The AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 Top Company Competition

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:18:51 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its third annual OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging on-demand and SaaS companies that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

Why Facebook Is Worth so Much Money

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:47:40 +0000

Facebook is widely expected to make a preliminary filing for its IPO today. Bloomberg reports that they have chosen Morgan Stanley as their lead banker and plan to raise $5bn.

Dispersion and Entropy In Social Media

Fred Wilson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:46:45 +0000

On Monday, I trained it up to New Haven to meet a Yale professor named Dina Mayzlin and talk to her class. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Dina's class as it allowed me to work on some new material in a comfortable setting. But the talk Dina and I had over breakfast before class was even more thought provoking.

The Management Team - Guest Post From JLM

Fred Wilson — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:42:27 +0000

Next up on our guest posts on the subject of The Management Team is AVC community regular JLM. For those that don't know, JLM runs a public company and before that built and sold a large real estate operation. He's also written one of the best guest posts ever on AVC. With that intro, here's what JLM has to say on the topic. I love the way he ends the post.

Software Will Eat the Whole World

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:41:16 +0000

Back in August Marc Andreessen wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal explaining why Software is eating the world.

Pay Me to Launch My Startup Company

Larry _Chiang — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:05:47 +0000

Pay me to do lead generation is a signature Gua Gua Guacamole recipe of mine.

I first recognized the pattern with celebrities and athletes. They would get paid to appear. After the cocktail party or networking event or two-minute speaking gig, they would collect a stack of business cards. Most were people eager to pay them more money to do similar "work."

Reflections On CES From A Perfective Of The Future

Brad Feld — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:00:06 +0000

I believe that science fiction is reality catching up to the future. Others say that science fact is the science fiction of the past. Regardless, the gap between science fact and science fiction is fascinating to me, especially as it applies to computers.

My partners and I spend time at CES each year along with a bunch of the founders from different companies we’ve invested in due to our human computer interaction theme. In addition to a great way to start the year together, it gives us a chance to observe how the broad technology industry, especially on the consumer electronics side, is trying to catch up to the future.

Would Shareholders Give a Higher P/E to Keep Jobs in the USA?

Mark Cuban — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:59:21 +0000

It used to be that if you owned shares of a public company, you actually felt like you owned shares of that company. The concept of actual ownership by individuals is long gone. Shareholders as owners are nothing but a concept , and echo from days gone by.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s just as rare for individuals with less than 10 figures in their networth to even consider actually buying shares as a path to ownership.

Entrepreneur Jiu Jitsu

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:07:07 +0000

Bruce Li kicks butt.

But the guy is like a small Shanghainese dude the size of a Shih Tzu. He kicks massive ass. How does he do it?

Bruce Li says stuff like "resist like water," but here is how he does it: He uses you to kick your own butt.

Your strengths?! Hurt you.

The AlwaysOn OnHollywood 100 Top Company Competition

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:12:17 +0000

The sixth annual OnHollywood 100 competition has begun! Disruptive technology is forcing big changes in Hollywood: new contracts, new genres, new stars. As the behemoth industry steps into the digital era, entertainment execs will be paying even closer attention to the global Silicon Valley—especially the startups that are writing the rules and creating the tools for the digital entertainment age.

To help identify these startups, we'd like your help. We're looking for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in digital entertainment.

Steve Blank vs. Steve Jobs

Jeff Bussgang — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:46:18 +0000

I am co-teaching a class at Harvard Business School on entrepreneurship called "Launching Technology Ventures" along with my friend and colleague, Professor Tom Eisenmann. The class kicked off this week with two cases: Dropbox and Aardvark.

As I reflect on the class discussions, one of the interesting tension points that arose is the challenge an entrepreneur faces in selecting their primary product design approach. Should they follow the Steve Blank, Customer Development Process school of product development or the Steve Jobs "vision" school? In other words, should they pursue a user-centric design paradigm -- setting priorities based on rigorous tests and listening excercises that determine what users want -- or should they pursue a more top-down approach akin to Steve Jobs, who famously said: "It is hard to design by focus groups because most of the time people don't know what they want until you show it to them. "

Mobile Advertising Growing Fast

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:45:37 +0000

eMarketer released some new data yesterday with the most detailed breakdown of the mobile advertising market I’ve seen to date. eMarketer have a history of being amongst the most bullish on this market. They were the first company to predict that 2011 mobile ad spend would top $1bn in the US, and they are predicting big growth again for 2012. Their new figures predict US mobile ad spend will reach $2.6bn in 2012, 80% up on the 2011 figure of $1.45bn (which was significantly higher than the $1bn eMarketer had forecast). Moreover, as you can see from the inset chart there is significant growth still to come.

Apple Gets Closer to $1 Trillion

Michael Moe — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:54:00 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 3.4% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 1.1%, and the S&P 500 was up 0.1%. For the year, the AO X Fund is up 9%, the NASDAQ is up 8.1%, and the S&P 500 up 4.7%.

Apple had an extremely strong quarter, with earnings growth of 116% and revenue growth of 73%. iPhone sales were the main driver, with 34 million iPhones sold during Q4, up 128%. iPad sales were also strong with 15.4 million units sold, up 111%, and Macs grew 26%, with 5.2 million sold. iPod sales continued to decline, down 21%, with 15.4 million sold. Retail revenue was up 37% vs. last year, and Apple generated $17.5 billion in cash from operations and now has $98 billion in cash on its balance sheet. For the week, AAPL advanced 6.4%.

Web Second, Mobile First

Mark Suster — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:54:45 +0000

Fred Wilson wrote two posts in 2010 that were very influential with the startup community.

The titles were:
Mobile First, Web Second
Mobile First, Web Second (continued)

If you’re in the minority that never read these posts – you should.

I know that they really impacted an entire cohort of startups because every company that was coming to pitch me businesses was (is) saying, “I’m a ‘mobile first’ company.”

Businesses Needs More Judo, Less Karate

Tony Tjan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:53:44 +0000

Consider two hypothetical restaurants: type one and type two.

Restaurant type one: Imagine yourself wandering the streets of a new city. You could be on Ocean Drive in South Beach, or Piazza Navona in Rome. You're thinking about dinner, and you come across a restaurant conveniently located on a busy stretch of street. Outside, it displays its panoply of meal choices in wax replica splendor, or "freshly cooked" under Saran wrap. On the sidewalk, an aspiring tan model flanks a manager-host, who wears a loud tie to go with the even louder voice he uses to solicit passersby. "Would you like to come in and eat 'world famous x'? Or maybe try the daily cocktail special?"

The AlwaysOn OnMobile 100 Top Company Competition

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:27:09 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

Announcing the 2012 Power Players New York City

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:11:26 +0000

The winners of this competition will be officially announced in a few weeks and honored at:

OnMedia 2012
Where Silicon Valley Meets Madison Avenue
February 21st - February 22nd, 2011
Time Warner Center
10 on the Park at Time Warner Center
60 Columbus Circle - 10th Floor
New York, NY

Register today to secure your ticket for OnMedia NYC at the lowest possible rate while tickets are still available!

Managing Hybrid Clouds

Jeff Kaplan — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:23:44 +0000

I had an opportunity to speak to the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum at Towson University last week about new strategies and tactics for fully capitalizing on today’s Cloud alternatives. Because the group is composed of CIOs primarily from mid-size and large-scale enterprises with a lot of custom built applications and systems already in place, their biggest challenge is determining how to integrate the latest Cloud services into their legacy operations. Managing ‘hybrid’ Clouds is becoming a common challenge.

Advertising Is Becoming Less Effective

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:22:59 +0000

This chart (data from Comscore, published on Vator.tv) shows that younger people are more ‘ad-blind’ than their elders, as shown by immediate recall. To me this is evidence that advertising works less well than it used to. It is interesting that delayed recall is better for millenials, and I think that probably reflects greater loyalty to brands that have genuinely impressed. Millenials are people born in the 1980s and 1990s, now aged 13-31.

Who Are the Power Players in New York City?

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:55:06 +0000

Behind every successful Internet and mobile technology startup is a handful of power players guiding the founders. Smart and savvy investors like Eric Hippeau or the celebrated Bob Pittman may give you a kick start, super attorney Victor Boyajian might draw up and help you ink your Series A financing, or Union Square's Fred Wilson might chip in some expansion capital and join your board. In celebration of these key insiders, AlwaysOn is seeking nominations for your favorite New York City Power Players.

Internet and Intellectual Property Clash at CES

johnblyler — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:54:02 +0000

Recent events at the Consumer Electronics Show highlight the divide between intellectual property creators and the Internet giants that need them.

The English-language Wikipedia page on January 18, 2012, illustrating its international blackout in opposition to SOPA.

If you mention the term “intellectual property” (IP) in connection with the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES), most folks will assume you’re referring to Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). As most users of the Internet know, the technology community has made considerable efforts to stop Hollywood-backed proposed copyright bills SOPA and Protect IP. As a result, passage of these bills in their present form looks dim.

Resegment If You Aren't In The Top Three

Brad Feld — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:53:24 +0000

Six months ago I wrote a post about how I think about competition which included a list of topics that summarizes my philosophy. I covered the first item, Be The First Mover, but then went on to other things, like thinking about competitors every single day. I’m back today with the second topic, “Resegment If You Aren’t In The Top Three.”

If you look at the Foundry Group portfolio, you’ll notice a lot of market leaders. Zynga is the obvious one, but I’ll assert that there are many others, including AdMeld (now part of Google), Cheezburger, Fitbit, Gnip, Makerbot, Oblong, SendGrid, Topspin, Trada, and Urban Airship.

Facebook Launches Actions, Driving Social into Everything

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:46:05 +0000

Last night Facebook announced a bunch of new partners that are using ‘Actions’, a Facebook feature which lets developers make just about any action a verb. We can now expect Facebook buttons to pop up everywhere inviting us to declare our relationships to all sorts of things by clicking buttons with verbs such as ‘Want’, ‘’Listen’, ‘Own’, ‘Watch’, ‘Read, or ‘Pin’. As I’ve said numerous times now I think the next big wave for social is when it spreads into everything that we do to make it just a little better. I’m not talking about new sites or apps, or even necessarily spending more time on Facebook, but rather the apps we currently use incorporate social data to get better.

The Management Team - Guest Post From Matt Blumberg

Fred Wilson — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:45:28 +0000

Now that I've completed three posts on The Management Team over the last three MBA Mondays, it's time for four or five guest posts on this topic. The first one is from Matt Blumberg, CEO of our portfolio company Return Path. I've been on Matt's board for over a decade and I've watched him develop into one of the finest managers I've had the pleasure to work with. Here are Matt's thoughts on this topic.

Nemertes Predicts Colocation Crunch

Greg Ness — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:49:16 +0000

For a fresh perspective on data center obsolescence check out The Coming Colocation Crunch by Nemertes Principal Analyst Ted Ritter writing for Data Center Knowledge this week (Jan 18, 2012):

“Nemertes Research predicts a shortage of colocation space in the U.S. beginning this year, growing to a $1.9 billion facilities gap by 2015.”

My World Is A Network

Brad Feld — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:48:35 +0000

This post should be sung to the tune of The World Is A Vampire by the Smashing Pumpkins

“the world is a vampire, sent to drain
secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
and what do i get, for my pain
betrayed desires, and a piece of the game
even though i know-i suppose i’ll show
all my cool and cold-like old job

Apple Launches iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author

Michael Moe — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:03:20 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 0.7% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 2.8%, and the S&P 500 was up 2%. For the year, the AO X Fund is up 5.4%, the NASDAQ is up 7%, and the S&P 500 is up 4.6%.

Google reported Q4 results below the street's expectations, which caused GOOG to drop 8.4% on Friday. For the quarter, Google saw its revenue grow 25%. EPS was up 9%, and traffic acquisition cost was at 24% vs. 25% a year ago. Cost-per-click dropped 8%, which could be the result of increasing traffic going to Facebook and Twitter.

Announcing the 2012 OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies

admin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:19:55 +0000

The winners of this competition will be officially announced in a few weeks and honored at:

OnMedia 2012
Where Silicon Valley Meets Madison Avenue
February 21st - February 22nd, 2011
Time Warner Center
10 on the Park at Time Warner Center
60 Columbus Circle - 10th Floor
New York, NY

Register today to secure your ticket for OnMedia NYC at the lowest possible rate while tickets are still available!

Sundance Film Festival. Hi, I'm Remmy Oxley

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:37:44 +0000

Like many VCs, some of my deal flow comes from out of left field.

It's because we VCs spend a decent amount of time in left field. One such left field is the Sundance Film Festival.

I'm here now in Park City, Utah, at Sky Lodge, and it starts today.

Sundance was the film festival where independent films jumped the shark into the main stream. Now, Sundance is the straight-to-DVD festival.

Why Startups Shouldn't Hire PR Firms

Mark Cuban — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:46:52 +0000

A quote from my book, How to Win at the Sport of Business got picked up in multiple stories. In the book I stated effectively that “Startups should never hire a PR firm”. As you would expect, the PR Industry was not over-joyed at the comment. Articles were written about how incredibly valuable a good PR person can be to a startup.

Actually, I have no doubt that a smart PR person can add value to a startup. The problem is that all things considered, it’s not enough value.

How Can I Tell When VCs Won't Invest When They Aren't Saying "No?"

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:46:16 +0000

Venture capitalists are notorious for not telling companies when they won’t invest, and worse, being enthusiastic about the company and the prospects of a deal for an extended period and then simply going quiet. It is unfair on startups when VCs behave like this as it wastes time (an entrepreneur’s most precious resource) and makes it harder to know when a fundraising process is failing and the company should change tack. Giving up on a fundraising process too late can be fatal for a business if it then doesn’t have enough cash left to pursue a different strategy.

How to Develop Your Fund Raising Strategy

Mark Suster — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:15:35 +0000

Raising money is hard. And when you’re relatively new to the process it’s easy to be confused by the process. There is all sorts of advice on the Internet about how to raise capital. Of course much of it is conflicting.

I’ve raised money as a “hot company” and I’ve raised capital when no one would return my phone calls. I’ve raised in boom markets and when everybody thought the Internet was a fraud. I’ve raised seed rounds and A-D rounds. I raised money as an entrepreneur, like you, in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005 for two different companies.

Redefining the Concept of Shared Services in the Cloud

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:14:32 +0000

The concept of “shared services” has been bandied about the IT industry for over 50 years. Yet, past iterations of this concept have often failed to meet the needs of corporate executives and end-users from a functional and economic standpoint.

This is because previous generations of shared services were too often built upon cumbersome and costly systems and software which could not scale to give corporate customers greater cost advantages or added features than they could gain from optimized inhouse resources. As a result, only highly specialized shared services, such as payroll processing and basic hosting, prospered in the past.

The TV Business Keeps Getting Stronger

Mark Cuban — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:47:26 +0000

Back in my broadcast.com days we had a saying that “bits are bits”. That once content becomes digital, it is naturally going to become available on any and all digital devices. Based on this, we always made the point to be platform and device agnostic. We didn’t care where or how people saw our content, as long as they saw it and we had the chance to monetize it.

We also knew that our core value proposition to consumers was that on broadcast.com they were able to get content that they couldn’t get on TV. We had Yoga channels, we had cricket live and on demand, we had sports , music, movies, tv, comedy and anything else you could think of available.

Over the Top TV

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:46:46 +0000

Netflix, Hulu, Youtube and Amazon, companies at the forefront of web delivered TV are increasingly resembling the traditional TV companies they seek to displace. They are now all complementing aggressive licensing strategies with large budgets for developing original content in recognition of the age old truism of TV – content drives subscribers. This leaves us in a situation where, like the old guard of TV, the new guard controls both content and distribution, but unlike the old guard they don’t bundle access (i.e. cable or satellite) in with the package. The access element is now commoditised and adds nothing to the package.

Managing The Startup-Big Company Relationship

Ben T. Smith IV — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:20:39 +0000

Every entrepreneur has met them. Big company executives with big company swagger. They ignore you. They dismiss the business problem you spent your life solving. They think they can crush you.

Then the tables turn. They push for strategic relationships. They want to give you money, frequently at irrationally high valuations. Finally they shell out enough scratch to buy you.

The Management Team - While Building The Business

Fred Wilson — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:19:48 +0000

This is the third and final post on the subject of the management team. The final phase of company development I am going to cover is "building the business." Building the business largely means building the management team. They are one and the same.

Many founders are naturally talented at building product and building the user base. But building the company comes harder to them. I once discussed this with Roelof Botha and he made a fantastic suggestion.

Apple Suspends iPhone 4S Sales in China

Michael Moe — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:18:57 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 3.1% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 1.4%, and the S&P 500 up 0.9%. For the year, the AO X Fund is up 4.7%, the NASDAQ is up 4.1%, and the S&P 500 up 2.5%.

Sports clothes leader Lululemon surged 15.4% for the week after management raised Q4 earnings expectations by 17%. EPS is now expected at $0.47-0.49 and revenue at $358-363 mil. CEO Christine Day noted that holiday season sales were strong and that the company is now focusing on its spring collection.

What a 6' 5" Supermodel Can Teach an NFL QB About Calling Audibles at SXSW

Larry _Chiang — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:18:12 +0000

Supermodels can teach NFL quarterbacks about calling audibles in the real world.

Supermodels are super street-smart because they do not have a lot of book knowledge clogging up their brains. At fashion shows (and conferences like SXSW), we can teach NFL play callers a thing or two about last minute play-changes (audibles).

The Management Team - While Building Usage

Fred Wilson — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:16:23 +0000

So you've built and launched your product. It is well received. You've acheived "product market fit" and it is time to get more users or customers. You've graduated from the "building product" stage and have entered the "building usage" phase. What does this mean for your team?

Well first and foremost, it means you are going to have start building your team. You will need more engineers because you will have to scale the product/service and you will need to continue to build it out, make it available on more devices, and listen to and adapt to the needs of the market.

Roger McNamee and Mike Maples Jr.: First Wave of "Social Web" is Over

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:43:20 +0000

Yesterday I wrote that the market for social interest sites has matured to the point where it is difficult for new entrants, and this morning I saw the slide below which says something similar. It is one of ten predictions for 2012 from Roger McNamee and Mike Maples, two leading US VCs. You will see that they make this prediction with only 50% confidence, which I think was lower confidence than all bar one of their other predictions. You can find the full set of predictions here.

Launch Your Startup for $870.00

Larry _Chiang — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:56:17 +0000

When you talk to CS-major CEOs about whether they are launching at SXSW, you will get all sorts of lukewarm feedback. They'll say SXSW is "too expensive" or "too competitive" or, more politically, "It's not the best allocation of money for our pre-funded startup." Promoting at SXSW is not hard for just CS majors. It is also hard for VCs, angel investors, and MBAs.

But with a decent dose of street smarts, a dash of fortitude, and a sprinkle of hustle, it is very possible to launch at SXSW for well under a grand—$870 bucks, to be exact.

Nine Facebook Predictions for 2012 That Don't Suck

David Brody — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:05:52 +0000

At North Social, we usually leave the end-of-year prediction posts up to top economic advisors like Snooki and political prognosticators like Gary Busey. But for some reason that can’t be fully explained (okay, we had a few cocktails at the holiday party), we felt it was time for our team to get in on the fun with a Facebook-centric list of useful predictions for next year. So without further ado, here’s what our Magic 8 Ball has confirmed:

2011 Was the Killer Year for Social Interest Sites

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:04:47 +0000

2011 was an amazing year for social interest sites. Twitter started growing fast again after an extended flat period, Tumblr finally made it up into the stratosphere and new kid on the block Pinterest had an amazing second half to the year. The Comscore chart below shows traffic growth for all three, as well as the epic decline of Myspace.

Facebook isn’t on this chart, but they had a pretty good year as well.

The OnMedia Top 100 Company Competition

admin — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:34:28 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its sixth annual OnMedia Top 100 Private Companies competition. We're looking for the top emerging technology companies that are creating new business opportunities in the worlds of media, advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

The Fan Experience at Sporting Events: We don't need no stinking smartphones!

Mark Cuban — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:27:06 +0000

With the season starting tomorrow, I wanted to update a blog post I did in 2010. In just the past 18 months the number of proposals for in-game entertainment have skyrocketed. It seems like every day I get a new proposal to invest in a company that is going to revolutionize the experience of going to a sporting event. Without fail the proposal starts out with some form of “with the explosion in sales of smartphones…” Then I get the meat of the pitch which is some derivative of stats, pictures, fantasy games, social sharing via FB/Twitter or some new network to replace FB/Twitter.

Scaling is Hard

Jeff Bussgang — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:26:28 +0000

At the onset of 2012, many start-up executives around the world are sticking their copy of Lean Start-Up on the shelf, leaning back, and bemoaning the fact that they have a new set of challenges ahead of them. Although there is a plethora of advice now being given about how to find product-market fit for your fledging start-up, there's a dirty little secret out there: once you've achieved product-market fit, the hard work really begins. Scaling is hard.

