Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 29, 2013
'If you track the venture capital industry it would be hard to miss the conversation going on this week over AngelList “Syndicates.” From the hyperbolic Jason Calacanis weighing in that “The petty VC’s did everything to deride [Naval, the co-founder of AngelList]” as though the industry was collectively s g its pants that AngelList was going to put us out of business.
This is going to be BIG.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2013
'Last Thursday marked the one year anniversary of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures being a real fund with money in it and everything--so it was fitting that I had my first annual investor meeting. We don''t do anything too fancy. I borrowed a conference room from a friend''s company and we huddled around some great sandwiches and pasta from Catercow. I brought three founders in for the first time and they rocked it.
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Berkonomics
SEPTEMBER 19, 2013
'Not all companies are successful. The end game can be a failure of the business. In fact, many angel investors or venture capitalists look for and respect the lessons learned by entrepreneurs that have survived a failed business. The key question is how did the entrepreneur fail? And then: What lessons were learned from the failure? One VC calls this entrepreneur one who “has seen the movie before” and spends time questioning the entrepreneur on lessons learned, often praising the person for
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
I have never worked for a company that was dogmatic about project postmortems but I have always wished I had. After all, project postmortems teach us so much. Learning from the mistakes and experiences of others constitutes the better part of our business education. It’s why we ask successful entrepreneurs to coffee and hang on every word when they speak at conferences.
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Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 17, 2013
'In my last post I pointed out that many of the media commentators who have criticized the YouTube video network companies as not having strong businesses were mistaken. The main thrust of the post is that with YouTube taking a 45% of revenue and talent taking 70% of the remaining revenue, YouTube Networks didn’t have sustainable businesses unless they invested heavily in technology as a tool to increase margin and provide defensibility.
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Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 28, 2013
'CEO transparency. It almost sounds uncontroversial. A CEO should tell her staff everything! Right? Right?!? Of course not. It’s a hard topic to write about because it’s almost an accepted norm that total transparency is good. It is not. For starters let me use “CEO” as a proxy to include her “inner circle” which might mean co-founders or might just mean senior execs of the business.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 15, 2013
'For much of 2013 I watched the press write articles about how the YouTube “MCNs” (multi-channel networks) were doomed and tried to square that with the data I was watching at the one I invested in, Maker Studios, who has had one hell of a year. Maker announced it has raised $62 million this year, acquired an amazing off-YouTube distribution network and grown its business in monetary terms by almost 300% year-over-year off of an already large base.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 26, 2013
'If you Can’t Make Time, MakeSpace. A few months ago I wrote about an entrepreneur, Sam Rosen, whom we brought on as an EIR at Upfront Ventures. I would have liked to have been even more Upfront with you back then about our intentions with Sam but out of respect to him we held back on our broader thesis until now. Today we announced our launch. Here’s the deal.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 12, 2013
'Today is a day I’ve waited patiently for for 5 years but more earnestly for more than 1 year. I am thrilled to announce that we have added Hamet Watt as a Partner at Upfront Ventures. Now that he’s become a VC he’s promising me he’ll provide way more public information and discourse so please welcome him by following him on Twitter and better yet welcoming him with a Tweet of your own linking to his Twitter handle or this post.
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Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 7, 2013
'Gabe Rivera wrote a post on why TechMeme is now using its editors to curate titles that appear on its site. Gabe’s post appears first on TechMeme’s website, which must mean Gabe has paid off some TechMeme editors to get his story to rise to the top. I never saw it go out with a “tip @techmeme” on Twitter. Did you? Well. His article is well worth reading anyways.
This is going to be BIG.
SEPTEMBER 17, 2013
'Risk is really another word for uncertainty. Investing in utilities is fairly low risk, because we''re pretty sure that people aren''t going to suddenly start using twice as much electricity out of the blue (or half as much, unfortunately). Investing in startups is fairly high risk, because not only could they go out of business, but they could be huge home runs.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
'I sit through a lot of presentations. These range from companies pitching me to portfolio companies presenting at board meetings. Each of these scenarios has a team presenting. Almost always the CEO plus members of his or her management team including tech, marketing, sales and/or product. Some CEO’s are masters at communicating when team members are present.
Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 30, 2013
'As I have argued before, a few key people in every organization can make a huge difference on its success. Even for very large companies or even at a citywide level. But that doesn’t forgive the CEO, the board or for that matter anybody in an organization from allowing weak links. In fact, nearly every team work with I encourage them to think about succession planning in the event “that somebody gets hit by a beer truck.” I don’t know where I started using the phrase but
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This is going to be BIG.
SEPTEMBER 2, 2013
'Stop looking at your paycheck as a measure of success. Stop counting followers as a measure of how loved you are. Stop using likes as a measure of the love you give. Stop using investor dollars as the metric of success for your business. Stop using square footage to feel good about where you live. Stop using pounds to measure your health. Stop using sexual partners as the measure for interpersonal relations.
This is going to be BIG.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2013
'Getting investor dollars is like a sugar rush. As soon as you have that cinnamon bun, you just want another one, and if you don''t get a second one, you crash. If there was one single mistake that crushed my startup five years ago, it was assuming I''d get any more money than what I got in the seed round. That underlying assumption was present in every decision I made.
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 12, 2013
The NoSQL movement launched officially in 1999 but rose to prominence much later perhaps closer to 2008 when Hadoop and other key value pair technologies became en vogue. Today, it’s hard to argue with the success of the movement. Large banks, insurance companies, biotech companies and dotcoms rely on NoSQL to power their services and inform their most important decisions.
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 10, 2013
One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask me is how does their business compare to others? Benchmarking is a great tool, if you can get access to representative data. Pacific Crest and David Skok have released a fantastic survey benchmarking SaaS metrics for early and growth stage companies. The entire report is well worth reading. Below is my list of the six most important benchmarks and observations from that report.
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Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 23, 2013
I’ll never forget the first large tech conference I attended after joining Redpoint. Held in the movie theater in downtown Redwood City, the TechCrunch conference attracted several hundred entrepreneurs, investors and journalists. Not one of whom I knew. After a handful of conferences and a few awkward quick-name-badge-glance-then-say-hello conversations, I started to recognize faces and became friendly with the conference regulars.
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 15, 2013
I’ve been reading Scott Berkun’s book The Year Without Pants which details his working life at Wordpress. The book reveals a thought-provoking collection of lore behind Wordpress and in particular, the day-to-day operations of a distributed volunteer team who built a technology that powers about 20% of the internet. Scott embeds insightful gems about daily startup work life into his stories.
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 9, 2013
The venture capital fund of the future will perform the same tasks as the venture funds of today: help portfolio companies, evaluate new investment opportunities and build networks of other investors, potential hires, and founders. But to succeed over the next 25 years, venture capital firms must increase the scale and sophistication of each of these duties by order of magnitude through technology.
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 6, 2013
In a very kind gesture, Ivan Kirigin submitted this blog (and Intercom.io’s blog) to answer the question posed by Disqus, What is the best content marketing campaign you have seen and why? I’m honored by his comment. In response, David Fleck, head of revenue at Disqus asked whether the blog has ever led to an investment and whether that’s the right KPI for it.
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Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
It is easy to think the sales process ends once a customer has signed a contract or downloaded an app or created an account. But it’s a huge mistake. Great products have a point of view on the way things ought to work. GMail chose labels over folders for email categorization. Pandora chose recommendations over libraries for music libraries. Looker chose spreadsheets over an SQL prompts for data exploration.
Berkonomics
SEPTEMBER 26, 2013
'So you’ve found the buyer, received a letter of interest, signed it, and tied your company up for a period to complete the deal. Everyone on the board is anxious to close this. You’ve committed time to do whatever is needed. You’ve informed your top management of the pending deal and they know they will be impacted and are a bit skittish. You wonder if you should make a public announcement to your troops, worrying over loss of focus, people thinking of jumping ship, competitors finding mors
Berkonomics
SEPTEMBER 12, 2013
'When we start a business, we are optimistic that we will succeed and dream of riches to follow when the company is sold or even participating in an IPO. Some of us build our businesses to be lifestyle creations, destined to provide for our families but not necessarily as creators of great equity upon an eventual sale. But most of us dream of selling the business someday for lots of money and building our wealth upon that event.
Berkonomics
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
'When we are young and early in our business lives, we feel infallible to the degree that we do not think of what might happen if we die while in office or decide to leave the company for any reason. Such thoughts just do not occur to most of us until the business is substantially far enough along in its growth to have multiple layers of management and enough employees and stakeholders that there is a board of directors and calls for key man insurance and succession planning.
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