet from Marshall Kirkpatick. Test: open your twitter stream, look at the 1st item in it, think of something to say in response, say it. Theory: it’s really that simple. — Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 24, 2015.

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Don Dodge

JANUARY 1, 2015

My 5 predictions for the tech world in 2015 and the next 5 years; Sensors, Indoor Location, Alternative networks, Wearable computers, the demise of cable TV. Billions of sensors will monitor everything, and become the next platform shift in computing. Your home, car, office, and even people will have special sensors that help us manage the complexities of life.

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enablement networking health 40

Berkonomics

JANUARY 22, 2015

'This is a trick headline. There can be three “whys” or twenty, depending upon the issue and the responses. To make the point, the word “why” has to be one of the more powerful words in a manager’s vocabulary. Asking the question forces the other person to think beyond the usual “what” that generated a response to “why.”. It sure is a way to get to the bottom of an issue.

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consulting 97

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startup

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 22, 2015

In 2015, SaaS companies trade at a 30% lower multiple of revenue than last year. In early 2014, the typical SaaS company traded at about 9.2x their next-twelve-months of revenue. Since August 2014, that figure has dropped by about 30% to about 6.0x. Almost every public SaaS company has seen multiple compression. Only RealPage, Qualys, NewRelic, ConstantContact and Hortonworks are at highs in 2015 compared to 2014.

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 22, 2015

'I''m incredibly excited to announce Brooklyn Bridge Ventures'' investment in Plum Print. Plum Print turns your kid''s artwork into buyable merchandise like coffee table books, and soon note cards, framed prints, and calendars. While other apps store art for future printing, Plum Print is different because it doesn''t require large amounts of time for you to do it yourself.

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venture capital disruption pitching ventures 328

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 25, 2015

'Startups in a world of massive markets can be confusing. The law of large numbers, platforms that can make your company blow up unexpectedly and the trendy nature of tech markets can be deceiving. Success for many is ephemeral. I have written about the deceiving nature of early successes before – in particular in the SaaS or B2B world leading to a phenomenon called “shelfware.” If you didn’t read it I recommend it.

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sustainability SaaS disruption venture capital 309

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2015

'I used to love blogging. For me it was always a creative outlet. I love sitting down – often in “one take” like a classic film – and capturing what was on my mind at the moment. What I loved about it was that my thoughts were instantly in the ether, I would get quick feedback from readers and I would know where my ideas stood in the world of ideas.

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creativity advice strategy support 305

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financing

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 15, 2015

'Why do startups fail? They run out of money, of course. That''s an oversimplification and actually it''s more the result than the root cause. A lot of times, it comes down to failing to produce results, and enough of them. What I''ve realized recently, though, is that smaller, faster results are key--and it doesn''t always matter whether those results are good or bad.

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board venture capital culture technology 414

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2015

'Not everybody likes the NY Times. I happen to be a long-time fan and paid subscriber. I mostly read the op eds and have for years. I count amongst my favorite people to read from the left & the right as David Brooks, Thomas Friedman & Paul Krugman (and was a big fan of the late William Saffire). I also read almost every Maureen Dowd post even though I don’t always agree with her politics or viewpoints I find it interesting to get other perspectives than my own.

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media startup 317

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 26, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Salesforce went public more than 10 years ago. This harbinger of subscription, internet delivered software created one of the most exciting waves in software and the single most valuable SaaS company today, worth $37B as of this writing.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 21, 2015

Figuring out how much capital your startup may need to raise will inform lots of different strategic decisions. A startup’s growth rate is often highly correlated with the amount of capital it can invest in sales and marketing. More customers means more bookings, which means more capital and so on. The chart above shows the cumulative dollars raised across a basket of more than 50 enterprise software companies.

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technology

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. There’s a SaaS company on the other side of the world founded nine years ago that is worth $2B, generates $100M in annual revenue and growing 80% year over year.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 13, 2015

Christoph Janz , one of the best seed stage SaaS investors, published a great tweetstorm on the state of the SaaS ecosystem yesterday. I’ve copied it below. There’s no excuse for not understanding your metrics, for not providing great customer service, for not understanding the role of customer success, for not doing intelligent lifecycle marketing, for not doing great content marketing…What was hard and innovative 5 years ago is #tablestakes now.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 6, 2015

This week, an entrepreneur told me his startup is a B2C2B business. It was the first time I’d heard this acronym, and I thought it was a genius moniker. B2C2B (business-to-consumer-to-business) succinctly captures the critical part of the new customer acquisition model powering many enterprise startups: winning hearts and minds of the intermediate consumer, the employees of a company.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2015

One of the most important forces in SaaS today is the Consumerization of IT. Instead of a centralized IT organization deciding which products to buy, product managers and marketers and engineers and data scientists determine which products they think would serve them best and buy them directly, often using a credit card. This movement is transformative and its impact is immediate.

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opportunity

Berkonomics

JANUARY 15, 2015

'New hires can shore up the weak areas of a business in ways existing employees cannot, if hiring is done to fill true needs. Some employees lose their drive, or remain behind as the company grows, failing to gain the experience or knowledge needed to manage expanded processes or numbers of subordinates. Sometimes, there is just too much work for one person, and a second is needed to continue growth.

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opportunity 75

Berkonomics

JANUARY 8, 2015

'It seems to be a rule, not an exception. The first professional senior manager that an entrepreneur hires to share the growing workload does not last more than a year. Why? Entrepreneurs start businesses with a strong vision of what and how , involved in every process from buying supplies to hiring and directly supervising early employees. The culture of the company is built day by day by those actions, often centering on the founder’s vision and management style with little room for deviati

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leadership culture entrepreneurs founder 70

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2015

SaaS startups are growing faster than ever before. Publicly-traded SaaS companies founded from 2008 through 2014 needed 50% less time to reach $50M than their counterparts founded between 1998 and 2005. I stumbled across this trend when looking at a different chart used in my S-1 analyses that compares the time to $50M for each of the 51 or so publicly traded SaaS companies.

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SaaS enablement ventures startup 45

Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 19, 2015

The best teams share two common attributes, according to MIT research : Relatively equal contribution by each member. Members with high emotional intelligence. The first characteristic makes sense. A team led by a single dominant person will perform according to the strengths and weaknesses of the (benevolent) dictator. Another team in which the strengths of one member complement the weaknesses of another will certainly be stronger.

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