Primum Non Nocere

Fred Wilson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:20:11 +0000

This latin phrase translates to "first, do no harm" and is one of the principal tenets of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take. I've been thinking about it a lot in the context of web services recently.

We all know about the many web services that have been purchased by large companies and have fallen by the wayside in the years following the acquisition. Services like delicious, myspace, flickr, bebo, and many more come to mind.

How Mid-Sized Organizations Can Leverage Business Intelligence and Analytics in the Cloud

Jeff Kaplan — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:19:29 +0000

Despite some skepticism from industry analysts about the ability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors to deliver viable business intelligence (BI) solutions a few years ago, today’s Cloud-based analytic tools are increasingly demonstrating that they can quickly generate tangible benefits to organizations of all sizes, especially mid-market companies.

The growing interest in Cloud-based analytics is easy to understand given the escalating pressures facing businesses contending with rising customer expectations and intensifying competitive. Businesses not only have to synthesize a widening array of internal and external data sources, they must also make timely and useful analysis available to an increasingly dispersed workforce so they can make better day-to-day business decisions.

The Management Team - While Building Product

Fred Wilson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:38:09 +0000

The first stage of a startup, what I call the Building Product stage is management light. The team should be small. We have portfolio companies like del.icio.us and duck duck go where the Building Product stage was accomplished by one person, the founder of course. That is not typical.

What is typical is a team of five or less. The founder/CEO is usually the product manager. There is often a technical co-founder who leads the development team. And there are often several developers (two or three).

Target May Add Apple Mini-Stores

Michael Moe — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:45:13 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio started 2012 up 1.5%, while the NASDAQ was up 2.7%, and the S&P 500 up 1.6%.

Apple could be adding mini stores to Target's mega stores in the near future, according to sources familiar with Apple's plans. The stores-within-stores will help Apple reach geographic locations it doesn't cover. Target has 1,752 stores in the U.S., and Apple could be in as many as 25 to start. For the week, AAPL advanced 4.3%.

Why The Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA

Steve Blank — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:03:16 +0000

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

Announce Your Financing In Conjunction With Your Form D Filing

Brad Feld — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:37:36 +0000

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the importance of a company announcing a financing in the absence of any other activity. “Dear World: We Just Raised $X From Investors A, B, and C.” Ok, but so what?

In my book, there is only one real reason for this – to attract new potential employees: “We’ve just raised $X and are hiring 20 people including types A through types Q – see our jobs page at jobs.companyname.com and apply now.”

America's Biggest Startup And Its Lessons

Ben T. Smith IV — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:02:35 +0000

Can you name America’s largest startup? It’s not Facebook or Amazon or even Home Depot. It isn’t even a technology company.

This little known giant is the Transportation Security Administration and its massive scale up offers a roadmap for entrepreneurs eager to turn big ideas into sustainable businesses.

The secret isn’t just a clear mission or a risk-taking culture, though both are important. For us, building an organization at breakneck speed - and returning a jittery public to the skies – meant rapid business model experimentation and imposing a strict methodology for measuring progress each step of the way.

Enterprise Software Companies Poised to Grow More Quickly than Ever Before

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:34:01 +0000

Happy New Year everyone! I blog every day that I work, and this is my first day back in the office. It is good to be back. I’m optimistic that we can all do some good stuff in 2012 – there were a lot of pockets of growth in tech last year and I don’t think the worsening economic climate will change that (although a booming economy would make life easier).

This is a time of year when people take stock, look at trends and make predictions for 2012 and I’ve been reading a lot of what has been written. Figuring out what is going to be big in the next 2-3 years is, after all, my business.

Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Mark Suster — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:12:39 +0000

There are certain topics that even some of the best journalists can’t fully grok. One of them is profitability.

I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!”

I mention journalists here because they perpetuate the myth that focusing on profits is ALWAYS the right answer and then I hear many entrepreneurs (and certainly many “normals”) repeating the same mantra.

Profitable: To Be Or Not To Be?

Fred Wilson — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:33:21 +0000

Mark Suster has a great post on this topic. In typical Mark fashion, it is long, with a lot of detail and substance. I highly recommend all entrepreneurs take the time to read it end to end.

For those who won't take the time to read it end to end, I'll summarize it.

Many high growth companies can be profitable. They have enough revenue to cover their essential costs and could easily decide to show a profitable income statement. But they don't make that choice.

Investing in a 501(c)3 Mega Profitable BCS Bowl

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:43:19 +0000

Some people need a vacation after their vacation.

I'm on vacation, and I have to do some work—or so it feels like. You see I am a VC so when I go to a cocktail mixer, it feels like my job because my job is to network. I get to go to the best bowl game parties because I am a douchie VC GP.

Kids are using douchie as an adjective to describe something positive and lucrative as "douchie" so I guess I'm double douchie.

Views on Corporations and Taxes

Mark Cuban — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:13:16 +0000

I understand why CEOs of public corporations take advantage of every opportunity to condemn taxes. The lower the tax rate, the greater the after tax profit. The greater the after tax profit, the greater the share price. The greater the share price, the closer they come to or exceed “their number”. You know, the number. The share price times the number of shares they effectively own when everything is awarded and vested. It is the number they need to be able to live the life they want to become accustomed to.

The Cloud and the Great Data Center Race

Greg Ness — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:40:54 +0000

In the same way that the rise of the Internet led to the enterprise web (web-enabled enterprise applications) the public and private cloud is driving IT to new modes of operation, most of which demand more agility, more capacity and an even keener focus on operating and capital expenses. This profound tension -between a substantial evolution in demands on IT and an extended period of economic doldrums- has placed CIOs in the crossfire.

Apple Leads December Mobile Purchases

Michael Moe — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:35:20 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio fell 0.7% last week, while the NASDAQ was down 0.5%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.6%. The AO X Fund finished 2011 up 4.6%, the NASDAQ was down 1.8%, and the S&P 500 was flat at -0%.

New rumors arose that the new iPad 3 will come in two different models and will be out as soon as Q1 2012. Impressively, Apple's iPad and iPhone users accounted for 92% of all mobile purchases in December in the U.S. For the year, AAPL finished up 25.6%.

Poor Semiconductor IPOs Point to Changing Future

johnblyler — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:09:07 +0000

This year was not kind for initial public offering (IP0) activities. In the past, IPOs represented the main mechanism for venture capital (VC) firms, banks and other investor types to recoup their investments in promising start-up companies.

Fewer successful U.S. IPOs will be realized this year than in 2010, reports the Wall Street Journal. Further, the amount of money raised this year was about 40% less than in 2007, which represented the high point in IPO ventures.

My Two Cents on CEO Pay

Mark Cuban — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:03:22 +0000

There is a game played by CEOs with the corporate issuance of lottery tickets. Otherwise known as stock. Stock can be issued in any number of ways, shapes or forms. Warrants, options, restricted or unrestricted stock. No matter what you call it, every CEO hired, is asking for equity knowing that their only goal is to hit the jackpot and create a pool of wealth that puts them in the “fuck you” wealth category. Thats enough money to buy or rent just about anything you can think of and put you in position to never have to work again. You just live off the cash in the bank.

Mocked And Misunderstood

Fred Wilson — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:41:49 +0000

When people ask me, "how do you know which companies and services are going to be the biggest successes?", I usually tell them to look for the companies and services that are mocked and misunderstood. For some reason, that correlates highly with the biggest breakout successes.

Twitter is a great example of this. For years, every post, column, or article written about Twitter would have comment after comment making fun of a service where people "told the world what they had for lunch."

The 2011 Cloud Market in Review

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:02:47 +0000

A year ago, I published a series of 10 predictions regarding how the Cloud Computing marketplace would evolve in 2011 in E-Commerce Times. Here’s a recap and assessment of my predictions:

The Cloud Computing market will grow more rapidly than analyst firms forecast as organizations move from asking “what is Cloud and why is it important” to “where and how can I capitalize on the Cloud today.”

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Why Startups Innovate Better Than Big Companies

Ben T. Smith IV — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:25:34 +0000

With all their resources and talent, why do big companies have trouble innovating? How can a Blekko exist when there is a Google? Or a Tapulous when there is an Electronic Arts?

Even more puzzling, why couldn’t Yahoo create Facebook with Yahoo 360 instead of losing out to a 20-year-old kid from Harvard? A lot of innovation comes from tiny teams with only $100,000 in the bank, or often a lot less. The reason is they don’t fear breaking the rules.

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The Amazing Power of Deflationary Economics for Startups

Mark Suster — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:03:40 +0000

I’m often asked by people what investment areas interest me.

It’s true that I have a functional focus on three areas: Performance-based marketing, digital television and mobile computing. I try to invest in things that I know and that I believe I might have better knowledge and relationships than the masses of VCs.

I have other areas of interest & competence such as cloud computing and document management given my background.

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The Business Model Canvas

Steve Blank — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:26:20 +0000

The Lean LaunchPad class for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps is a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part two. Part one is here. Syllabus here.

The 21 NSF teams had been out of the classroom for just 15 hours as they filed back in with their business model canvas presentations. Their assignment appeared (to them) to be deceptively simple:

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Some Thoughts On The IPO Market For Web Companies

Fred Wilson — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:02:49 +0000

We have an IPO market for web companies again. I don't have all the names in front of me, but this year has brought IPOs for Pandora, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, and TripAdvisor. These five companies are all trading for north of $1bn market cap. Pandora is at ~$1.5bn. LinkedIn is at ~$6bn. Groupon is at ~$15bn, Zynga is at ~$7bn, and TripAdvisor is at ~$3.5bn.

We can (and surely will in the comments) argue about these valuations. Some will say they are too high. Some will say they are too low. That's what makes a market. But in the aggregate, these valuations do not seem ridiculous to me.

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Make Time for Time

Tony Tjan — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:02:59 +0000

"Donner du temps au temps," the late French President François Mitterrand used to say. "Give time for time." The notion being that you need to make time in order to appreciate the ultimate gift we have been given: time on this earth. Every day, we make conscious and less conscious choices on time allocation. Some uses of our time are routine — dropping off kids, eating meals, or going for a daily run. In between those routines, we look to our agendas to see what we are meant to be doing, whom to meet, when and where to go next.

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Building Startups Is Cheap But Never Run Out of Cash

Ben T. Smith IV — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:54:19 +0000

Internet startups have been getting cheaper to build for 10 years. So why is it more important than ever not to run out of cash?

We built MerchantCircle into one of the 100 most trafficked U.S. sites and I honestly never remember signing a purchase order for more than $10,000. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t fear the ever-present prospect of running out of money.

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The Web May Not Prevail

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:01:58 +0000

Regular readers will know that I’m a strong believer in open standards. I think they provide the best platform for innovation and are the best protection against monopolists. Hence I would love it if the open web prevailed, and the rising power of gatekeepers like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and even Google annoys me as a consumer and worries me as an investor.

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The End of the Web? Don't Bet on It. Here's Why

Mark Suster — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:55:08 +0000

Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below.

The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N).

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2012: The Year When Traditional Retail Really Starts to Hurt

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:50:57 +0000

A few things recently have made me think that traditional retail is nearing the beginning of the end. That isn’t to say it will disappear, but I think it will undergo some fundamental changes.

Perhaps most notable development was Amazon’s Price Check Promotion which offered a 5% discount to shoppers in traditional stores who looked up items using its Price Check App and then made a purchase through the online retailer. I love the way this combines a compelling offer with a bold statement about the superior economics of online retail (more of which below). Unsurprisingly it has been very popular.

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How Much To Burn While Building Product

Fred Wilson — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:51:36 +0000

In last week's MBA Mondays, I wrote about burn rates at three stages of a startup. The first stage is what I called "Building Product Stage" and I suggested that a burn rate of $50k/month was appropriate for that stage.

I got a fair bit of pushback in the comments for that part of the post. My favorite push back came from The Kid, who said:

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The Government Starts an Incubator: The National Science Foundation Innovation Corps

Steve Blank — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:39:43 +0000

Over the last two months the U.S. government has been running one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II.

They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S.

This week we saw the results.

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Getting a Mindful from Gartner Summit: Virtualization, Networks and Data Centers

Greg Ness — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:40:32 +0000

Earlier this month I attended the Gartner Data Center Summit, and sat in on several presentations, including David Cappuccio’s intro keynote on data center trends and Neal MacDonald’s session on virtualization security. I apologize in advance for the breadth of my rambling and speculation, but I think the IT revolution playing itself out will mark the evolution of virtualization into the network and into private clouds built within a new type of elastic data center. While I cite two excellent Gartner presos the following thoughts are my own extrapolations.

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How Do VCs Make Investment Decisions?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:21:11 +0000

Most VCs are secretive about the detail of their decision making processes. Some have spent a lot of time thinking about it and regard their processes as a core part of their IP whilst others are reluctant to share because they haven’t thought about it and don’t have too much to say. For these reasons it is hard to get a complete picture of how decisions are taken in the industry as a whole, and this post is based on what I’ve observed across the two partnerships I’ve worked in, one we acquired, what I’ve seen at DFJ in the Valley, what my friends at other funds have told me, and the small amounts I’ve read on the web.

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Let Me Introduce Myself

Mark Suster — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:31:41 +0000

I am a big believer in VC pitches that the bio slide should come up front. Actually, I think the advice in this post applies to any sales meeting also.

The short answer is that by knowing the key members of the management team the VC firm can quickly identify strengths on your time and know whether you have some competitive advantage in your chose field relative to other people with whom you will compete.

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Code Red

Brad Feld — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:20:31 +0000

Many of the companies that we invest in are the leaders in their respective markets. Often they create the market. Sometimes they appear out of no where and dominate. And sometimes they are in a brutal fight every day with another company or two for market leadership. We don’t care which case it is – we just want to be investors in the companies that are #1 or #2 (and have a chance to be #1) in their markets.

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Someone Come Please Setup My Sonos

RemmingtonOxleyV — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:13:54 +0000

I invest in technology.

I don't set up technology.

This Sonos system I got via my friend MC Hammer's recommendation. It has multiple-room functionality that I can use to control the music in my house using my wife's iPhone—SO COOL.

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Some Thoughts On The Louis CK "Experiment"

Fred Wilson — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:32:32 +0000

Since the early days of this blog, it has been filled with musings on how creativity will be rewarded in the internet age. It is a theme I've come back to again and again. These thoughts have worked their way into our investment thesis and our portfolio. Investments like Etsy, Kickstarter, SoundCloud, and many others have come from this line of thinking.

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Five Reasons Why It's Time for CIOs in Mid-Sized Businesses to Move to the Cloud

Jeff Kaplan — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:30:45 +0000

Despite numerous market research forecasts predicting that small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) would be in the vanguard of adopting today’s rapidly expanding array of Cloud-based services, the truth is that most mid-sized businesses have been slow to join the migration to these ‘on-demand’ alternatives.

In too many cases, it has been hesitancy or even overt resistance among IT decision-makers within mid-sized businesses which has let to these organizations staying away from Cloud services.

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The Startup Team

Steve Blank — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:56:15 +0000

Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds
SEAL Team saying

Over the last 40 years Technology investors have learned that the success of startups are not just about the technology but “it’s about the team.”

We spent a year screwing it up in our Lean LaunchPad classes until we figured out it was about having the right team.

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The Remmy Oxley F.u.c.y.V.C. Algorithm

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:06:13 +0000

I have an algorithm. An effing algorithm.

Literally.

What I mean is that my investment thesis is very much influenced by whom you are banging.

It actually is a sex algorithm based on pattern recognition—whom you're banging and how it relates to my investment growing. I am serious. As my father, R4Ox4, taught me: "Bang less, get ahead."

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CEOs Must Lead

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:00:29 +0000

The difference between success and failure for companies is making the right decisions – no surprises there. Another truism is that making the right calls is often a subjective process, with no right or wrong answer. Decisions like whether to hire candidate A or B, or what your budget should be for next year are at least in part matters of gut feel, and inevitably there will be times when the CEO disagrees with the rest of the board.

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Freedom To Innovate

Fred Wilson — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:59:49 +0000

For something like seventeen years, I have been investing in entrepreneurs who have had the freedom to innovate on the Internet. It has been a powerful life lesson for me. These people imagine something, they create it, and they are off and running building a business, hiring employees, generating cash flow. They ask nobody for permission. They don't need any permits. They don't need any real estate. All they need is a server (now rented in the cloud from Amazon and others) and a laptop or two and they are good to go.

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The 2011 Power Players West

Tony Perkins — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:20:35 +0000

The AlwaysOn Power Players West list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support the entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to a connected, savvy, mobile world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Silicon Valley an incubator for success, creating strong companies, building indispensable products, and bringing prosperity to the world economy.

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Eight Steps To Mastering Small Company Acquisitions

Ben T. Smith IV — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:55:32 +0000

One of the biggest misconceptions in technology is that small acquisitions are less risky and require less attention than large ones. It is not true.

When Reply bought my company, MerchantCircle, in May it put several of my top execs in key financial and legal roles. The move was a clever way to bridge the two companies without burdening either team with integration chores.

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I Wanna Invest! But I'm Hiring Your Girlfriend First

RemmingtonOxleyV — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:00:45 +0000

HALF MOON BAY, CA—So I have my ear to the ground to make sure I'm at the forefront of venture.

I'm an arrogant ass because I kick ass.

But here at the cushy Ritz Carlton, I found myself naked, floored, flanked, and completely outmaneuvered.

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Burn Rates: How Much?

Fred Wilson — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:25:44 +0000

In the comments to last week's Burn Rate post, I was asked to share some burn rates from our portfolio. I can't do that. But an alternative suggestion was to write a post suggesting some reasonable burn rates at different stages. I can do that and so that's the topic of today's post.

The following applies to software based businesses, and most particularly web and mobile software businesses. It does not apply to hardware, life sciences, and energy startups. It is also focused on startups in the US. It costs less to employ teams in many other parts of the world.

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Google Apps Marketplace Ecosystem

Brad Feld — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:25:03 +0000

Recently my partners and I spent some time discussing three of our recent investments – Spanning, Yesware, and Attachments – which are each applications built on top of Google Apps. Specifically, they are built for Google Apps and available in the Google Apps Marketplace or the Chrome Web Store.

Each company is going after something very different. Spanning is all about cloud backup. Attachments is all about getting control of your email attachments. And Yesware is “email for salespeople.” However, they have one very significant thing in common – they are all deeply integrated into Google Apps. In our thematic definition, they are in the Protocol theme.

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Out with the Old and In with the New: A Story of Two Tech Giants

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:07:51 +0000

I was struck this morning by two headlines which summed up the recent successes and failures of two household tech names:

The Kindle Fire Is On Fire; Amazon Expected To Ship 3.9 Million This Quarter

RIM To Miss Earnings Goals After Half A Billion In PlayBook And Outage Charges

It is notable how everything that Amazon does these days plays out well, whilst pretty much everything Blackberry does is a disaster. The stock markets have noticed as well; at $8.7bn RIM’s market cap is now only 2.6x their net income in the year to February 2010, whereas Amazon’s $89bn market cap is over 100x their net income in the twelve months to September just gone.

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Go Vertical

Jeff Bussgang — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:54:30 +0000

Start ups are great barometers for the future. Those of us who spend our time immersed in the world of young companies are priviledged to get a glimpse of what's coming around the corner by meeting with entrepreneurs who are trying to bring the future forward.

In that context, I enjoyed USV's Christina Cacioppo's blog post, What Comes Next, where she summarized a few trends that are coming out of some of the start up incubators. I have also seen the componentization of software and the shift to independent work agents, the latter of which has interesting policy implications for a jobs-obsessed policymakers.

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Why I’d Rather Err on the Side of Direct Feedback Than Pleasantries

Mark Suster — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:53:43 +0000

A few weeks ago I was reading a blog post by MG Siegler that really struck a chord. The title was “The Jerk,” which is a reference to both the Steve Martin film but more precisely to Robert Scoble’s interpretation of Steve Jobs having just read his biography.

The gist of MG’s argument is that he’d rather work with people who are openly critical of his ideas if it helps him to perform better than to have a bunch of “yes men” around who just say what a great job he’s doing. I agree with that mentality. And the problem is that most people are “yes men” because it’s easier.

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What Are the Five Killer Things I Could do to Improve my Chances of Funding?

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:04:51 +0000

Have a great company! I almost put this point as a footnote rather than a member of the list because it is so obvious, but when I thought it through I figured that a lot of people go out to raise money when they are still working out for themselves whether they have a great company or not. That is ok, up to a point, but only up to a point. Most VCs understand that the product will iterate and the plan will change over time, and like to back entrepreneurs who will absorb and act on market feedback. But, they also want a Plan A which is exciting, and raising money before Plan A has been worked on enough to be compelling is always going to be tough. It is still possible (and I would say advisable if you can) to have discussions with VCs before Plan A is baked, but they should be couched as ‘getting to know you’, or ‘advice’ meetings as opposed to fundraising meetings.

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IP Developers Will Play Games

johnblyler — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:03:11 +0000

Gamification is moving from social media networks to technical sites for both motivational and generational reasons. Engineers will have to play to win.

Let’s play a little game. First, start with a noun. Let’s choose the noun, “game.” Now, add the suffix “ification” to the noun. The result is a new word (no longer a noun) that seems to add something more to the original meaning of the word. Wasn’t that fun? No? Well, it was at least engaging.

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Pattern Recognition at VC Parties

RemmingtonOxleyV — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:18:41 +0000

VCs are known to be expert pattern recognizers.

When you get pitched enough times, you start associating newbie startups with successful or non-successful investments. For example, startup X is like FoodSpotting for office furniture. Or startup Y is like Yelp, but for iPhone apps. Startup Z is like PeopleSoft, but as SaaS.

There is a pattern I observe this season. So many VCs host the exact same holiday party, with a super similar theme, with the same food, in the exact same location.

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Burn Rate

Fred Wilson — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:43:18 +0000

MBA Mondays is back after a week off. Today we are going to talk about burn rate, or cash burn rate to be more specific.

Your burn rate is the speed at which your cash balance is going down. If you had $1mm in cash on January 1st, and now it is October 1st and you have $250,000 left, your burn rate is $750,000/9, or $83,333/month. Just to be perfectly clear the $750,000 in this calculation is the amount of cash that has gone out the door ($1mm minus $250,000 is $750,000). And the 9 is the number of months that have transpired (January through September is nine months).

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Will Startup Jumpers Hit It Big?

Ben T. Smith IV — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:42:33 +0000

When gambling on high-risk startups, the more bets you place the better, right? Maybe not.

There is an unspoken discussion going on in Silicon Valley now about the value of “Portfolio” versus “Persistence,” especially among people who have never started a company. The claim is that you can improve the odds of a Facebook-like outcome by jumping from company to company until one hits, building a portfolio of startups (and stock options). I’ve even heard people scheme to switch startups every one or two years, ready to abandon the ship the moment the rain starts.

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Saving Time vs. Killing Time

Josh Kopelman — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:13:32 +0000

Over the years, we've met with thousands of entrepreneurs who were starting consumer Internet businesses. And as we listen to them describe their business, I find myself categorizing the opportunity. One of categorizations I've found most helpful has been to determine whether the company is looking to help people "save time" or help people "kill time".

Companies like Youtube and Zynga entertain people (and help them kill time) -- while companies like Google, LinkedIn and Mint.com are great utilities and help people save time (but users rarely visit them for without intent or for for pure entertainment). At First Round, we've funded both:

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SAP Finally Buys SuccessFactors. Is It Too Late?

Jeff Kaplan — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:12:47 +0000

For years, a variety of industry analysts and bloggers have suggested that SAP jumpstart its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader Cloud initiatives with a major acquisition, such as SuccessFactors. Today’s news that SAP will buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion shows that the company’s executives have finally admitted that they can no longer rely on internal development and organic sales efforts to gain a meaningful share of the rapidly growing SaaS/Cloud marketplace.

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Cheap Willl Be Smart. Expensive Will Be Dumb.

Fred Wilson — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:43:38 +0000

I wrote about this a while back but I've been refining and sharpening my thinking on the question of which devices will be smart and which devices will be dumb. It's an important question because it gets to what platforms developers should build on.

I believe that cheap devices will be smart and expensive devices will be dumb. Here's why:

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You'll Be Dead Soon - Carpe Diem

Steve Blank — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:42:52 +0000

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Steve Jobs

Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching them fail from a lack of nerve is tragic.

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YouTube Gets a Makeover

Michael Moe — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:52:26 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 6.6% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 7.6%, and the S&P 500 up 7.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is down 0.6%, the NASDAQ is down 8%, and the S&P 500 is down 7.9%.

Lululemon's Q3 results beat on EPS expectations, but missed slightly on revenues. EPS grew 50%, revenue grew 31%, and same-stores sales were up 16%, which is on top of a very strong +29% in the same quarter a year ago. E-commerce seems to be picking up, representing 10.4% of total revenue and growing at 71% in Q3. For the week, LULU was up 7.4%.

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It's Called Fishing, Not Catching

Ben T. Smith IV — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 17:38:20 +0000

It is called fishing and not catching, and it is the dirty secret of Silicon Valley. Unless your startup hits a grand slam, or you are its founder, CEO or a key engineer, your post-exit payday isn’t more than a few months salary. Then you may lose your job.

So why join a startup?

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Questions Limited Partners Should Ask VCs, But Don't

Larry _Chiang — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 17:37:38 +0000

LPs are miffed at VC results.

Limited partners (LPs) are the people who fund venture firms and financially back the general partners (GPs) that lead them. At secret annual LP meetings, LPs calculate total value paid in (TVPI), internal rate of return (IRR), digest confidential past results, test the waters on new funds, jockey themselves into better funds, and mentor their investor base as to what is new and emerging.

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The Challenges of Bringing an Operating Mindset to Venture Capital

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:13:57 +0000

I’ve had two conversations this week with people from entrepreneurial and operational backgrounds who are looking to become venture capitalists. They were smart people who I respect for their achievements and intellect, but I’m not sure their ideas about adding value to a portfolio of venture capital investments will work well in practice.

Before I start I want to make it clear that this isn’t a post about whether it is best for venture capitalists to have an operating or financial background – I think both can work.

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Announcing the 2011 Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 Top Private Companies

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:54:50 +0000

It's with great excitement that AlwaysOn announces the second annual Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 top private companies. The VSMA100 represents the best emerging companies from the mid-Atlantic region. This year's list is particularly dynamic, as the amazing growth that's being experienced all over the Global Silicon Valley is bringing a new surge of innovation to the mid-Atlantic region.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at Morgan Stanley, Duane Morris, SAP, Flybridge Venture Capital, Sequoia Capital, BlueRun Ventures, KPMG, Greycroft, and Canaan Partners, as well as industry experts across the globe, surveyed the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are challenging entrenched players and creating new, vital solutions that will lead to industry disruption and huge value-creation opportunities in the mid-Atlantic region.

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newBrandAnalytics Named Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 Company of the Year

Tony Perkins — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:12:58 +0000

newBrandAnalytics provides social business intelligence solutions for the hospitality, restaurant, and retail industries. The company's products are geared toward providing clients with guest satisfaction and loyalty, consumer intelligence, and competitive insight, letting service-industry businesses that traditionally operate on a very tight margin, leverage their customer base to build revenue.

newBrandAnalytics' flagship, enterprise-grade SaaS product, Social Guest Satisfaction, lets organizations whose bottom line is reliant on customer satisfaction identify key insights in real-time from guest feedback.

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Why Great Entrepreneurs Take Big Risks And Sometimes Get Fired

Ben T. Smith IV — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:06:22 +0000

I never met a great entrepreneur who was afraid of failure. Or who didn’t take over-sized risks to win big. This is why many get fired.

I spent the first 10 years of my career at A.T. Kearney, a long way from the risk taking that is Silicon Valley. Kearney, at 85, is one of the oldest consulting firms in the world. It is a tight partnership and people are rarely let go. Employees grow and develop, and some leave to become industry executives. But part of the culture is that managers shy away from firing colleagues.

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If You Don't Have a Discrete Hypothesis You Are Incapable of Failing

Mark Suster — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:05:39 +0000

There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. And there are very few people who so consistently exceed my expectations when I hear them speak. I find myself nodding – even when the topic is one I don’t expect to agree with such as “fail fast.”

This week was no exception. I interviewed Eric for an hour for - This Week in Venture Capital.

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Healthcare

Fred Wilson — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:06:37 +0000

A few weeks ago, I met with a VC who has been investing in healthcare for over 30 years. He asked if we invested in healthcare and I told him that we'd like to but we don't really know how to fit it into our investment thesis which is focused on large networks of engaged users disrupting large markets. Clearly healthcare is a large market, possibly the largest measured as a percent of GDP. But we haven't seen many large networks of engaged users emerging in healthcare.

A week later, I got an email from an entrepreneur I backed something like sixteen years ago. I think that his company was the very last healthcare investment I've made. He built an enterprise IT healthcare software company and sold it for a nice return. Then we mostly lost touch. He emailed me that he had a very exciting new opportunity to create a new software solution to managing costs in large hospitals.

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Trends in Silicon Valley Venture Financings

Fenwick and West — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 21:09:47 +0000

We analyzed the terms of venture financings for 113 companies headquartered in Silicon Valley that reported raising money in the third quarter of 2011.

Overview of Fenwick & West Results
Up rounds exceeded down rounds in 3Q11 70% to 15%, with 15% of rounds flat. This was an increase from 2Q11 when up rounds exceeded down rounds 61% to 25%, with 14% of rounds flat. Series B rounds were exceptionally strong, comprising 38% of the relevant rounds (Series A rounds aren't included as there is no prior round for comparison purposes), and 89% of the Series B rounds were up rounds. This was the ninth quarter in a row in which up rounds exceeded down rounds.

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Apple iTV a "Real Thing"

Michael Moe — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 21:00:37 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 5.2% last week, while the NASDAQ was down 5%, and the S&P 500 declined 4.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is down 0.6%, the NASDAQ is down 8%, and the S&P 500 is down 7.9%.

Russia's Yandex will become the default search engine for Windows phones sold in Russia. Yandex is already the default search engine on Samsung's Omnia. Nokia's Windows phones will hit stores in December, and HTC is also planning on having YNDX for its new phones sold in Russia. For the week, YNDX dropped 8.8%.

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Silicon Valley Is A Multi-Inning Game, Relationships Are How You Play

Ben T. Smith IV — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:44:36 +0000

I heard two things recently.

“Silicon Valley is a multi-inning game, relationships matter.“ And.

“I am all business, I don’t care about relationships.”

The first statement came from a seasoned venture capitalist with 20 years of experience. His point is relationships matter because you play with the same people over and over again.

The second was from the founder and CEO of one of his companies.

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Will a VC Bring in a Pro CEO Once the Round is Closed?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:14:35 +0000

The first thing to say here is that experienced investors rarely plan on bringing in a pro-CEO when they invest. It has become something of a cliche now, but backing good teams is probably the single biggest driver of returns for a VC fund, and if the CEO of a company isn’t good, then the team isn’t good. So rather than invest and plan to make a change most VCs would decline to invest.

However, companies change as they grow, and the requirements to manage them change as well, and the right person to run a company at the early stage isn’t always the right person to run it once it gets to 50 or 100 people, and other companies don’t perform and bringing in someone at the top with some new ideas can be the best way forward.

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Is Astroturfing Coming To Social Media?

Brad Feld — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:13:58 +0000

I hate astroturfing. I think think it’s the lamest form of promotion and advocacy possible. It’s the opposite of authenticity and the antithesis of the brilliance of Twitter.

Last week I tweeted about one of my investments and a number of people replied. After each reply, the founder of a competitor tweeted out his own message to the @replies that responded to me. After a few I became annoyed since his @replies were both (a) unwelcome and (b) cluttering up my stream. I considered blocking him but then decided to think about it some more.

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You Don't Have to Tweet to Twitter

Bill Gurley — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:19:22 +0000

[Follow Me on Twitter]

“In a brand new direction
A change of perception
On a brand new trajection”
- UB40

[Disclosure: Benchmark Capital is a major investor in Twitter, and my partner Peter Fenton sits on the Twitter BOD.]

Twitter is having a remarkable year. Active users have soared to over 100 million per month, with daily actives now above 50 million. Tweets per day are over 250 million. Most top actors, athletes, and artists are all active on Twitter. Every news and sports program proudly advertises its Twitter account handle. No one would consider running for public office without a strong Twitter presence. Global news in any region breaks first and spreads fast on Twitter. Even uber-socialist Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has 2.24 million followers (which puts him slightly behind Mandy Moore, but just ahead of Queen Latifah).

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Path to Revenues

Josh Kopelman — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:20:09 +0000

Last week I posted some data from our portfolio about the pace of seed-stage financings. And it sure looked like things are speeding up.

This week, I thought we'd take a look at the speed at which our companies generate revenue. Specifically, we took a look at the 14 investments we made in our first fund (which was a 2005 vintage)...and wanted to know how many of them generated at least $250K in revenue in the 18 month period post-investment. (I recognize that $250K and 18 months are arbitrary thresholds - but hey, we had to choose something).

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Smaller Companies and Larger Data Centers

Greg Ness — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:18:46 +0000

For months I’ve been preoccupied with Lew’s Law, or the theory that IT expenses over time will track to the cost of electricity (versus hardware, peoplepower, etc.) authored by Cisco Cloud CTO Lew Tucker and shared in early 2010 with the then-billowing Infrastructure 2.0 Working Group.

After watching an SAP webcast shared by Reese Jones via Facebook on The Coming Age of Abundance, it occurred to me that the near future will be driven by smaller companies producing more electrons per employee via larger and more efficient data centers. You can skip the theatrical intro and head to the discussion at about 40 minutes in for the most inspired content, although the entire discussion is worthwhile.

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Dollar Tree Reports Strong Q3 Results

Michael Moe — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:26:14 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 5.3% last week, while the NASDAQ was down 4%, and the S&P 500 declined 3.8%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 4.8%, the NASDAQ is down 3%, and the S&P 500 is down 3.3%.

Dollar Tree reported better than expected Q3 results, beating expectations by 4 cents, with EPS up 19% YoY and revenue up 12%. Same-store sales increased 4.8%, driven by strong Halloween sales. DLTR opened 93 new stores (net) during the quarter and has a total of 4,335 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Management said it expects revenue growth to be 33% in Q4 and 12% for the year. For the week, DLTR dropped 3.4%.

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Mobile Gatekeepers

Fred Wilson — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:46:59 +0000

One of the things we try to avoid in our investments is gatekeepers. We would prefer that a company has easy access to end users and doesn't need to navigate through a gatekeeper or a series of gatekeepers to get into the market.

Mobile internet investing has been tricky for as long as I have been doing Internet investing. Initially it was the carriers and handet manufacturers who controlled access to the end user.

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Europe's Autumn (or, Why You Can't Outrun Big Debt Forever)

Jeff Bussgang — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:51:23 +0000

"I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everyone."

--James Carville

The news out of Europe just goes from bad to worse. With debt levels so high and confidence in government so low, the bond market has come a knocking and is intimidating the heck out of European governments. Interest rates on sovereign debt soar (see chart below) when the trust in the sanctity of that debt, and the country’s ability to tighten their belt while growing out of it, plummet.

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10 Signs Internet TV is Ready to Disrupt the Industry

Mark Suster — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:00:45 +0000

I recently gave a talk about the Future of Television. I’m still planning to write some in depth pieces on the topic but I thought I’d do the quick version here.

Since this is about how video will consume the Internet over the next 5 years, what better way to exemplify this than with a 10-minute video? Here’s a link to watch it or click the image above (Sorry for speaking so quickly. I was given the impossible task of covering this in just 10 minutes.) The the text summary is below.

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Who Are the Power Players Out West?

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:52:01 +0000

Behind every successful Internet and mobile technology startup is a handful of power players guiding the founders. Smart and aggressive folks like Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway or the celebrated Sean Parker may give you a kick start, super attorney Bob Gunderson might draw up and help you ink your Series A financing, or KPCB's John Doerr might chip in some expansion capital and join your board. In celebration of these key insiders, AlwaysOn is seeking nominations for your favorite Power Player.

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Scientists Unleashed

Steve Blank — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:50:09 +0000

Some men see things as they are and ask why.
Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

George Bernard Shaw

We’re in the middle of our National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class – taking the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and teaching these scientists the basics of entrepreneurship. Our goal is to accelerate the commercialization of their inventions. Our Lean LaunchPad class teaches scientists and engineers that starting a company is another research project that can be solved by an iterative process of hypotheses testing and experimentation built around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. It’s “the scientific method” applied to startups.

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Business Arcanery: Going Concern

Fred Wilson — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:30:25 +0000

We got so many ideas for this Business Arcanery series on MBA Mondays that I'm not going to do it as a series. I am going to do one of these every month. There is enough business arcanery out there that I could do a years worth of weekly posts without running out of material.

We'll start with the term "going concern." What the hell is a going concern?

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While the Exits Keep Coming the Party Will Keep Rolling

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:23:30 +0000

Data just out shows that Q3 was a great quarter for M&A. As you can see from the charts below total deal value and average deal size were up quarter on quarter and year on year and deal volumes are also pretty robust. On top of that Groupon finally went public (pricing at $20, above its expected range of $16-18), Zynga is expected to list after Thanksgiving, and Yelp announced this week that they have appointed bankers and are expected to IPO in Q1.

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Priceline Up, with Strong Q3 Earnings

Michael Moe — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:25:45 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 2.2% last week, while the NASDAQ was down 0.3%, and the S&P 500 was up 0.8%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 13.1%, the NASDAQ is up 1.3%, and the S&P 500 is down 0.4%.

Priceline.com reported strong earnings, beatings expectations by 66 cents, with EPS growth of 45% and revenue growth of 45% in Q3. Total bookings increased by 56%, with the international segment up 64% and domestic up 13%. Global hotel nights grew 47%, rental car days increased 36%, and airline ticket sales grew 8%. Additionally, Priceline launched Tonight-Only deals, which let last-minute travelers choose the hotel they want to stay the same night and still get the Priceline discount. For the week, PCLN was up 3.9%.

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Minimum Viable Entrepreneur Experience for VCs

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:13:37 +0000

Moving from associate or principal to partner is tough. I wrote about it before.

According to Steve Blank, VCs without startup experience lack "steel in their eyes."

Steve Blank recommends solving the problem by funding the associate with $500,000 to train a partner. Well, I observe that VC firms (mine included) would rather acquire a partner versus spend $500,000.

The problem weighs on the non-partner much more that it does on the firm.

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Don't Forget To Bootstrap

Brad Feld — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 03:02:47 +0000

I recently spent some time with a long time friend and entrepreneur who I’ve funded in the past. He’s working on a new company which I think is really neat and I’m already a user of. He called me for feedback on his fundraising strategy as well as to see if it’s something that we’d be interested in investing in.

It’s outside our themes and different than the type of business we invest in. Given our long relationship and the fact that he’s an awesome entrepreneur, I squinted hard at one of our themes, turned my head sideways, and decided to take a look.

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Mobile: Why The Balance Will Shift Back from Browsers to Apps for Commerce

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:09:33 +0000

I love using the Amazon iPhone app and this weekend I tweeted about how good the British Airways app is, but what I don’t want is to have an app on my phone for every retailer I use. That would be a navigation nightmare – already I find myself swiping left and right through pages of application icons looking for the one I want, and the problem has actually got worse since I upgraded to iOS 5 and took the chance to halve the number of apps on my phone because the apps are in a different order now. I had a short period of using folders, but I grew tired of the work needed to keep a folder structure organised. I suspect most people are like that.

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Launchpad LA Receives VC Funding: $50,000 Per Startup

Mark Suster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:16:26 +0000

Launchpad LA today announces it will accept applications for its third class of Los Angeles-based tech startups. We have significant VC commitments (listed below) – every entering company will get $50,000 in funding, mentorship from top VCs and successful entrepreneurs plus free office space. For any company interested in applying please visit the website.

History
For the past 2.5 years there has been an initiative in Los Angeles called Launchpad LA.

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CEO Showcase: RewardMe

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:52:47 +0000

RewardMe delivers real-time CRM solutions and applies them at the point-of-sale of local businesses, boosting per-store revenues equivalently. RewardMe's SocialCRM solution uses the data most businesses capture at point-of-sale to add powerful cross-sell/up-sell, personalization, basket abandonment, and VIP CRM techniques—in-store, online, and on-the-go.

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Another Day, Another Patent Troll

Brad Feld — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:45:49 +0000

These days I’m regularly exposed to patent trolls. Sometimes I read about them, sometimes friends email me about them, and sometimes companies I’m an investor in gets sued by them. Whenever I read the claims in the lawsuits, I often think that the claim in question is “obvious.” For those of you out there who know how patents are supposed to work, for something to be patentable it needs to be “non-obvious” as well as “unique.” While the specific claims may not be obvious to the patent troll, especially those who are lawyers who own patents they’ve picked up from other people (bankrupt companies, individuals who applied for and got a patent, patent factories), they are often extremely obvious to any software developer.

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CEO Showcase: Giggo

admin — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:24:27 +0000

Giggo is a bilingual group-buying platform focused on the U.S. Latino market as well as those that embrace the Latino culture. Currently, Giggo offers bilingual hyper-local daily deals for U.S. Spanish speakers. For merchants, Giggo has developed two apps. First is a tool for Spanish-speaking merchants to generate creative ads. Giggo's second app is a merchant application that makes Web presence management simple. Giggo's ad generation tool leverages social media to enable merchants (and others) to try various ad formats.

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Don't Send That Email. Pick up the Phone!

Tony Tjan — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:16:18 +0000

Around this time last year, I wrote about how we need to get back to allowing conversation to occur without texting, emailing, browsing, Tweeting, Facebooking, or doing whatever else zeros and ones can do these days on smart phones, iPads, notebooks, etc. I am as guilty as the next person of falling for the perception that any response latency is unacceptable. As 2012 fast approaches, this needs to go on top of my New Year's resolution list: focus on the live conversations at hand, rather than parallel conversations on the Blackberry screen.

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CEO Showcase: Pocket Literacy

admin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:47:29 +0000

Pocket Literacy Coach is a text-messaging service designed for parents of two to 12 year olds. The PLC sends a daily text message to parents' cell phones with short literacy lessons that they can use with their children to help them build their emerging literacy skills. These mini-lessons, designed by a PhD literacy scholar and team of teachers, provide parents with creative and fun research-based lessons to use with their kids.

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LinkedIn Plans Follow-On Offering

Michael Moe — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:03:40 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 1.3% last week, while the NASDAQ was down 1.9%, and the S&P 500 were down 2.5%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 13.1%, the NASDAQ is up 1.3%, and the S&P 500 is down 0.4%.

Herbalife posted 49% EPS growth, 30% revenue growth, and raised its 2011 full-year guidance. Volume growth was the best in five years, up 23%. Geographically, South America and Asia Pacific were the fastest growing regions, with revenue up 40% and 36%, respectively. For the week, HLF was down 2.3%.

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Play Golf with the West-Coast Power Players

admin — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 19:03:23 +0000

Just announced, AlwaysOn, KPMG, and some of the most powerful players in Silicon Valley will be playing in the first annual Power Player West Golf Tournament on the first day of Venture Summit Silicon Valley 2011 in beautiful Half Moon Bay. Join us the day before the official even starts—December 12th—at the Rizt Carlton in Half Moon Bay, CA. Not only will you get to play with some of the hottest VCs, entrepreneurs, and power players on the West Coast, you'll get to challeng your game on this world-class course, steeped in natural beauty.

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8 Questions LPs Should Ask GPs (But Don't)

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:18:21 +0000

It's that time of year: annual investor meetings for LPs.

We know the uber, uber basic questions. So dull. Here are the questions LPs should be asking:

Any MIA divorced partners?

What matters more, entrepreneur experience or operations experience?

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What Are the Five Biggest Pitfalls to Avoid During Negotiations?

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:14:03 +0000

I just brainstormed common pitfalls that entrepreneurs fall into during negotiations with my partner Richard Marsh. The top five are listed below, in rough order of importance/frequency of occurrence.

Focusing on the wrong points/ignoring any of the most important terms
In previous posts I listed out the key terms in a termsheet (see here and here). A common mistake is to focus on other areas, either at the termsheet stage of negotiations or when the definitive documents are being agreed. There are a great many points that need to be discussed and many of them are complicated to understand and it can be easy to get excited about the wrong points. Wasting energy and goodwill on clauses of minor significance will weaken your position on other points and is a classic negotiating error.

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CEO Showcase: Gogobeans

admin — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 21:02:40 +0000

Gogobeans is a content-sharing solution bridging the gap between the Internet and mobile worlds. Gogobeans Digital Locker and social networking tools give customers easy solutions to managing their growing digital world. Beans are the symbol that represents each and every item of content customers have in their locker.

Each Bean is the same size in a user's private Internet world, even if the content it represents is a single line of text or a full-length feature movie.

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Top 5 Scaling Lessons From Superhero CEOs

Jeff Bussgang — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:12:55 +0000

Scott Kirsner of The Boston Globe called them the startup equivalent of the Justice League of America. Seven superhero CEOs gathered on Friday afternoon at the Mass TLC Unconference to discuss the challenges of scaling their young companies. The CEOs on the panel were (from left to right):

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Steel In Their Eyes – Why VCs Should Be Startup CEOs

Steve Blank — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 21:11:52 +0000

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Mark Twain

Venture Capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year. Running a company is distinctly different from simply having operating experience – (working in bus dev, sales or marketing.) None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “Hail Mary” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster.

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VP Engineering vs. CTO

Fred Wilson — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:11:01 +0000

Last week on MBA Mondays I posted about the difference between CFO and VP Finance. In the comments to that post, I was asked about VP Eng vs CTO and I figured that had the makings of a good post too. So here we go.

Like VP Finance & CFO, the differences in the two positions are not just about seniority. In fact, in the case of CTO and VP Eng, seniority is often a non-factor. They are often peers. A VP Eng can report to a CTO. And a CTO can report to a VP Eng (although this last one is less frequent).

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We Have Only Scratched the Surface of the True Value of Twitter. Here's What You're Missing

Mark Suster — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:40:39 +0000

I have written extensively about Twitter in the past. I still find that many people don’t understand the basics. If you consider yourself a newbie, please check out a group of posts that I’ve done in the past that might make you feel more comfortable with what is unique about Twitter.

In this post I want to talk about a Twitter that I see beyond what is visible to most Twitter users today. Call it “Strategic Twitter.”

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A Common Misconception about Venture Capital

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:39:25 +0000

The Friday before last I was on an investor panel at the Like Minds conference down in Exeter. As I’ve mentioned before I do these panels in the hope of making the process of raising money more widely understood and therefore easily accessible, thereby encouraging more entrepreneurs to start companies. You can find a liveblog of the panel here, and the picture on the left shows me on stage at the event with Sam Sethi of Skadoo.sh.

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Protecting The Safe Harbors Of The DMCA And Protecting Jobs

Fred Wilson — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:40:16 +0000

My partner Brad and I spent Thursday in DC along with a bunch of entrepreneurs and VCs. We talked to dozens of our elected officials about an issue that is very concerning to us, protecting the safe harbors of the DMCA.

The DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It received unanimous support in the Senate and was signed into law by President Clinton in 1998. It is a complex piece of legislation but it contains four "safe harbors" for "network service providers. The four safe harbors are explained here. "Network service providers" is shorthand for web services. Companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are "network service providers."

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SayAhh's Expense Projections

Brad Feld — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 01:39:26 +0000

While Jane was building SayAhh’s revenue projections, Dick focused his attention on building the expense side of the projections. He procrastinated for a few weeks because he was deep in product development, but surfaced a few days ago when he realized they had an investor meeting coming up and really should have at least a basic financial model ready in case the investor asked about it.

Before building his projections, Dick needs to make three main decisions:

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Crunch Time in the Clouds

Greg Ness — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:59:55 +0000

Two key industries industries face massive disruption in the coming years as IT becomes ever more strategic to enterprise operating advantage, and IT infrastructure scales to new levels of complexity and dynamism. The future of IT will likely be created by those who accelerate the pace of automation and who build more energy-efficient, scalable data centers.

Setting the Stage: Clouds and Networks

A few years ago ARCHIMEDIUS covered a cloud computing war shaping up between emerging private cloud players like VMware and Cisco and the public cloud players (Amazon and Google, etc.) who at the time owned most of the cloud mindshare. This high level mindshare battle distracted many from critical issues, not unlike how the dotcom milieu had a way of masking business issues.

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The Controversial First Role to Hire After Your A Round

Mark Suster — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:59:09 +0000

I’ve thought a lot about team construction of early stage companies.

I was once asked on Quora what my idea startup team would be. I wrote the following:

“I like to invest at the seed or A round. My ideal team is simple:

Assuming 6 people
1. 5 engineers
2. 1 CEO who doubles as head of product management
3. Nothing else

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Yandex Moves Russian Search into the Forefront

Michael Moe — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:20:15 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 4.4% last week, while the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 were up 3.8%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 14.6%, the NASDAQ is up 3.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 2.2%.

Amazon reported Q3 results that were lower than expected by Wall Street analysts and caused the stock to drop more than 10% on Wednesday. Nevertheless, the company had strong revenue growth, up 44%, with Kindle Fire sales twice as strong as the previous version's launch. Also, Amazon's cloud growth is accelerating, with 370,000 items stored per second at peak times. For the week, AMZN was down 7.4%. We are now adding 1% to our position.

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When A Company Is Too Close For Comfort

Fred Wilson — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:10:07 +0000

It seems like more and more, we are seeing interesting companies emerge that are operating in the same or directly adjacent market spaces to our portfolio companies. In this situation, we exercise great care to make sure we aren't backing two companies who will eventually find themselves in direct competition. That process isn't simple. Many entrepreneurs who have already secured venture capital view every company within a hundred miles of their business as competitive. Many entrepreneurs who haven't secured funding don't think anything is directly competitive.

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Entrepreneurial Communities Must Be Led By Entrepreneurs

Brad Feld — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 20:51:39 +0000

I’m about to head out to TechStars New York Demo Day. Our investment in SideTour – one of the TechStars New York companies – was announced yesterday and I’m excited to introduce them along with hanging out with all of the other great entrepreneurs from this session. If you’ve been watching the Bloomberg TechStars series, we are doing the finale tonight where we meet with all of the teams and see where they are six months after the program ended. It’ll be happening live at 9pm ET/PT.

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How the iPhone Got Tail Fins, Part 2

Steve Blank — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:47:50 +0000

Read part 1 of this post for background.

By the early 1920’s General Motors realized that Ford, which was now selling the Model T for $290, had an unbeatable monopoly on low-cost automobile manufacturing. Other manufacturers had experimented with selling cars based on an image and brand. (The most notable was an ad by the Jordan Car company.) But General Motors was about to take consumer marketing of cars to an entirely new level.

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How Should an Entrepreneur Approach Negotiation of the Key Terms?

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:53:53 +0000

My last post in the 50 Questions series was a mathematically dense explanation of how anti-dilution clauses work. This week I’m relieved to be back writing prose!

The most important term in the termsheet is without doubt the valuation. My advice here is to follow standard practice and let the VC be the first one to come up with a number. Letting the other side go first is text book best practice for negotiations – you never know, but you might just get a higher valuation than you were expecting. Most VCs will press hard for some kind of indication prior to putting in an offer, and if you feel you have a good handle on market rates for your type of company then giving an indicative range can help the process along, but I would avoid giving a precise figure.

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CEO Showcase: Nukotoys

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:48:34 +0000

Nukotoys is a new kind of toy company that's redefining toys for today's digitally fascinated kids and engaged parents. Today's kids are, by age 3, navigating an iPad with ease and have parents who want to their kids to benefit from this fascination. Nukotoys believes in giving kids fun, fantastical experiences that join online and real-world play, bringing the original social activity into the digital realm

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VP Finance vs. CFO

Fred Wilson — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:06:26 +0000

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to talk about the financial leader in an organization. Sometimes this person is called the VP Finance and sometimes they are called the CFO. What is the difference? When will a VP Finance do? And when do you need a CFO?

Like all titles, they can get mangled. A person might be promoted from VP Finance to CFO without exhibiting the characteristics I am going to ascribe to a CFO. That happens all the time. But if you really need a CFO and you have a VP Finance, you will know the difference.

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Take a Page From Ayn Rand

Jeff Bussgang — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:05:36 +0000

Fountainhead is one of my all time top ten favorite books. The lead character, Howard Roark is an independent-minded architect who bucks conventional wisdom and delivers buildings with vision and verve in the face of criticism and doubt – in short, a true entrepreneur.

One of my favorite scenes is when his antagonist, Ellsworthy Toohey, an obsequious newspaper columnist, captures a private one-on-one moment with Roark and asks him: "Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." Roark replies, “But I don’t think of you." The sentiment is simply delivered; no antagonism or emotion – Roark truly doesn’t even consider Toohey or other critics like him when embarking on his work.

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How the iPhone Got Tail Fins

Steve Blank — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:38:49 +0000

It was the most advanced consumer product of the century. The industry started with its innovators located in different cities over a wide region. But within 20 years it would be concentrated in a single entrepreneurial startup cluster. At first it was a craft business, then it was driven by relentless technology innovation and then a price war as economies of scale drove efficiencies in production. When the market was finally saturated the industry reinvented itself again – one company discovered how to turn commodity products into “needs.”

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Apple Raises Its Q4 Numbers

Michael Moe — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:56:22 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 2% last week, the NASDAQ fell 1.1%, and the S&P 500 gained 1.1%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 9.8%, the NASDAQ is down 0.6%, and the S&P 500 is down 1.5%.

Chipotle reported strong Q3 results with same store sales up 11.3% on stronger customer traffic. Revenue grew 24%, and earnings were up 25% YoY. Restaurant level operating margin was at 26.7%, down 1% vs. last year. CMG opened 32 new restaurants for a total of 1,163. For 2011, Chipotle is on track to have a total of 145 restaurant openings. CMG advanced 4% for the week.

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Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

Mark Suster — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:38:04 +0000

Today’s post courtesy of the Dave McClure school of vocabulary.

About a month ago I was meeting with a seasoned entrepreneur. After 10 minutes I felt like we were old buddies because we had both been through the trenches of startup tech land and had had similar experiences.

He was recounting one of his higher profile startups to me. He founded the company, raised a bunch of money, built the product and established a good reputation and market position. But five years into it he has brought on a senior management team, had stopped growing at the same meteoric rate and started to lose some enthusiasm.

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CEO Showcase: FunMobility

admin — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:40:36 +0000

FunMobility delivers a unique, integrated mobile entertainment experience through mobile multimedia applications that let users connect and express themselves through mobile photos, videos, music, graphics, and slideshows. FunMobility distributes applications through every North American carrier as well as direct to consumers through FunMo.com. FunMobility builds America's largest mobile content community through some of the wireless industry's most popular applications.

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Two Great Comments on Strategy at Startups

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:24:16 +0000

I started life as a strategy consultant, which has left me with an appreciation for the power of letting strategy drive your business, but also an appreciation of how difficult that can be to do well. Len Jordan from Madrona Venture Group has a guest post up on Techcrunch which describes a couple of common mistakes:

Firstly, on seeing the difference between errors in the strategy and problems with execution:

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Understanding How Dilution Affects You at a Startup

Mark Suster — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:51:03 +0000

Dilution. Or as industry insiders call it, “taking a haircut.”

Everybody knows that when you raise money at a startup your ownership percentage of the company goes down. The goal is to have the value of the startup go up by enough that you own a smaller percentage of a much larger business and therefore your total personal value goes up.

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Know Where You Are in the Cycle, but Don't Let It Knock You Off Course

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:25:23 +0000

Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures put up an interesting post on Friday about the importance of staying focused on your business and not getting distracted by the overall macro-economic picture or whether we are in a bubble or not.

I agree with this up to a point.

Roger titled the post ‘Know thyself’ and he starts with a seven point process for building a company which neatly captures what has become regarded as best practice over the last five years or so:

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Execution Is An Order Of Magnitude Easier Than Opportunity

Brad Feld — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:27:39 +0000

I heard a fascinating one-liner the other day that I had knee jerk negative reaction to but when I thought about it more thought was deeply insightful, especially in the context of big established companies vs. new entrepreneurial companies.

A CEO of a very large, successful company said “execution is an order of magnitude easier than opportunity.” In the context of young startups, I often feel exactly the opposite. Opportunity is everywhere, but execution in a bitch.

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Google Set to Hit 1 Million Android Activations

Michael Moe — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:20:35 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio soared 9% last week, the NASDAQ advanced 7.6%, and the S&P 500 gained 6%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 12%, the NASDAQ is up 0.6%, and the S&P 500 is down 2.6%.

Google was the first to announce its Q3 results, with impressive 33% revenue growth and 24% EPS growth. GOOG said it is activating 900,000 Android phones per day and will soon get to the 1 million per day mark. Android's revenue run rate is at $2.5 billion, up nearly 150% YoY. Google+ now has 40 million users. For the week, GOOG advanced 14.1%.

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Where Do I Get My VC Alpha

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:17:57 +0000

Seeking that ever-elusive alpha, is what I (and other VCs) am after. Alpha is return that is above and beyond regular investment returns. On Thursday, October 20, 2011, in San Francisco, I will be at Venture Alpha. I can't say if I am speaking or just attending because that would almost give my real identity away.

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Cool VCs Are Now Founders Too

RemmingtonOxleyV — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:50:32 +0000

"Hey, I am a founder, too!" This is a statement that does not go over so well when VCs charm and build rapport. I guess entrepreneurs don't see fundraising $200 million from an LP or five as very entrepreneurial. I digress.

Back to my article focus: Cool VCs are founders now too.

Tony Conrad, partner at True Ventures, now the founder of About.me.

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New York #2 to Silicon Valley in Hot Startups

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:49:53 +0000

Technology entrepreneurs are talking and Madison Avenue is listening. And what's emerging will change the face of advertising, branding, and content publishing. As the mobile social Internet has exploded during the last few years, New York has emerged as a leader in hot startups. AlwaysOn's sixth annual OnMedia NYC gives you the chance to meet the companies that are at the forefront of the next digital media wave.

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Why You Should Embrace Opposing Views at Your Startup

Mark Suster — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:30:20 +0000

What could you learn from looking at your competitors or other tech startups in a different way?

Are you cynical about their chances in the market just because they seem to be hot in the press and that bugs you? Or you think their startup is a passing fad and yours is the real deal?

I hear views like this all the time. Even if you’re right – there’s something you may be missing.

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Liquidation Analysis

Fred Wilson — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:29:24 +0000

Last week I pointed out that when your company is sold at price points around or below prices where you have financed your company then your proceeds in a sale transaction will not equal your fully diluted ownership percentage times the sale price. You will get less because some or all of the preferred shareholders will choose to take their liquidation preference instead of their percentage of the company.

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Netflix Redux: Is It Ever OK to Fire Your Customers?

Mark Suster — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:05:03 +0000

A month ago I applauded Reed Hasting’s bold decision to split his business into two components. Today he’s announcing that they’re backing out of this decision.

Netflix as a service has always prided itself on movie recommendations that are tailored specifically to you plus user ratings on the quality of films. So let me use their ratings system to judge their actions to date and explain how I think things will break in the future and why.

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SayAhh's Revenue Projections

Brad Feld — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 06:02:57 +0000

Since last checking in with the SayAhh team, they have spent a few months consumed with building an early version of the product and speaking to potential customers, all the while watching their cash balance steadily diminish. They realize the clock is ticking and have decided that it is time to create a robust set of financial projections in order to provide themselves with a better sense of when they will need to raise more money.

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The Performance and Prospects of European Venture Capital

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:48:49 +0000

Last week the European Investment Fund (EIF) released a thoughtful paper on The Performance and Prospects of European Venture. It is a comprehensive discussion and analysis of how European venture has performed and the main arguments put forward to explain the underperformance versus the US.

I agree with their conclusion, which has three strands:

European venture capital has performed badly over its history

The industry lacks critical mass and performance will improve as it scales

Venture capital needs to grow as part of the wider startup ecosystem, which will take time

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Great Board Meetings

Brad Feld — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:48:02 +0000

I’ve had a string of great board meetings lately. They all had several similar attributes.

There were no powerpoint slides: While each company has a substantive monthly reporting package, this was decoupled from the board meeting. I got my taste of financials, metrics, qualitative stuff, and whatever else the CEO wanted me to see on a monthly basis. But I read this independent of the board meeting (which wasn’t on a monthly cadence) and asked questions in reaction to getting the monthly reporting package rather than taking up air time in a board meeting.

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AlwaysOn and PACT Team Up in 2011

admin — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:47:14 +0000

PACT’s annual venture conference, IMPACT 2011, is the most established venture conference in the northeast. For over 20 years, IMPACT has been showcasing the best and most promising investment opportunities in the technology, life sciences, and clean technology sectors. IMPACT’s Featured Companies have raised more than a $1 billion in venture financing and are some of the region’s most recognizable names. Hosted by Duane Morris, IMPACT 2011 will be held on November 29th-30th at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, CA.

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Understanding Why Netflix Changed Pricing

Bill Gurley — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:11:16 +0000

Many journalists have offered their opinion on Netflix’s recent changes, its stock price decline, and their even more recent branding changes (Qwikster). Yet in each article, it appears as if the journalist all agree that the price move (creating separate prices for streaming and DVDs) was a bad strategic move. As an example, Techcrunch notes:

“Raising prices for those of us who opt for both streaming and DVDs would have been fine if Netflix had a deeper streaming catalog. But the gap is still too big, and the price hike seemed premature. Your customers are extremely loyal. Don’t piss them off.”

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Tips to Help you Think About Sales at Your Startup

Mark Suster — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:10:40 +0000

It’s the lifeblood of any organization and yet most startups don’t have any sales DNA on their teams. It’s important enough that I dedicate a tab on my blog to startup sales & marketing

This week I had the chance to have an hour-long discussion with Vince Thompson (ran West Coast sales for AOL for 7 years – back in the day when AOL was what Facebook is today) and Mo Ali, who has the awesome Twitter handle @BornToCall – runs sales at This Week In.

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Apple Launches the iPhone 4S

Michael Moe — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:06:53 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 1.1% last week, the NASDAQ advanced 2.7%, and the S&P 500 gained 2.1%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 2.8%, the NASDAQ is down 6.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 8.1%.

Apple launched the new iPhone 4S and also introduced the new iOS 5, which will add many cool features, such as Twitter integration, Notification Center, iMessage, Newsstand, Reminder, and more, to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. For the week, AAPL dropped 3.6%.

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Recent Facebook Changes Will Force Brands to be More Open and Transparent

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 13:55:46 +0000

I love social media for the way it gives power to the people and forces governments and brands to be more transparent and have more integrity. Now that everyone has a printing press the truth surfaces more quickly – not always and in all sectors, but there is a clear trend in that direction. Focusing in on brands and retail the result has been a decline in the importance of marketing and an increase in the importance of delivering a quality product and service.

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On IPOs: If You Are Going To File, Make Sure You Price

Bill Gurley — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 13:52:40 +0000

As you likely know, I am a big believer that the IPO can play a key role in the development of a company’s life. Moreover, I have argued that many in our ecosystem have an unhealthy anxiety regarding the dangers and consequences of being public. Lastly, I have argued that the IPO window is wide open for great companies – something I still believe today. All that said, I have been quite surprised by the recent trend in companies that file and then chose to delay. If you are going to file the S-1, it is imperative that you are prepared to follow through. Standing too long in the middle of the financial equivalent of the river Styx can have severe consequences.

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Digital Media Goes Global

admin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:22:06 +0000

OnMedia NYC will be taking place February 1st-2nd, 2012, where cutting-edge technology CEOs from the back streets of Silicon Valley meets the global advertising, publishing, and media establishments. This two-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.

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The Challenge of the Average Employee

Tony Tjan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:56:28 +0000

Most businesses have a normal distribution of talent — a limited number, say top 10 percent, of high potential, rock star performers, a bottom decile of underperformers, and a thick middle of 80 percent of folks who get the day-to-day stuff done. In well-managed businesses, there are clear feedback mechanisms to ensure that the bottom of the talent pack gets managed out efficiently and objectively. While at GE, Jack Welch popularized the notion that it was good to fire the "bottom 10" of his managers every year.

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Entrepreneurial Density Revisted

Brad Feld — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:51:45 +0000

I’m in San Francisco right now and then New York later this week. When I look at my schedule, and where I’m hanging out, I realize that even though I’m in two very big cities, I’m going to spending most of my time in a very small area.

When asked why Boulder is such a vibrant entrepreneurial community, I talk about a concept I call entrepreneurial density. Boulder is a small town – the city itself is only 100,000 people. Yet the number of entrepreneurs in Boulder is significant. And the number of people working for startups is off the charts. Start with the definition:

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CEO Showcase: App47

admin — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:13:51 +0000

App47 is a provides application intelligence for the mobile enterprise. App47's cloud-based mobile application management solution gives today's mobile enterprises the power they need to optimize the mobile user experience. App47 delivers an integrated, lifecycle approach to help enterprises quickly and securely deploy, manage, and analyze enterprise mobile apps-without compromising the privacy of enterprise data.

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The Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 Top Company Competition

admin — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:56:55 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual AlwaysOn Mid-Atlantic 100 competition. We're looking for the top emerging companies from the mid-Atlantic region that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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Why Aren’t There More Female Entrepreneurs?

Mark Suster — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:57:29 +0000

I’m often asked the question about why there aren’t more women who are entrepreneurs. On my blog I’ve been hesitant to take the topic head on. Somehow it seems kind of strange for a man to answer this question that obviously comes from a man’s point of view.

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Entrepreneur-Friendly Policies (Finally) Showing Promise, But Leadership Required

Jeff Bussgang — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 02:14:54 +0000

The policy conversation regarding jobs and economic development is starting to show some promising signs, particularly in helping young companies flourish. The fact that the entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical to job creation should be obvious, but there remains a misperception that small businesses create jobs. In truth, it’s not small business that represents the country’s job engine. It’s new businesses. The Kauffman Foundation’s research on this matter is clear: from 1997 to 2005, job growth in the US was driven entirely by start-ups. What this means is that any economic development effort must be framed in the context of the following central question: how can the government help more young companies be formed, grow faster and achieve long-term success?

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Top Trends In 2012 Up For Debate

admin — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 01:32:12 +0000

The combination of mobile, social and the cloud are crushing the way consumers and business are creating, sharing and storing information. Driving this disruption is a whole new generation of companies and entrepreneurs who represent some of the highest growth opportunities AlwaysOn has seen since we were founded. On December 13, the most influential VC's, corporate strategic partners and up-and-coming consumer and business Internet technology companies will congregate at the glorious Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay at AlwaysOn's sixth annual Venture Summit Silicon Valley, and you are invited!

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What Are the Different Types of Instruments VCs Use to Invest?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 01:13:30 +0000

You won’t be surprised to hear that VCs don’t use banjos, guitars or any other musical instrument to invest, rather we use ‘investment instruments’. Investopedia defines an investment instrument (aka a financing instrument) as “A real or virtual document representing a legal agreement involving some sort of monetary value. In today’s financial marketplace, financial instruments can be classified generally as equity based, representing ownership of the asset, or debt based, representing a loan made by an investor to the owner of the asset.”

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CEO Showcase: Gumiyo

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:33:37 +0000

Gumiyo's mission is to deliver any content to any device. The Gumiyo platform lets publishers, media companies, and technology companies create mobile websites, native apps, and messaging programs that extend content and technology products to mobile devices. Gumiyo specializes in content delivery, rich media mobile websites and applications, SMS marketing campaigns, mobilized data, and inventory integration.

Built upon a robust, flexible framework, the Gumiyo's Mobile Ready Platform is comprises a suite of mobile marketing and merchandising tools.

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CEO Showcase: Wmode

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:20:28 +0000

Wmode's mission is to expand the "widality" of apps across the entire app value chain by leveraging its 10 years of delivering app and media platforms to mobile carriers. The company's Widality business unit was set up to offer Wmode's carrier-grade solutions, technologies, and services to leading handset manufacturers, brands, ISVs, enterprises, and mobile app companies. Wmode works with its major clients to solve their app challenges including distribution, discovery, promotion, fulfillment, billing, settlement, analytics, and supply chain management.

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Why Email May Be Draining Your Company’s Productivity

Mark Suster — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:56:17 +0000

Email. Ah, email. That great productivity drain that we somehow all buy into. I’ve taken to saying, “Email is our personal to-do list that anybody adds to – whether they know us or not.”

I was lamenting it tonight when I saw the most brilliant response Tweet by Andrew Hyde

“inbox = tetris getting zero lines doesn’t win it just makes the next move easy.”

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Cap Tables

Fred Wilson — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:55:38 +0000

Cap Tables (short for capitalization tables) are spreadsheets that show how much everyone owns of the company. You can get a stockholder ledger from your lawyer that will list all the stockholders and show how many shares or options they have, but I don't consider that a cap table.

For the past 25 years, I've used a simple form, mostly given to me by the partners I worked for when I first entered the venture capital business in the mid-80s, but with a few modifications by me over the years. It looks like this (click on the image to enlarge):

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CEO Showcase: Locatrix

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:46:22 +0000

Locatrix delivers mobile value-added services and a broad portfolio of location-based solutions and services. The company develops mobile location-based and social networking apps that help mobile operators use network assets to add value to their customer experiences and enhance the user experience on social networks and the mobile Web, improving retention and ARPU metrics. Locatrix hosted solutions let tier-1 mobile network operators like Telstra provide engagement and ARPU-generating location-based and social networking solutions for its subscribers.

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Amazon Announces the Kindle Fire

Michael Moe — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:48:06 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was down 5.4% last week, the NASDAQ dropped 2.7%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 1.6%, the NASDAQ is down 9%, and the S&P 500 is down 10%.

Amazon revealed its highly anticipated tablet, the Kindle Fire, which will go on sale November 15th for $199. Fire is based on Google's Android operating system, but excludes many of Google's popular apps, such as Chrome and Gmail. The tablet has the potential to become a strong competitor to Apple's iPad due to its lower cost. Additionally, Amazon might be in the process of acquiring Palm, according to several reports on Friday. For the week, AMZN dropped 3.3%.

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How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition

Steve Blank — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:47:52 +0000

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development.

One of the problems they run into is building a web site.

———

If you’re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than diving into Ruby on Rails, Nodes.js and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site. (Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.)

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Thoughts on Our Federal Government, Taxes and Small Business and More

Mark Cuban — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:46:44 +0000

These are not meant to be researched items. These are “streams of consciousness” from the conversation yesterday’s post created.

First some housekeeping. I DO NOT like paying more in taxes. HOWEVER, I think that this country has created unique opportunities for entrepreneurs and paying taxes is a small price to pay. Taxes are not a bad thing. What bothers me are not the taxes I pay to help others and to support the services our country needs.

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Remmy Oxley: What is a Snappy Guy?

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:42:55 +0000

Snappy Guy = Remmy Oxley

Hi Silicon Valley. Thank you for your questions! Keep them coming via email

A reader from Omaha, NE, asks, "Do you need to be in Silicon Valley to get funding?"

Remmy Oxley: No, but it helps. Look, I like putting money into less risk, and there is a community within 20 miles of my office. This community is like a business incubator, and your shareholder equity has a greater chance of growing when you grow and incubate your business here.

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CEO Showcase: Blaast

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:39:52 +0000

Blaast's mission is to bring mobile apps to the next billion subscribers. The Blaast platform lets application developers efficiently target users of connected feature-phones and smartphones-a segment of 800 million devices annually. Through a series of unique distribution partnerships, Blaast is works together with mobile network operators, creating a unique subscription-based app store.

Users benefit from a robust, well-designed and functional platform. Developers will create great apps for hundreds of devices and reach millions of users.

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Announcing the 2011 GoingGreen Global 200 Top Private Companies

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 01:08:04 +0000

AlwaysOn is proud to announce this year's GoingGreen Global 200—the top emerging companies that are transforming big industry and creating viable business models for the green technology.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at Morgan Stanley, SAP, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, Goldman Sachs, Technology Partners, Bridge Bank, Sheppard Mullin, Silicon Valley Bank, NEA, and industry experts across the globe scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 200 private companies that are transforming our world into a safer, more efficient, and environmentally friendly place, while at the same time creating high-growth businesses that offer huge upside potential for investors.

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C3 Named GoingGreen Global 200 Company of the Year

Tony Perkins — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:07:46 +0000

C3 is a newly emerged stealth software company that deploys enterprise solutions to manage energy and emissions for entire business organizations. The software then measures, mitigates, and monetizes energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in commercial buildings. In addition to adding to the environmentally friendly footprint of the organization, C3's solutions help organizations maximize their profitability and increase their cash flow by optimizing their enterprise-wide energy strategy, reducing expenses based on energy waste, and bringing their carbon footprint ever closer to zero.

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Why Super Pro-rata Rights are Not a Good Deal for Entrepreneurs

Mark Suster — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:58:32 +0000

Yesterday I saw a Tweet from Chris Sacca fly by that prompted me to want to write a blog post helping entrepreneurs understand why they should push back against VCs asking for “super pro-rata” rights. I’ll explain what they are and why you should avoid them if you can.

A primer on “pro-rata” rights
Institutional investors will always insist on pro-rata rights. This is not something to be concerned about. All it says is that the VC has the right (but not obligation) to invest his/her proportional ownership in the next round of financing.

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In Situ Content

Fred Wilson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:57:49 +0000

I've been working on a prezi for a talk I'm giving next monday at OMMA Global (here's the high level outline of the talk). It's a work in progress. I started it last weekend. I do a bit more each morning. I hope to have it done before I walk on stage monday at 9:10am.

I like to use visuals when I give a talk. I use them as eye candy for the audience. And they are the cues for me to move through the concepts I want to cover. It's like a visual outline. I don't use notes. I just hit next and I'm reminded about the flow I want to use.

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Cloud Channels Coming Into Focus

Jeff Kaplan — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:49:40 +0000

The topic of building effective channel alliances in the Cloud continues to gain greater attention. This past week, I spoke at two events and attended a third in the Boston area in which Cloud channel strategies and solutions were a central theme.

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Why Venture Capitalists Invest In Pigs, Not Chickens

Jeff Bussgang — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:48:50 +0000

There is an old parable about the concept of commitment when it comes to breakfast. The story goes that when looking at a plate of the traditional fare of ham and eggs, it's obvious that the chicken is an interested party, but the pig is truly committed.

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Amazon Tablet on the Horizon

Michael Moe — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:46:49 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was down 5% last week, the NASDAQ dropped 5.3%, and the S&P 500 was down 6.5%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 7.5%, the NASDAQ is down 6.4%, and the S&P 500 is down 9.6%.

Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz said that the company is targeting further expansion in Europe and Russia. In an interview he said, "We have decided to grow our business in Western Europe, but will do so with discipline and be very mindful of ongoing economic issues. We are significantly under-stored in many markets, including France and Germany." For the week, SBUX was down 1.3%.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 18

David Brody — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:57:01 +0000

Rule #12 – Make An Editorial Calendar

Feeling daunted by the task of figuring out what to say?

Well one of the best tricks to discovering what to message out is to first look at when to message it.

I’m not talking about your weekly social media updating calendar. I’m talking big picture.

You’ll be surprised what you come up with when you scribble down thoughts about your brand and consumer from January through December.

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What Are the Different Types of Instruments VCs Use to Invest?

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:55:15 +0000

You won’t be surprised to hear that VCs don’t use banjos, guitars or any other musical instrument to invest, rather we use ‘investment instruments’. Investopedia defines an investment instrument (aka a financing instrument) as “A real or virtual document representing a legal agreement involving some sort of monetary value.

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Whither Netflix?

Fred Wilson — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 01:56:03 +0000

When you see a stock chart like this you have to wonder, what the hell is going on?

Netflix has been one of the hottest stocks out there, rising from $50/share in Feb 2010 to $300/share in July of 2011. That's six times your money in 18 months. And now the stock has given back well over half of those gains in two months and that freefall in the past week seems particularly scary.

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Sayahh's Financial Statements For August 2011

Brad Feld — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:52:05 +0000

Now that Dick and Jane have added a CTO to SayAhh’s founding team, they’ve turned their full attention to working on their product. Today, we’ll look at the impact of the expenses to date on the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement.

Since SayAhh is in the pre-launch development stage, the company doesn’t have any revenue yet. They also haven’t launched a product, so there is no corresponding “cost of goods sold” – the direct cost of delivering their product. This results in a gross margin of $0, where gross margin is revenue – cost of goods sold.

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Why Reed Hastings Should be Applauded for Netflix Split

Mark Suster — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:51:14 +0000

By now you probably know that Netflix is splitting its business into two parts: its digital streaming business (retains the name Netflix) and its DVD mailing business, which was its original business (to be called Qwikster).

If you haven’t read Reed’s explanation of this split make sure you read it (of course, after you’re done with this post ) —> here. It’s simply brilliant.

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EBITDA

Fred Wilson — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:30:28 +0000

Last week's post on valuation brought a couple questions about EBITDA. The first of which is how do you pronounce that acronym? The answer to that question is e-bit-dah. The second of which is what does it mean? The answer to that is Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization.

The way I like to think about EBITDA is the pre-tax cash earning power of the business. It is not much different than the notion of Operating Income which is revenue minus cost of goods sold and operating expenses. But it takes out the two big non-cash items in an income statement, depreciation and amortization.

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Why Your Startup Doesn’t Need a COO

Mark Suster — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:29:44 +0000

It’s very common for startup companies to have COO’s. So I know I’m getting myself into a bit of trouble by writing this. But …

Startups don’t need – shouldn’t have – COOs. I have this conversation with every startup that comes to see me and has a CEO & a COO. I think usually a COO title at a startup is an ego thing. You have two founders and it was agreed that one would get the CEO role so the other needs to call themselves president or COO.

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Convertible Debt – The Discount

Brad Feld — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:28:57 +0000

As we start our convertible debt series, we’ll focus on the discount. Remember that a convertible debt deal doesn’t purchase equity in your company. Instead, it’s simply a loan that has the ability to convert to equity based on some future financing event (we’ll tackle the conversion mechanics in a later post.)

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Lean

Fred Wilson — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:34:39 +0000

I've been reading Eric's book which I am very much enjoying. And on wednesday night I spoke to the NYC Lean Startup Meetup with the help of Giff who interviewed me.

Eric and his fellow lean advocate Steve Blank have both written at length about the methodologies associated with the lean startup approach. If you have not read their books (Steve's here), I suggest you do.

But the most interesting part of the discussion on wednesday night for me was when Giff asked me about a comment I had made that "you need more than a lean methodology, you need a lean culture."

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Fast Times in the Cloud

Greg Ness — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:33:43 +0000

The cloud hysteria and the “end of PC” debate is today’s equivalent to the dancing shadows on the walls of Plato’s famous cave (see Plato’s cave allegory); both topics are keeping companies and their customers distracted while the technology industry is entering an era of accelerating change more like Kurzweil’s Singularity than Moore’s law.

The mainframe is being reinvented as the green data center; the hard drive is becoming a mere front end for applications and services residing on servers.

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The Pay-It-Forward Culture

Steve Blank — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:11:17 +0000

Foreign visitors to Silicon Valley continually mention how willing we are to help, network and connect strangers. We take it so for granted we never even to bother to talk about it. It’s the “Pay-It-Forward” culture.

——-

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The Power of Nuance of the Heart

Tony Tjan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:10:34 +0000

In the wake of his recent retirement, much has been written about Steve Job's peerless leadership and how he transformed not just his company, Apple, but the way we interact and live with media and technology. However long Apple manages to stay on top, there is no doubt that Jobs, with his angular genius, relentless quest for perfection, and industry-changing products, will go down as one of the greatest iconoclasts of business.

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Apple Plus China Mobile?

Michael Moe — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:09:48 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 4.2% last week, the NASDAQ advanced 6%, and the S&P 500 was up 5.3%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 13.2%, the NASDAQ is down 1.2%, and the S&P 500 is down 3.3%.

Apple, while making headlines on the highly expected iPhone 5, might be close to signing a deal with China Mobile, as the two companies have been talking about a potential relationship. The offering could also include a 4G LTE technology. "We discussed this issue with Apple. We hope Apple will produce a new iPhone with TD-LTE. We have already gotten a positive answer from Apple," said the chairman of China Mobile, Wang Jianzhou. For the week, AAPL advanced 6.1%.

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CEO Showcase: Kargo

admin — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:57:31 +0000

Founded in 2003, Kargo is a mobile publisher network working with major media companies and brand advertisers. Kargo partners to create the best in branded mobile sites, iPhone apps, Android apps, widgets, and advertising solutions. Kargo leverages its global distribution relationships to build audience while aiding monetization through carrier billing capabilities and a robust advertising management platform. For viral marketing, Kargo integrates community features and social media into its products to deliver engaged fans.

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It’s Not How Big It Is – It's How Well It Performs: The Startup Genome Compass

Steve Blank — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:06:36 +0000

What makes startups succeed or fail? More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter several near death experiences along the way. Simply put, while we now have some good theory, we just are not very good at creating startups yet. After 50 years of technology entrepreneurship it’s still an art.

Three months ago I wrote about my ex-student Max Marmer and the Startup Genome Project. They’ve been attempting to quantify the art. They believe that they can crack the code of innovation and turn entrepreneurship into a science if they had hard data rather than speculation of why startups succeed or fail.

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What Are the Key Terms in a Termsheet? Part 2

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:52:10 +0000

In Part 1 of this post I said that the terms in a termsheet fall into four categories – those relating to economics, to control, the legally binding ones (exclusivity and costs), and everything else. I then went on to write in a bit of detail about valuation, which is the most important of the economic terms.

In this post I will cover the other key economic terms; liquidation preference and anti-dilution, the most important control terms; board structure and protective provisions, and then finish with a few words on exclusivity and cost. Over these two posts I will then have covered the most important clauses in a termsheet, and you should be able to tell whether a termsheet is attractive or not, but there is a lot that isn’t covered and they are no substitute for a good lawyer.

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Google Acquires Zagat

Michael Moe — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:50:48 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was off 0.4% last week, the NASDAQ was down 0.5%, and the S&P 500 was down 1.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 8.6%, the NASDAQ is down 7%, and the S&P 500 is down 8.2%.

Lululemon reported a very strong Q2, with revenue growing 40%, EPS up 73%, and same-store sales up 20%. LULU continues to improve its operating margin that was at 28%, up from 22.5% a year ago and opened nine new stores, up to a total of 147. We are now increasing our position by 1%. For the week, LULU advanced 3.6%.

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CEO Showcase: Appcelerator

admin — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:43:16 +0000

Appcelerator helps Web developers create mobile, tablet, and desktop applications with its enterprise-grade, cross-platform mobile development solution. More than 1.5 million developers worldwide have launched more than 20,000 mobile apps using Appcelerator software. The company's flagship offering, Appcelerator Titanium, enables fully native, cross-device development from a single codebase for iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Appcelerator's customers include NBC, PayPal, eBay, Orange, and Cisco.

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The Data Center is the Server, the Cloud and the Future

Greg Ness — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:08:18 +0000

While the computing revolution shifts from PC to server-centricity, market caps are shifting from hardware-centric to software and services-centric enterprises. This places the data center at front and center for the foreseeable future, and promises a much-needed disruption at the core of how data centers are designed, built and managed.

Note the theme from the last section of this August 29 piece from GigaOM on Dell and VMware, which IMHO is one of the first shots fired in the coming network hardware versus server software battle for the future of the network.

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Determining the Appropriateness of Freemium in B2B

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:07:32 +0000

Regular readers will know that I believe the price of content, including software, is trending towards the marginal cost of delivery, which is zero (note that doesn’t mean it will necessarily reach zero). Innovative companies are responding with innovative pricing models, of which ‘freemium’ is perhaps the most common. This is now a pretty well trodden path for consumer applications where free to use has been very common in social media and content for sometime and following the success of anti-virus companies is increasingly the default model for software as w

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Introducing the Cap Table and Hiring the CTO

Brad Feld — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:01:32 +0000

When we were last with Dick and Jane on Finance Fridays, our fearless entrepreneurs were figuring out how to split up their founders equity and account for an investment from Jane. While they’ve been hard at work on their product, they’ve also incorporated the company, now named SayAhh (thanks Mac!) as a C-Corp in Delaware. They’ve done a bunch of other mundane things, such as establishing a business checking account and depositing Jane’s $50k in seed capital, but like all good early stage entrepreneurs, they’ve spent most of their time obsessing about their product, talking to a few potential early customers about what they needed, and coding away on their MVP.

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The Problem with Collecting Logos at Startups

Mark Suster — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:00:44 +0000

Collecting logos. It seems to be all the fad in the startup and VC world these days. VCs are paying up at enormous prices to say that they have GroupOn, Facebook and Twitter on their roster irrespective of whether they really venture funded them or bought in late stage.

And entrepreneurs are working hard to make sure they have as many VC names and famous angels on their cap table for signaling value. As a result they end up taking money from many firms all at once.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 17

David Brody — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 02:59:50 +0000

Rule #11 – Create A Signature Move

Earlier I mentioned using a few simple ideas to maximize your Facebook profile pic. This is an example of a what I call a signature move.

Do you have one for your brand? You should. These basic but memorable tactics are some of the best ways to build momentum for your brand. And the best part? You won’t have to rip off a piece of your clothing to earn applause.

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Determining Valuation Multiples

Fred Wilson — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:56:17 +0000

Last week on MBA Mondays, I talked about valuing an internet marketplace business. In that post, I talked about using 1x gross marketplace transactions and 20x EBITDA as multiples to determine value. In the comments, I was asked about multiples for other sectors. That's a good question so I figured I'd show how to calculate multiples for various sectors.

For this exercise we will focus on the software as a services (SAAS) sector. The first thing you need to do is find a universe of publicly traded companies to use for your model. I found this blog post and used a subset of the companies on the list.

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Why Governments Don't Get Startups

Steve Blank — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:55:30 +0000

Not understanding and agreeing what “Entrepreneur” and “Startup” mean can sink an entire country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

———

I’m getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I’ve spent the last week reviewing several countries’ ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.

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Baidu Unveils Mobile Platform

Michael Moe — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:52:42 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 0.6% last week, the NASDAQ was flat, and the S&P 500 was down 0.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 9%, the NASDAQ is down 6.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 6.7%.

Baidu unveiled a new mobile software platform, trying to expand its user base and aiming to intensify its competition with Google, while using its Android operating system. Baidu isn't excluding the option to develop its own mobile operating system in the future. For the week, BIDU advanced 0.5%.

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What Are the Key Terms in a Termsheet?

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 22:51:07 +0000

My recent posts in this series have offered thoughts on what to write in pitch documents aimed at VCs. If those documents are written well, and your business idea is a good one, and you are impressive, and you are lucky, and, and, and… then you will hopefully be on the receiving end of a termsheet, and ideally more than one. A termsheet is usually a longish document of 3-10 pages with many clauses and terms. In this post I list the most important of those and explain what they mean.

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Why Online / Offline Mobile Integration is Going to be a Huge Business

Mark Suster — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 22:50:15 +0000

“People still want calls …”

When I first got into VC I decided I better have some investment themes. My macro theme was “great entrepreneurs” who mapped to my belief system about the kind of entrepreneurs I wanted to work with.

My background was 8 years of telecoms & mobile and 8 years of cloud computing & SaaS – so these two themes were a given.

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CEO Showcase: Expensify

admin — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 19:49:53 +0000

Expensify helps people create excellent expense reports. Expensify imports expenses and receipts straight from credit card or bank accounts, submits PDF expense reports by e-mail, and reimburses reports up to $10,000 entirely online. With the 1.0 launch, Expensify bolstered its QuickBooks export features, helping bookkeepers, accountants, and finance departments nationwide integrate their expense reports with ease.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 16

David Brody — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:48:42 +0000

Rule #10 – Don’t Let An Intern Drive

Facebook may have established the entry-level title of Page Admin to represent the person in charge of managing your Facebook page. However, before you bring on an extra set of hands to help manage and maximize your social media presence, you should quit looking at your open position as one that requires, “little or no experience.”

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Mea Culpa

Mark Suster — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:47:23 +0000

On this blog I’m often trying to combine lessons for entrepreneurs and market commentary. Yesterday it was my turn for the lesson.

In my zeal to prove a point I often take a strong stance on an issue. I then debate the topic in the comments section and hope that we all learn from the conversation.

It’s my personality to do this.

Yesterday I pushed this passion in the wrong direction.

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Identity, Authentication, and Provisioning Them Online

Fred Wilson — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:44:03 +0000

Christina jotted down some thoughts on indentity on a flight to SF and I read them this morning. In her post, she references Ev's excellent post on the same topic from a while back.

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Explaining FNAC: Feature, Not a Company

Mark Suster — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:42:09 +0000

FNAC. I first heard the term from Chris Fralic at First Round Capital. Feature, not a company.

It has always stood out in my mind. Whether something is a feature or a company is clearly subjective. And sometimes features (say, Twitter) turn into companies.

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Users First, Brands Second

Fred Wilson — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:24:44 +0000

I like simple ways to think about things. Like mobile first, web second. These kinds of constructs work for me. One that I've been using a lot lately to describe what we like and don't like as much is User First, Brands Second.

When you are building your product and thinking about your go to market strategy, you need to decide who your first users will be and how they will take your product into the market. You can focus on getting everyday internet users first. Or you can focus on getting brands first and working with them to get users. This decision is critical and will impact almost everything about your business going forward. So don't make this decision lightly.

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It's Time to Fire Some of Your Customers

Tony Tjan — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:23:51 +0000

As we move into volatile times (again), business leaders more than ever need to maniacally focus on the few customers that matter most to them — and spend much less time on the rest. The customer may always be right, but not every customer is right for you.

Some years ago, when our venture firm was starting one of its first retail ventures, I met with a highly successful CEO in the retail services industry to better understand how he did so well across all of his stores (he had some mind-blowing numbers). It was abundantly clear when you walked into any of his stores that his customers were genuinely delighted. I asked him for his secret. His response surprised me and has therefore stuck with me: "When we open a new location we quickly grow to a database of 8,000 customer names — and then work hard to get it down to 1,500 names."

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7 VC mistakes at Y Combinator and Demo Days

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:33:49 +0000

VCs rise and fall. Venture firms fall and rise.

The front lines of venture capital show tectonic plate shifts in power, influence, and reach. At Y Combinator's recent demo day, VCs made some errors that will cost their brands dearly.

1. Don't send hot female associates.

An east-coast venture firm sent two female associates.

This might work in NYC or Boston….

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Overview of Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows

Brad Feld — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 01:26:10 +0000

When we were last with our SayAhh cofounders, they had implemented an accounting system and Jane had contributed $50,000 for a 55/45% equity split. This week we introduce two of SayAhh’s key accounting documents: the Balance Sheet (BS) and Statement of Cash Flows (SCF) showing how this investment is accounted for.

The investments by the founders created two transactions. Since SayAhh is a C corporation that is incorporated in Delaware, they decided to have a very low non-zero par value for their shares, set at $0.00001, to prevent higher franchise stock taxes.

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Avoid Monoculture. Travel. Read Widely. Let Experience be Your Compass.

Mark Suster — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 01:25:11 +0000

I sometimes feel that the Silicon Valley culture and we as technologists more broadly can breed monoculture in our approach to entrepreneurship, problem solving, market analysis and technology solutions.

Experiences way beyond any hack-a-thon, startup blog or your current company engagement can enrich your thinking and challenge you to think more broadly about the solutions you offer in the market.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 15

David Brody — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:22:55 +0000

Rule #9 – Star at Social Karaoke

Sure, imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery.

But learning from those that have succeeded before you can fast track your career.

Not suggesting you copy someone’s design or campaign exactly. Umm, that would be plagiarism.

But you certainly can add your own twist on a hit to make it work for your own brand voice, industry, or fan base.

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Financing Options: Working Capital Financing

Fred Wilson — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:15:40 +0000

We are coming to the end of the Financing Options series. This is the final post in the series. Today we are going to talk about working capital financing.

For those of you not steeped in finance and accounting matters, I suggest you go back and read the Balance Sheet post before reading on. Working Capital Financing relies on a company's balance sheet to support the loan so understanding how a balance sheet works is important to understanding working capital financing.

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Hiring: Easy as Pie

Steve Blank — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:14:49 +0000

Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten involved in hiring for two startups, a public agency and a non profit. Part of each conversation was getting asked to help them put together a “job spec.”

I had them leave with a pie chart.

——–

There must be something in the air. In the last week I had four separate groups through the ranch all wanting to talk either about hiring a senior exec or a senior exec looking for a new job.

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Google TV Will Launch in Europe in 2012

Michael Moe — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:13:23 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 6.7% last week, the NASDAQ was up 5.9%, and the S&P 500 was up 4.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 8.4%, the NASDAQ is down 6.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 6.4%.

Mid week, we added to our larger positions in Apple and Google, 1% and 3% respectively. We also initiated several new positions that were on our watch list. We added 2% to LinkedIn and Fusion-io as well as 2.5% to Pandora, all of which are recent IPOs.

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Y Combinator Demo Day. It Should be Called Embargo Day

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:02:03 +0000

Embargoes were used during the cold war to send a message. Small subtleties and rule-breaking nuances were allowed as a way to back-channel communicate. Yes, it was a war like baseball where nothing happened. It's difficult to understand, and the devil was in the minutiae.

YC Demo Day gag orders pitch evaluation where VCs and others aren't allowed to social-media an opinion.

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Financing Options: Bridge Loans

Fred Wilson — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:42:18 +0000

Today's post in the financing options series on MBA Mondays is about Bridge Loans. Bridge loans are so called because they are a "bridge" to something else. They are short term loans intended to fund a company to an anticipated event in the future.

Bridge loans exist in many sectors outside of the startup world. Big banks will often bridge companies to transactions they are putting together for them. Real estate transactions are often bridged to a closing. The concept of short term transaction driven loans is universal in business.

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Ebooks Driving Growth and Enabling Innovation in the Book Industry

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:04:34 +0000

It is often the case that new media formats are greeted with suspicion amid fears that the changes they herald will undermine important creative aspects of society. Often these fears are misplaced and it is the distribution channels of the old format that are under threat rather than the media itself, and after a period of decline the industry returns to growth and often hits a new peak. Earlier this week I saw a chart which showed how the music industry evolved according to this pattern as the physical format shifted from vinyl through cassettes to CDs, and today I’ve seen data showing that ebooks are now driving growth at the overall market level in the book industry.

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The GoingGreen Silicon Valley 200 Top Company Competition

admin — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:49:04 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its fifth annual GoingGreen Silicon Valley Top 200 Private Companies competition. We are looking for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in green technology. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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CEO Showcase: Mu Dynamics

admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:06:10 +0000

Mu Dynamics helps network operators and their diverse product suppliers build and operate higher-quality, more reliable and robust networks that have minimal downtime. Operators need their revenue-critical next-gen IP services to be robust, available, and secure to ensure minimal customer churn and costly downtime issues.

Mu's unique application-aware, multipurpose testing solution gives companies the ability to understand how new applications will impact networks as well as identify and resolve potential issues before they disrupt services.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 14

David Brody — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:05:13 +0000

This is a total duh, right? Not so fast my friends.

One of the biggest mistakes brands make in social media is being exclusive rather than inclusive. They also do it without even knowing they’re doing it too. Shocking.

If you work for a national brand and think you’re being strategic by pushing out a 20% discount on a product or service to all of your Facebook fans but that offer is only redeemable in Omaha; well, you’re not.

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There’s Always a Plan B

Steve Blank — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:03:18 +0000

Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.
Mike Tyson

One of the key distinctions between an entrepreneur and an operating executive is an entrepreneur’s almost seamless agility in the face of changing circumstances versus an operating executive’s intense execution focus on a plan. World-class entrepreneurs learn how to combine both.

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Android Outstripping iOS in Ad Impressions and Device Market Share

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:01:42 +0000

On Friday I wrote about how I see the future for HTML5, native apps and Adroid vs OS. The post stimulated a fair bit of debate which led me to check out how the operating system between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android is playing out in the market place. Looking at the latest data in this fast moving market, the overall answer is that Android is doing well, and better than I expected, with around half the market depending on how you count it and whose data you trust.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 13

David Brody — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:46:03 +0000

Rule #7 – Balance Yourself Out

Is your brand serious, entertaining, encouraging, or informative?

Well, whatever it is, it doesn’t mean you have to take on one of those personality traits all the time.

That would be unnatural. It wouldn’t be human.

Why? Because humans have emotions. Some days we laugh. Some days we cry. Some days we’re helpful. Some days we’re opinionated.

The key to staying relevant and interesting in social is by exposing your audience to the full range of your expressions.

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Why You Need to Take 50 Coffee Meetings

Mark Suster — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:37:47 +0000

50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of “10,000 hours.”

Anybody who has spent any time with me in person will be tired of this advice because I give it so frequently. It is a piece of actionable advice that if you put into practice starting next week will start paying dividends in the near future. There’s a direct correlation to your future success.

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The Shrink Wrap Redemption

Greg Ness — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:36:12 +0000

I never thought I would hear Steve Jobs hail the post-PC era, much less IBM PC legend Mark Dean . They must be right, because HP just announced its exit from the PC business.

But then Microsoft has said that the PC isn’t even middle-aged.

This is as close as it gets to a meaningless debate among marketeers. Remember all the worthless noise around definitions of cloud computing? Welcome to the PC-era fluff fight.

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CEO Showcase: Fiberlink

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:54:37 +0000

Fiberlink provides mobility as a service (MaaS) that helps enterprises to connect, control, and secure laptops and mobile devices. Its MaaS platform helps mobile workers connect to the Internet and the applications and data they need. The company's MaaS platform is used to perform identity management and authentication services; deploy, monitor, and manage security and connectivity applications on laptops and PCs; view information on compliance status, security events, and connectivity costs; and protect mobile devices and the data from loss, theft, data leakage, hackers, and viruses.

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Google Purchases Motorola Mobility

Michael Moe — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:32:03 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 9.6% last week, the NASDAQ was down 6.6%, and the S&P 500 was down 4.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 1.6%, the NASDAQ is down 11.7%, and the S&P 500 is down 10.7%.

We sold our position in Qualcomm, as the stock dropped below our -20% selling target.

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Software Patents: A Brake on Innovation

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:24:33 +0000

Since Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s Mobility division on Monday intellectual property law has been a hot topic of discussion. The acquisition value was $12.5bn, and according to Google’s CEO Larry Page Moto’s seventeen thousand patents were the principle attraction. Since then I have talked with two journalists on the subject and had numerous conversations and email chats with friends and colleagues. Nick Clarke of the Independent has written up his thoughts here.

Patents have also been in the news this week because Apple successfully claimed that Samsung had copied the shape, user interface and packaging of the iPad secured an injunction prohibiting sales of the Samsun Galaxy Tab across most of Europe, and then the injunction was over-turned.

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Keeping Great People with Three Kinds of Mentors

Tony Tjan — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:23:39 +0000

To attract and retain great people, several things need to coalesce. From the extrinsic reward of a salary to the more nuanced (and more important) intrinsic reward of people feeling that they have a meaningful role, it requires thought and a proactive approach to keep talent once you've got it.

One of the most critical elements in retaining great people is effective mentoring. But what does that really mean? The word "mentoring" is too general to capture the specifics of what people need through the different stages of a career. It is akin to saying that people need to be educated — and then implementing a teaching curriculum that is the same every year for everyone. Like education, mentorship requires different things at different stages, including different types of skills and advice, and different types of teachers and learning styles.

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Teachable Moments in PR and Crisis Management

Mark Suster — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:48:33 +0000

I was recently approached by Fast Company to comment on “crisis management” at startups in the wake of the Airbnb “ranksackgate” story. I agreed to do the interview because the story was about what other companies can learn rather than about airbnb in particular.

What are the teachable moments? The short article in Fast Company is here if you’d like to read it.

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What Are the Most Common Mistakes in a Business Plan?

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:46:55 +0000

This is the first post in this series after a four week break due to the summer holidays, and the subject this time is common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when producing documents that describe their companies. I referred to ‘business plans’ in the title of the post for brevity, but everything below applies equally to executive summaries and introductory Powerpoint decks.

Earlier today I polled my partners with the question “what are the common errors people make when writing their business plans?” and the following list is an amalgam of their responses and my own thoughts.

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There Will Be No Files In The Cloud

Fred Wilson — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:35:48 +0000

I've spent a bunch of time talking to entrepreneurs who are building companies in and around the cloud storage space. It's not a space I like very much because I don't think we'll be using files in the cloud. Now Dropbox is a brilliant company and an amazing service and they are doing very well, but will we need a service like Dropbox when everything is in the cloud? I don't think so.

I was in DJ Woooo's Dance/Electro Turntable room last week. I heard a remix track that was super fun. I hit the button to send the track to Rdio. I went to Rdio and listened to it a few times. Then I went to SoundCloud, found the track and then reblogged it into Tumblr.

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CEO Showcase: SmrtGuard

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:30:19 +0000

SmrtGuard provides industry-leading mobile security and mobile device management solutions for individuals and enterprise organizations that need security, control, and management over their smartphones. SmrtGuard lets smartphone users wirelessly backup and restore data, locate their devices, protect against malware, block unwanted e-mails and calls, remotely wipe device data, and more.

SmrtGuard provides comprehensive protection for mobile devices. The platform automatically and securely backs up all data on the device as well as protecting against malware and spam solution.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 12

David Brody — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:33:42 +0000

Rule #6 – Plan For The Long-Term (“ice ice baby”)

My guess is that you want your business to stay at the top of the charts for a long, long time.

So do your brand a favor; don’t just bank on having one hit for its entire career.

The key to generating social momentum is being consistent. You can’t rely on one-off efforts. To be effective you need to supplement those big promotional campaigns with a lot of smaller (and motivating) offers.

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On Porous Paywalls

Fred Wilson — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:34:53 +0000

Felix Salmon has a couple great posts on the New York Times' paywall. He notes that it has been successful and explains why. Felix says:

Yes, the NYT paywall is porous — but that’s a feature, not a bug. It allows anybody, anywhere, to read any NYT article they like. That makes the NYT open and inviting — and means that I continue to be very happy to link to NYT stories.

I've been a fan and a proponent of porous paywalls since studying the FT's model a few years back and was very pleased to see the NY Times go with the FT's model.

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My Suggestion on Patent Law

Mark Cuban — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:26:36 +0000

It is easy to complain. Much harder to come up with solutions. Many won’t like what I propose, but who wants to make lawyers happy anyway ?

The solution ?

1. End all software patents. Don’t make them shorter, eliminate them.

I have no problem with software being copyrightable just as it always has been. That is more than enough protection and keeps enough lawyers un-gainfully employed.

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Financing Options: Capital Equipment Loans and Leases

Fred Wilson — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:23:48 +0000

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to cover yet another topic in the Financing Options series, financing capital equipment like servers, routers, switches, computers, etc.

Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute. It makes sense to look for places where you can use other less expensive forms of capital to fund growth. As we talked about in the last post in this series, I'm not a fan of debt for an early stage startup because there is no obvious way that the debt is going to get paid back. But capital equipment provides an opportunity for debt financing because you can borrow against the equipment. There are two primary ways to do this, capital equipment loans and leases.

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Keeping Going Through the Turmoil

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:26:40 +0000

The world is a chaotic place right now with riots in London, biggest ever one day falls on American stock markets, debt downgrades in the US and unprecedented steps from the European Central Bank to bail out the peripheral Eurozone economies all happening in the last week. The catalyst for these events has been the declining prospects for economic growth and I was asked this morning in an interview with the Guardian what I thought the impact will be on the startup world and the tech bubble that we are in at the moment (I will post a link to the podcast when it is online).

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Setting Up Your Accounting System

Brad Feld — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:22:51 +0000

When we were last with Dick and Jane on Finance Fridays, our fearless entrepreneurs were figuring out how to split up their founders equity and account for an investment from Jane. While they’ve been hard at work on their product, they’ve also incorporated the company, now named SayAhh (thanks Mac!) as a C-Corp in Delaware. They’ve done a bunch of other mundane things, such as establishing a business checking account and depositing Jane’s $50k in seed capital, but like all good early stage entrepreneurs, they’ve spent most of their time obsessing about their product, talking to a few potential early customers about what they needed, and coding away on their MVP.

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If You Want to See more Jobs Created, Change Patent Laws

Mark Cuban — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:20:03 +0000

Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 11

David Brody — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:18:43 +0000

Rule #5 – Have Some Freakin’ Manners

At first, I thought I was being ridiculous to include a Rule around social etiquette.

Then I went to a party and overheard someone taking credit for a story that I actually told them months ago.

It seriously bummed me out (not so much for claiming to have lived the experience in the story, but because they told it totally wrong and left out the really funny part…).

Anyways, let’s talk manners. Social style.

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Google Video Upgrades App

Michael Moe — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 02:24:24 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 0.7% last week, the NASDAQ was down 1%, and the S&P 500 was down 1.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 12.4%, the NASDAQ is down 5.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 6.3%.

We sold our positions in Yandex and Fossil as both stocks crossed below our -20% limit. We are bullish on both companies in the long-term and will keep both on our watch list.

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An Idea for the Economy that will Freak Out a lot of People but could be Fun to Discuss

Mark Cuban — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:27:29 +0000

The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield. In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money. That’s a premise that should make the Democrats happy.

The problem for the Democrats is that the government hasn’t shown that they can earn a positive or even a break even return on their spending. (Stunningly, bailouts excluded).

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Stock Market Drops. Then It Rallies. What Happens Next for Funding?

Mark Suster — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:26:58 +0000

Venture Capitalists typically have partners’ meetings on Mondays. Why is that? Who knows. But probably because as a group we travel a lot. So the industry formed around a day of the week when all partners could avoid having company board meetings or traveling.

Yesterday was a Monday. And not a pleasant one.

Rewind. When I first got into the industry it was 2007. Valuations were enormous relative to progress in companies. Web 2.0 was still a term being bandied about. Companies with less than $2 million in revenue were asking for $50-60 million valuations and getting them. My partnership was pretty bearish and scratched our heads a bit at price tags.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 10

David Brody — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:25:23 +0000

Rule #4 – Ditch The Robot Voice

People, it’s called social for a reason.

If your brand updates lack a real live personality, you’ll have no shot at building a real relationship down the road.

Remember, these aren’t just fans, they’re humans too.

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Perpetual Promotion Machine, Larry Chiang

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:24:17 +0000

[UPDATE: I was wrong, he does have a degree in engineering from University of Illinois. And his company is incorporated in IL. It didn't come up because he never took VC funding.]

There is a perpetual promotional force of nature here in Silicon Valley. His name is Larry Chiang.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 9

David Brody — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:21:52 +0000

Rule #3 – Shut Up And Listen

I know it’s tempting. You have a blank form field sitting in front of you, begging you to blast out one-way dialogue all day long. Don’t cave.

Social media success is predicated on having an engaging two-way conversation.

And no, two-way is not hearing your own voice echo off the walls of your conference room.

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Be The First Mover

Brad Feld — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:09:22 +0000

Recently I wrote a post titled Competition where I listed out a set of topics that summarizes my philosophy around competition. I’m involved in a lot of companies, many of which are either the market leader in their segment, fighting head to head with a few other companies for clear market leadership, going after an existing incumbent, or creating a new segment entirely.

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Progress On The Startup Visa Movement

Brad Feld — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:22:57 +0000

Yesterday there was solid progress on the Startup Visa Movement – specifically making it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to start their companies in the US. The WSJ had a good summary article titled U.S. to Assist Immigrant Job Creators that discusses two formal communications from the Obama administration.

Press release from the Department of Homeland Security titled Secretary Napolitano Announces Initiatives to Promote Startup Enterprises and Spur Job Creation

Post on the White House blog titled Making It Easier for Immigrants to Start Companies in the United States by the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 8

David Brody — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:08:15 +0000

Rule #2 – Eliminate Extra Toppings

Like anything that involves communicating, the more layers you add, the harder it is for the receiving party to follow along.

While Facebook allows for 420 characters per update, that doesn’t mean you should use every last breath to get your point across.

Twitter forces us to be even briefer, which is even more challenging for brand windbags like myself. You see, social media is a sound byte medium. It begs for simplicity. It often involves conversation taking place between smaller screened smart phones.

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Want to Know How This Guy Got His Startup Endorsed by Oprah?

Mark Suster — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:48:18 +0000

I’d like to start by asking each of you to consider helping under-privileged children in America get a little bit more than they have today. Sure, you can give a small amount of money. Even $10. Please. It’s better than zero.

You can combine that with supporting Fred & Joanne Wilson.
(if you click no other links on theis site click that one)

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Arranged Marriages

Jeff Bussgang — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:47:17 +0000

My wife and I have picked out the perfect spouse for my son. They have developed a wonderful relationship together over the years, with great chemistry and warmth. She comes from a family that has identical values and priorities to ours and would make wonderful in-laws.

They are both 9 years old.

This example - admittedly absurd (although we still do talk about it!) - got me thinking about the challenge of arranged marriages in the world of entrepreneurship.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 7

David Brody — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 02:45:49 +0000

Rule #1 – Lose the B.S. Routine.

Not temporarily. Not just on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Not whenever you’re feeling like having an “honest” moment.

Full time.

Your consumer has a laser sharp ad radar and an unbelievably low tolerance for bullshit.

Don’t be ruled by fear. Become transparent. Social media demands it.

Why do you think these corporate CEOs are now willing to go on and participate in a reality show called “Undercover Boss”?

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Public Service Announcement For Entrepreneurs: Ignore the Dow

Brad Feld — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 01:30:05 +0000

Today is Finance Friday and post #2 has been drafted by the Finance Friday team from University of Chicago Booth and is waiting for my edits. I’m procrastinating so I thought I’d write one of my periodic public service announcement for entrepreneurs. This one is more specific than “ignore the macro economy” – instead, it’s “ignore the Dow and the stock market and get back to work on your business.”

Tom Evslin had a post up this morning titled Don’t Watch The Dow! that caused me to say “right on.” In 1999, 2000, and 2001 I had a my.yahoo.com page up with a bunch of stocks, including a number of companies I was an investor in, as my home page.

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Are Real Names Required For Real Socializing?

Fred Wilson — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 01:29:04 +0000

Over the weeekend my friend Jeff Jarvis and I had a twebate about this topic. You can see it in action on storify thanks to David Connell.

I'm all for real names if people want to use them. I use "fredwilson" on every web service I can and that is almost all of them. It's a vanity thing for me more than anything else. I want to get to the service early enough that I can grab that handle.

But not everyone wants to use a real name. There are all sorts of reasons for that. This post on the EFF blog, which kicked off the twebate between me and Jeff, lists a bunch of them.

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Bonfire of the Vanities

Steve Blank — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:15:33 +0000

When I was in my 20’s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire.

Over thirty years ago, before the arrival of the personal computer, there were desktop computers called office workstations. Designed around the first generation of microprocessors, these computers ran business applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and accounting. They were an improvement over the dumb terminals hanging off of mainframes and minicomputers, but ran proprietary operating systems and software. My third startup, Convergent Technologies (extra credit for identifying the photo on page 2) was in the business of making these workstations.

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If You Want to See more Jobs Created, Change Patent Laws

Mark Cuban — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:14:52 +0000

Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation.

Every technology company I have is getting hit by patent lawsuits that are the biggest bunch of bullshit ever. Every week it seems like a new one comes up. Between having to pay our lawyers a lot of money to review each, to increasing insurance rates and settlement costs because we can’t afford to pay to fight the nonsense, it’s an enormous expense. So much so that money that would have gone to new hires to improve and sell the product has to be saved to pay to deal with this bullshit.

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Web.com Acquiring Network Solutions

Michael Moe — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:12:33 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 5.4% last week, the NASDAQ was down 8.1%, and the S&P 500 was down 7.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 13.2%, the NASDAQ is down 4.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 4.6%.

Herbalife and Priceline reported strong results with signs of good momentum and high growth going forward. For the week, HLF advanced 4.6%, while PCLN declined 1.8%.

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30/10/10

Fred Wilson — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:21:46 +0000

We see a lot of metrics on web and mobile apps. Our portfolio companies share their metrics with us, which we keep confidential and do not share with anyone outside of our firm. And companies that are seeking investment from USV also share their metrics with us. We also keep these metrics confidential and do not share them outside of our firm.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how similar some of the metrics are from service to service and company to company. I like to call these the web/mobile laws of physics. One fairly common "law of web/mobile physics" is the ratio of registered users/downloads to monthly actives, daily actives, and max concurrent users (for services that have a real time component to them).

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 6

David Brody — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:21:01 +0000

Jump into your hot tub machine and let’s imagine now that one of your concepts paid off. You were able to ramp up your fanbase. Fantastic. Go ask for a pay raise…wait, not yet.

First make sure all of your likers are listeners too.

Seriously, are those smiling faces and colorful icons sitting on the side of your Twitter and Facebook pages actually active or are they just lifeless pixels taking up prime real estate on your page?

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The Start-Up Law of Comparative Advantage

Jeff Bussgang — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:10:31 +0000

I can type faster than my assistant. If she is reading this blog, she may dispute this (and we may have to have a show down with the help of an online typing test), but I'm a pretty darn fast typer.

But, if my assistant were to sit in on my board meetings for me while I stayed back in the office and typed, I'm not sure my entrepreneurs would be very happy (at least, I hope not!).

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Continuous Financing

Fred Wilson — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:09:57 +0000

Chris Dixon has a good post up called The Downside Of Accelerated Investment Decisions in which he talks about "shotgun weddings" and why they are often bad decisions for both entrepreneurs and investors. I could not agree more with Chris. We hate financings that go down like this and often choose to sit them out.

I believe that entrepreneurs and investors should be engaged in a non-stop dating process that starts as early as possible and goes on continuously regardless if the entrepreneur is actually in the market for capital or not.

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Eureka! A New Era for Scientists and Engineers

Steve Blank — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:06:34 +0000

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn’t pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money).

The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. It provides private funds for untested and unproven technology and entrepreneurs.

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Finance Fridays: Getting Started – Allocating Equity and Founder's Investment

Brad Feld — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:05:58 +0000

Finance Friday’s gets off the ground with today’s post by introducing you to an imaginary startup, the entrepreneurs that we’ll being following throughout the series, and their first challenges: splitting up the founders’ equity and addressing the case where one of the founders provides the initial seed capital for the business.

We felt like we needed to put some groundwork in place using a case-study like approach, rather than just jumping into looking at balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. Hopefully, by the time we are done, we’ll all have some new friends and a lot of knowledge.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 5

David Brody — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 22:20:09 +0000

My primary goal for this blog mini-series is to give you some actionable insights on how to effectively attract and retain consumers through a memorable and engaging social voice.

On the image above, I’ve put together a simple grid you can use to define your social target and eventually the voice you talk to them in (consider this a peek behind the curtain at how many brand strategists help identify the hot buttons of the desired target).

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Learning Optimism with the 24x3 Rule

Tony Tjan — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:24:47 +0000

One of my greatest mentors was the late Jay Chiat of TBWA Chiat Day, an iconoclast in the field of advertising with a constant imagination for possibilities in business and life. Jay embodied the three traits of a "lucky attitude" that I described in my last post: humility, intellectual curiosity, and optimism. Of these three characteristics, it was Jay's optimism which was perhaps his greatest lesson to me. He inspired people to embrace optimism — inside themselves, and also, as importantly, in others. It is a gift to understand how to project, share, and inspire with optimism. It is an even greater act of generosity to be inspired by optimism from others and to be willing to receive it.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 4

David Brody — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:23:20 +0000

So what makes great brands great? If you answered their logo, you’re wrong. If you answered their product or service, well…you’re half right.

What separates a loveable brand from their competition? They’re aspirational to their target audience, they don’t mirror them.

Reality check; most people aren’t in love with, nor do they aspire to be, the person they look at in the mirror everyday.

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How Scientists and Engineers Got It Right, and VCs Got It Wrong

Steve Blank — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:48:56 +0000

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley.

It might be its most important.
———-

ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley, was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. Since it was my first job, I just took for granted that scientists and engineers started and ran companies. It took me a long time to realize that this was one of Silicon Valley’s best contributions to innovation.

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Financings Options: Venture Debt

Fred Wilson — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:48:12 +0000

It's Monday, time for MBA Mondays and the next post in the Startup Financing Options series. Today we will talk about Venture Debt.

If there were two words less likely to be found together, it would be venture and debt. Startups are not credit worthy enterprises. They have little to no assets and no cash flow. Equity is the appropriate way to finance startups.

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Baidu Raises Its Q3 Outlook

Michael Moe — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:47:27 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 3.6% last week, the NASDAQ was down 3.6%, and the S&P 500 was down 3.9%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 19.7%, the NASDAQ is up 3.9%, and the S&P 500 is up 2.8%.

Amazon reported strong results, with revenue growth accelerating to 51%, and Kindle sales showing accelerating momentum. The Kindle store has now more than 950,000 books, with more than 800,000 of those being less than $10. Media sales grew 27%, and electronics sales grew 69% year-over-year. For the week, AMZN advanced 2.8%.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 3

David Brody — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 22:20:58 +0000

To all of you brand haters that think social media makes the brand less important, please. Brands are actually more valuable than ever before – both personal and business.

I’m not going to name names, but there’s a good chunk of the swelling social media consultant population that spends more time chirping about their expertise than they do focused on their own brand.

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Don't Cede Control: Why You Need to Cut out Middle Men in Negotiations

Mark Suster — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 20:01:23 +0000

Middle Men. Middle People?

They exist in all forms of work and life. They’re essential in helping us get our jobs done because they specialize in something we do not. They do a routine task over-and-over again all year long that we do only periodically.

Lawyers. Recruiters. Bankers. Real Estate professionals. PR firms. You name it. And yes, VC’s, too.

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The $10 million Photo and other VC Stories

Steve Blank — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 20:00:13 +0000

While on vacation I had a phone interview with Kevin Ohannessian of Fast Company who wanted a few “funding stories.” Here are two of them. Apologies for the rambling stream of consciousness. The original interview in Fast Company can be seen here.

Throw in the Photo and You Have a Deal
When we were trying to raise money for E.piphany, my last startup, I was negotiating with a venture capital firm called Infinity Capital. They really wanted to invest, but it was the beginning of the bubble, and I wanted (what was then) an absurd valuation.

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Announcing the 2011 AlwaysOn Global 250

admin — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 13:19:01 +0000

It's with great excitement that we introduce the ninth annual AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies list. The AlwaysOn Global 250 represent the top emerging companies in the Global Silicon Valley that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in digital media, mobile, social media, cloud, and SaaS computing.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at SAP, Morgan Stanley, the Blackstone Group, KPMG, Silicon Valley Bank, DCM, Greycroft, and Bridge Bank, as well as industry experts across the globe, scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 250 private companies that are taking old notions of doing things and forging solutions that will lead to industry shake-up and huge value-creation opportunities. The AlwaysOn Global 250 winners were selected from among thousands of domestic and international technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists, and industry insiders.

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M&A Spikes in 2011

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:42:14 +0000

With the economy out of the depths of recession, and stock prices and cash hoards at many tech companies hitting record levels, technology M&A was expected to bounce back significantly during the past 12 months. While that upturn didn't happen for tech M&A in general, AlwaysOn Global 250 companies outperformed the market in style.

During the past 12 months, acquirers spent in excess of $12.33 billion to acquire 57 AO250 companies-almost double the spending of last year, and the highest number of deals in AO250 history. The median revenue multiple for AO250 exits was more than three times that of the industry median. Nine in ten of these companies was venture-backed.

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Finance Fridays

Brad Feld — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:49:34 +0000

Last week I expressed my frustration with the current lack of financial literacy that I see all around me. In the spirit of Fred Wilson’s awesome blog series MBA Mondays, I’ve decided to write a series of posts about this and asked for suggestions. I got a bunch, but one that stood out was from a group of incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago Booth.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 2

David Brody — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:48:47 +0000

Sorry, but being successful at social media marketing doesn’t begin with setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter account.

It doesn’t even start with putting those cute and colorful “F” and “T” icons on your website or other marketing materials.

Nope. It actually begins with building a B-R-A-N-D.

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Violin Memory Wins AlwaysOn Company of the Year

admin — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:22:30 +0000

AlwaysOn's editors are proud to announce that Violin Memory has been chosen as this year's AlwaysOn Company of the Year. Violin Memory joins a prestigious list of previous AlwaysOn Global 250 overall winners. Since its inception in 2003, the AO250 overall winner's circle includes Google, salesforce.com, MySQL, Skype, YouTube, BlueLithium, Twitter, and SecondMarket. The New Company of the Year Award went to Square, the mobile payments startup founded by Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 3

David Brody — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:53:41 +0000

To all of you brand haters that think social media makes the brand less important, please. Brands are actually more valuable than ever before – both personal and business.

I’m not going to name names, but there’s a good chunk of the swelling social media consultant population that spends more time chirping about their expertise than they do focused on their own brand.

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Social Networks Engender Trust

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:06:07 +0000

One of the reasons that I’m a fan of social media is that I believe that Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc. are a powerful force for good by virtue of the transparency they bring to society and the relationships between people they engender (here are two posts I’ve written previously on this topic). I realise that not everyone holds this view and that some people are worried about the implications for privacy and traditional offline relationships and so I like to blog when I see relevant research in this area.

This time it is another report from the Pew Research Center: Social Networking Sites and Our Lives, and a couple of the key findings were (as reported on FastCompany):

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Financing Options: Preferred Stock

Fred Wilson — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:07:30 +0000

Today on MBA Mondays Startup Financing Options series, we are going to talk about the financing option that I specialize in - preferred stock.

Almost all venture capital firms and many angel and seed investors will require the company they are investing in to issue them preferred stock. The vast majority of equity dollars invested in startups are securitized with preferred stock. So if you are an entrepreneur, it makes sense to understand preferred stock and what it means for you and your company.

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Without A Strong Brand, You Ain't Got Jack So...cial! Part 1

David Brody — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:06:24 +0000

Snapshot: The candid insights in this 6-week crash course are meant to provide inspiration for how you can create a bigger following, more engagement, elevated experiences, and social ROI by leading with your brand. Study up. Any of these basic branding tips and tricks can be used to improve your results on Facebook, Twitter, or your next blind date for that matter. Enjoy.

There’s no question that social media moves at a speed we’re just not accustomed to experiencing. Keeping up with and making sense of it all is sort of like trying to watch your favorite TV show while holding down the fast-forward button on your DVR.

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The Best Places to Troll Rising CS Major CEOs at Stanford

RemmingtonOxleyV — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:39:22 +0000

Hi there.

I am the snappy guy, but after this post, you are going to think I am a mobile, pop-up accelerator.

I meet entrepreneurs and hunt deals years before any other VC does. I do it by sourcing CS majors while they are undergrads. You see, I love executing Moneyball. It a book about evaluating baseball talent, but I apply it to scouting entrepreneurs.

Here are the best fields of play when it comes to discovering CS majors:

Tresidder Oak West

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Why You Should Eliminate Titles at Startups

Jeff Bussgang — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:29:57 +0000

There has been a recent dialog around a theme I'll call "hacking the corporation" - creating novel approaches to building young companies, particularly when they are in their formative start-up stage and pre-product market fit. One of them, reinventing board meetings (or, "Why Board Meetings Suck"), has gotten some attention from leading thinkers like Steve Blank and Brad Feld.

I'd like to submit another item to add to the "hacking the corporation" punchlist: elimnating titles.

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Twitter, Jobs, Democracy, and the U.S. Elections

Mark Suster — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:30:46 +0000

I recently wrote a post about the open nature of Twitter and why I’m long on its future. I know it’s easier to write “horse race” stories about who’s signing up more users, raising more funding or who’s “hot” lately. But something more nuanced is at hand that is worth debating – is the future of the Internet & global communications more open or more closed?

I’ve discussed this on StockTwits with Howard Lindzon before, so if you want the longer view check that out.

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Qualcomm Posts Strong Q2 Results

Michael Moe — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:27:47 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 0.8% last week, the NASDAQ was up 2.5%, and the S&P 500 was up 2.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 24.2%, the NASDAQ is up 7.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.9%.

We sold both positions in Riverbed Technologies and Fortinet after the two companies reported not-too-impressive Q2 results.

Other companies that reported last week include Acme Packet, Chipotle, and Qualcomm.

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Competition

Brad Feld — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:57:54 +0000

I think about competition all the time. Every company we invest in aspires to lead whatever market segment it is in. In many cases, they want to create entirely new markets. Regardless, they always have competition, whether from other startups, existing companies, large incumbents, or companies they don’t even know about yet.

Whenever the startup world heats up, there are many more new entrants. We’re once again in the part of the cycle where there are an abundance of new companies being started. While there are plenty of unique ones, there are a much larger number of “me toos” and “fast followers”.

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Twitter Delivers You 4x More Traffic Than You Think. Here's Why...

Mark Suster — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:57:33 +0000

Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics.

These were good packages in the pre social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic.

Today they’re wrong. Terribly wrong. And figuring out who is referring your traffic is a very important part of determining how you allocate your marketing budgets. It is almost certain that Twitter is driving much more of your referrals than you think.

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What Should I Put in my Business Plan?

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:15:10 +0000

The business plan has two purposes, to introduce your company to prospective investors and as a document investors who are in their due diligence process can look to for additional information about the company.

As I wrote in my last 50 Questions post, I wouldn’t advise that your business plan is the first document that you send to a VC, that should be an executive summary and covering email. However, some people will ask to see a business plan before a meeting and for others the business plan will be the first contact they have with your business (particularly the partners of your sponsor) and so the business plan should work as an introductory document. That means putting an executive summary at the beginning the contents of which should be as I described here (same post as linked above). Note that the executive summary should stand on its own, i.e. the reader should be able to get an good high level feel for the whole business without needing to read any other part of the business plan.

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Explicit Groups vs. Implicit Groups

Fred Wilson — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:14:20 +0000

Kevin Cheng (aka @k), product manager at Twitter and an all around smart guy wrote a great blog post called Can We Ever Digitally Organize Our Friends?. I've been thinking many of the same things that Kevin wrote about since I started to use Google+ a few weeks ago and Kevin's post is a good opportunity to riff on the same ideas. But first, a bit of humor courtesy of someecards:

With that out of the way, here's my thinking on grouping things. I don't like to be that organized personally. I don't file stuff away very well. I never liked folders in outlook. I use a few labels in gmail (about 20) but I label less than one out of every 100 emails I get. I've created two twitter lists (one automatically). I follow two twitter lists. I belong to one or two google groups. I belong to less than ten Facebook groups. I am sure that there are many people out there who are different, who love to organize, file, group, and structure their lives and work. But I'm not one of them.

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Google Blasts Expectations - Up 12.3%

Michael Moe — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:29:17 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 1.3% last week, the NASDAQ was down 2.4%, and the S&P 500 was down 2.1%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 24.9%, the NASDAQ is up 7.8% and the S&P 500 is up 6.9%.

At the beginning of the week, we added a new 2.5% position in Internet radio star Pandora. The recent IPO dropped 7.7% for the week.

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Why I’m Doubling Down on the Twitter Ecosystem

Mark Suster — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 20:20:45 +0000

Today I’m announcing that GRP Partners is doubling down on the Twitter ecosystem by investing in DataSift, a company who provides a real-time data platform and tools to third-party developers and corporations.

Our goal is to make the enormous volume of real-time information more manageable for the 99% of companies that lack the infrastructure to process these volumes in real time. Think of DataSift as turning the fire-hose into a cost-effective and manageable tap of running water. Or in utility speak, they are transmission and we are last-mile distribution.

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Financial Literacy

Brad Feld — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 20:19:42 +0000

I’m stunned by the lack of financial literacy of so many people in so many contexts. The commentary by politicians, economists, and the media on the European debt crisis and the US debt ceiling dynamics is appalling. The general media and blogosphere commentary on the financials of high growth companies, especially those who have either recently gone public or filed their S-1′s, range from perplexing to just plain incorrect. And more and more entrepreneurs who I’m exposed to who are presenting their companies for financing have a complete lack of understanding of their financials – both current and projected. Of course, some of my fellow board members don’t understand how to read financial statements either, which doesn’t help matters much.

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Financing Options: Convertible Debt

Fred Wilson — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:56:07 +0000

MBA Mondays are back after a one week hiatus. Today we are going to talk about convertible debt. Convertible debt can also be called convertible loans or convertible notes. For the purposes of this post, these three terms will be interchangeable.

Convertible debt is when a company borrows money from an investor or a group of investors and the intention of both the investors and the company is to convert the debt to equity at some later date. Typically the way the debt will be converted into equity is specified at the time the loan is made. Sometimes there is compensation in the form of a discount or a warrant. Other times there is not. Sometimes there is a cap on the valuation at which the debt will convert. Other times there is not.

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Note To CEOs: Decisions Come From You, Not The Board

Brad Feld — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:55:21 +0000

I had two similar experiences last week where I heard from employees of two different companies that I’m on the board of. In each case, a senior exec said something like “I heard the board wants us to do blah.”

I was in each board meeting and the board most definitely did not say “we want the company to do blah.” Rather, in each case there was a discussion about the topic in question. In one of the cases consensus was reached quickly; in the other there was a robust discussion since two of the board members disagreed and the CEO wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Ultimately in that case as well there was consensus.

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Dear GP: Why Are You Blowing Me Off?

Brad Feld — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:07:08 +0000

On my run today I was thinking about GP – LP interactions. This line of thought was prompted by a contrast between two interactions, or rather one interaction and one non-interaction, that I’ve had in the past few days.

The interaction was I had with one of my LPs over the last 24 hours. They emailed asking for a reference on someone who indicated they knew me and had invested with me. I didn’t know the person, but knew a few people who did, and quickly sent emails getting addition info for my LP.

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Why Some People Have All the Luck

Tony Tjan — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:06:15 +0000

Some business builders just seem to have more luck than others. In fact, many of the entrepreneurs and business builders I know say luck is a driving factor in their success.

But luck in business isn't entirely, well, luck. There's a popular saying that "you make your own luck." This "make your own luck" principle has become a central chapter of a book I am co-authoring for Harvard Business Review Press. Luck, alongside Heart, Smarts, and Guts — turns out to be a critical factor in entrepreneurial DNA and successful business-building.

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Apple Reaches 15 Billion Downloads in Three Years

Michael Moe — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 21:11:00 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio surged 3% last week, the NASDAQ advanced 1.6%, and the S&P 500 was up 0.3%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 24.9%, the NASDAQ is up 7.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.9%.

Apple announced it has reached a milestone, with its users downloading 15 billion apps from iTunes within three years. More interestingly, a month ago, Apple announced it had 14 billion apps downloaded, which would imply that 1 billion apps alone were downloaded during the last couple of months.

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The Coming Brick Wall in Venture Capital and Why This is Good for U.S. Innovation

Mark Suster — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:58:13 +0000

This is the final part of a 3-part series on the major changes in the structure of the software & the venture capital industries.

The series started here if you want to read from the start.

Or the Cliff Note’s version:

Open Source & Cloud Computing (led by Amazon) drove down tech startup costs by 90%

The result was a massive increase in startups & a whole group of new funding sources: both angels & “micro VCs”

With more competition in early-stage many VCs are investing smaller amounts at earlier stages. Some are going later stage to not miss out on hot deals. I call this “stage drift.”

The opportunities for tech startups today are more immense than they’ve ever been with billions of people now connected to the Internet nearly all the time.

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How Much Money To Raise

Fred Wilson — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:56:24 +0000

I spent some time yesterday talking to an entrepreneur about this topic and I thought I'd share what I told him with everyone.

When your company is growing really fast, doubling employees year over year, adding users and customers at a very rapid rate, you don't want to raise too much money. If you raise three or four years of cash, there is a very good chance that by your second year, you will be sitting on cash that you raised when your company was worth considerably less. That's not a good thing. It's too dilutive to you and your co-founders and angels.

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Why the Price of Content is Headed Toward $0

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:51:13 +0000

Back in 2008 Chris Andersen published his seminal book Free: The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing is Changing the Face of Business. The title is a mouthful, but the book is a monster and as I wrote when Chris published the preview of ‘Free’ I think Chris’s arguments are spot on. I have written numerous posts on the topic since and as time has passed and events have unfolded my conviction has increased rather than decreased, and I say that in spite of the iPad, which I think at best will provide a temporary fillip to publishers but doesn’t alter the fundamentals of the argument.

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Changes in Software and Venture Capital, Part 2

Mark Suster — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:49:06 +0000

Yesterday I wrote Part 1 of the series on the changes to the software industry over the past decade that has led to changes in the venture capital industry itself.

If you don’t want to read that post, the summary is:

Open source computing drove computing costs down 90%, which spurred innovation in technology

Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90%. This led to an explosion in startups.

Amazon in turn led to the formation of an earlier stage of venture capital now led by what I call “micro VCs” who typically invest $250-500k in companies rather than the $5-7 million that VCs used to invest.

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Understanding Changes in the Software and Venture Capital Industries

Mark Suster — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:24:28 +0000

In this three-part series I will explore the ways that the Venture Capital industry has changed over the past 5 years that I would argue are a direct result of changes in the software industry, not the other way around. Specifically, Amazon has changed our entire industry in profound ways often not attributed strongly enough to them.

I believe the changes to the industry will be lasting rather than temporal change. Venture capital is in the process of its own creative destruction with new market entrants and new models of innovation at the precise moment that our industry itself is contracting.

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The Optimal Size Acquisition

David Shanberg — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:23:40 +0000

Is there an optimal size acquisition, either on an absolute basis or relative to the size of the acquirer?

Companies that are active acquirers are continually evaluating transactions across a wide range of sizes. Some employ criteria on the size of the M&A target, and the answer to the question posed here would be useful in refining such criteria. Likewise, the answer would give companies positioning themselves for a sale an idea of which acquirers might find them most attractive.

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10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups

Mark Suster — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:26:54 +0000

I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error.

If I can help you avoid some of my first-time mistakes it would be a victory. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.).

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OpSource Acquisition Aimed at Accelerating Dimension Data's Global Cloud Strategy

Jeff Kaplan — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:22:49 +0000

Dimension Data’s acquisition of OpSource marks the end of an era and illustrates how the Cloud Computing competitive landscape is expanding to encompass every type of tech vendor and service provider.

Although it is only a fraction of the size and has only a fraction of the brand equity of Salesforce.com, OpSource has had a disproportionate impact on the growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market and broader Cloud movement.

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Financing Options: Vendor Financing

Fred Wilson — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:21:54 +0000

Last week's financing options post was about getting your customers to finance your business. This week's post is about getting your suppliers to finance your business.

Truth be told, this is not very common in the startups I work with. The more capital intensive your startup is, the more you can and should think about this approach.

Two reasonably common examples of vendor financing in the world of tech startups are equipment financing and development for equity.

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Baidu Signs Deal with Microsoft

Michael Moe — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:09:37 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio surged 6.6% last week, the NASDAQ advanced 6.2%, and the S&P 500 was up 5.6%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 21.2%, the NASDAQ is up 6.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.5%.

China's Baidu announced it signed a deal with Microsoft to offer English-language search to Chinese users. The partnership will allow English-language input into Baidu's search box to automatically activate Bing, with those search results being delivered to Baidu's web pages. The relationship will also give Microsoft a better access to China's 450 million Internet users. For the week, BIDU advanced 11.4%.

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Microsoft Moves to the Clouds

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:27:29 +0000

Today’s official launch of Microsoft Office 365 squarely positions the company as the latest major contender seeking to win a share of the rapidly growing Cloud Computing marketplace.

Although Microsoft has been saying that it is “All In” and funding a TV ad campaign which has made the catchphrase “To the Cloud” popular, Microsoft 365 represents the company’s boldest offering to date. The company has been watching its Office suite suffer attacks from Google Apps for years. In fact, Google Apps are quickly becoming the basic productivity suite of choice for most new college graduates entering the workforce.

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What Is the First Document I Should Put in Front of a VC?

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:26:08 +0000

Hopefully the recent posts in this series have given you an idea of how VC evaluate companies, markets, teams and so on. My next three are going to deal with how to best get that in writing with the aim of getting productive meetings with investors.

I use the term ‘productive’ very deliberately as I’m a big believer that ‘raising money’ is actually better described as ‘selling equity’ and hence should be treated like a sales process where qualifying prospects out quickly is key to being efficient. The purpose, then, of putting something in writing in front of the VC is to make sure that they have thought about your business enough to be genuinely interested before you give up your valuable time to meet with them (and take up theirs). Meetings where it becomes quickly apparent that there is no fit between the startup and what the investor wants are no fun at all and the approach I describe here works better for both entrepreneur and VC.

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The Rise of Specialty Cloud and the Green Data Center

Greg Ness — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:47:30 +0000

Last week I had a brief meeting with Yoram Heller of hot cloud player Morphlabs and we talked about the next wave of cloud innovations. Of particular interest was the concept of specialized software suites that ride on top of the commoditized cloud platforms that have so far captured most of the popular interest in cloud computing.

It is possible, if indeed likely, that most forms of dedicated hardware or appliances in the network will be replaced by powerful instances, workloads and or/ boutique platforms that transcend the physical and technical boundaries that have been in place since the rise of the enterprise network.   Perhaps that is how network automation plays itself out, as software trumps specialized network hardware.

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The Internet Might Kill Us All

Steve Blank — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:36:58 +0000

My friend Ben Horowitz and I debated the tech bubble in The Economist. An abridged version of this post was the “closing” statement to Ben’s rebuttal comments. Part 1 is here and Part 2 here. The full version is below.

—————————————————
It’s been fun debating the question, “Are we in a tech bubble?” with my colleague Ben Horowitz. Ben and his partner Marc Andreessen (the founder of Netscape and author of the first commercial web browser on the Internet) are the definition of Smart Money. Their firm, Andreessen/Horowtiz, has been prescient enough to invest in social networks, consumer and mobile applications and the cloud long before others. They understood the ubiquity, pervasiveness and ultimate profitability of these startups and doubled-down on their investments.

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The New Grill Order

Ed_Lambert — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:14:31 +0000

The first OnMobile conference was held at the Old Fox Theatre in Redwood City, CA. It seems appropriate: The movie theater was the first real form of mobile video content to provide entertainment, disseminate information, and share ideas. Indeed, the format of the movies was like an app. First, information was delivered via news reels and selected short subjects. Then came entertainment like a cartoon, followed by the main attraction—the movie itself.

Underlying it all, of course, was the "idea" or intention of the content providers: political, informative, educational, commercial, or just fun. It was done in the social-media context of a captive audience that was all in one room, watching the same content.

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Social Media Experts Now Outnumber iPhone Owners?

David Brody — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:00:23 +0000

According to the Bureau of Social Connectivity, there are now more self-identified Social Media Experts in the United States than there are active users of the popular smart phone. WTF? Wait, there’s more. The BSC study says at this pace, there will be more Social Media Experts than actual Social Media Users by 2015.

Before you Google the BSC or go to FactCheck.org, hit up the Onion, because we’re kidding. The reality is, this “title turned punch line” thing just won’t go away. It continues to dig under the thinning skin of those that do pay the bills by providing real social media services and software tools to a growing roster of clients.

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Financing Options: Customers

Fred Wilson — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:55:05 +0000

I wrote in an earlier post in this series that friends and family is the most common form of startup financing. If you are talking explicitly equity investments, then that is probably true. But the most common way that startup businesses get money to get going is they sell something to someone. In this context, someone means customers.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business.

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On Bubbles... And Why We'll Be Just Fine

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:54:28 +0000

I recently spoke at the Founder Showcase at the request of Adeo Ressi. I asked what the audience most needed to hear.

He said, “They need an unbiased view of the fund raising environment because there is too much misinformation and everything seems to be changing fast.”

This was an audience of mostly first-time entrepreneurs. They have seen one side of a market where many of us have seen the ebb and flow multiple times. Still, market amnesia by ordinarily rational actors always surprises me.

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Reed Hastings Joins Facebook's Board

Michael Moe — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:10:23 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 4.1% last week, the NASDAQ was up 1.4%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 13.8%, the NASDAQ is flat, and the S&P 500 is up 0.9%.

Apple might be close to signing a contract with China Mobile. Rumors have been going around, as Tim Cook was spotted at China Mobile's headquarters last week. If true, AAPL will be going after a $70 billion market. China Mobile has 611 million subscribers, or 68% of the Chinese population. Additionally, we saw multiple reports suggesting a new iPhone 5 coming out in September, which will be better and faster, and will have an improved camera. For the week, AAPL advanced 1.9%.

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The Chorus For Immigration Reform Grows Louder

Fred Wilson — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:37:04 +0000

Yesterday, Mike Bloomberg went to Washington and spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations on the topic of immigration reform. The text of the entire speech is here. I just read the whole thing and I'm encouraged and excited that the chorus for intelligent immigration reform has gotten louder. This quote was my favorite:

We must stop telling foreign entrepreneurs to build their companies in other countries.

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The Post-PC World: Design for the Task

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:35:59 +0000

Today I attended a breakfast meeting with Werner Vogels CTO of Amazon.com and am writing this post during the lunch break at the Money in Mobile conference here in London. Maybe unsurprisingly the conversation at both events has revolved around mobile and cloud services.

I’ve written about Spotify and other cloud services enough that regular readers won’t be surprised when I write that I think that all services are headed to the cloud – access and collaboration are simply much much more convenient that way.

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The AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Company Competition

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:47:56 +0000

AlwaysOn and KPMG have officially launched the fourth annual AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies competition. The AO Global 250 is a competition for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in the global technology industries. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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The Next Microsoft

Greg Ness — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:44:19 +0000

Last summer I suggested that VMware could be the next Microsoft. A few weeks ago I saw Gary Orenstein’s VMware is the New Microsoft (just without an OS) and his point was triggered this AM when I read a blog on data centers comment from Fabio Violante (EMEA CTO at BMC):

If I may add something to your picture, I personally think that in addition to DC infrastructural innovation, a powerful (cloud) management software layer is also crucial to enable any enterprise achieve or ( at least aim at achieving) the efficiency of “Well-capitalized tech companies”.

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Five Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From the Navy SEALs

Jeff Bussgang — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:43:45 +0000

There has been a surge in interest with the world of the Navy SEALs since the Osama bin Laden action (this piece in the WSJ was a particularly good profile) and I confess to being caught up in it myself. One of my portfolio company CEOs, Will Tumulty of Ready Financial, is a former Navy SEAL (1990-1995). Will was kind enough to introduce me to a SEAL classmate of his, Brendan Rogers (SEAL 1990-2000), who joined me and 20 NYC CEOs/founders from the tech scene last night to talk about the SEALs - the training, the planning and the operations behind their combat operations - as well as draw out some relevant lessons for entrepreneurs. Brendan went on to HBS and McKinsey after the SEALs and then started his own hedge fund with a partner, so he had an interesting, multi-faceted perspective.

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Are You the Fool at The Table?

Steve Blank — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:11:16 +0000

My friend Ben Horowitz and I debate the tech bubble in The Economist. This post is the “rebuttal” statement to Ben’s opening comments.

You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em
Know when to fold them
Know when to walk away
Know when to run
Kenny Rogers – The Gambler

My esteemed colleague Ben Horowitz essentially makes four arguments: 1) look at how relatively cheap Apple, Google and Amazon stock is compared to their growth; 2) Major technology cycles tend to be around 25 years long with the bulk of the purchases occurring in the last five-to-ten years. The major adoption wave for the Internet technology platform will hit in the next 8 years; 3) the economics of building Internet businesses has changed; 4) the markets are much bigger.

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What Is the Best Way to Approach a VC?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:07:25 +0000

Startups presenting business plans to VCs have a much better chance of getting a meeting and maybe an investment if they know the VC already, so the first answer to the question “what is the best way to approach a VC?” is to get to know them before you want to pitch them for money. My co-author in this series Nicholas Lovell likes to say, ‘VCs invest in lines not dots” by which he means that if when you come to ask for money a VC can see how the story you have told her over the last 6-12-24 months has unfolded more or less according to plan (i.e.

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Financing Options: Government Grants

Fred Wilson — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:23:14 +0000

Governments will provide capital for startups and I've seen many entrepreneurs over the years take advantage of this form of financing. The grants are usually "free money" in the sense that they do not need to be paid back and they don't cost any equity.

But nothing in life is free. You do pay for this money in ways that may not be in your interest. The application process is usually long, involved, and distracting. And sometimes the grants come with strings attached; you can't move, you have to use it for a specific purpose, you have to hire a certain number of people with it, etc, etc.

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Does Your VP of HR Report To Your CEO?

Brad Feld — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:22:13 +0000

A decade ago I didn’t pay much attention to the VP of HR position. Today, I view it as a key role if you are growing headcount at least 50% year over year and have more than 20 people in the company. And, title inflation notwithstanding, I prefer to call it “VP of People” since we are people after all, not “human resources” or “HRs”.

Over the past five years, I’ve had the privilege to work with a handful of amazing VPs of People. And, as several of our portfolio companies continue their incredible growth rates, I’ve been involved in recruiting a few new ones to these companies. I have three basic principles for each of them.

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Starbucks' U.K. Picture Brighter

Michael Moe — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:22:27 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 2% last week, the NASDAQ was down 1%, and the S&P 500 was flat. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 11.5%, the NASDAQ is down 0.3%, and the S&P 500 is up 1.1%.

Apple's long-time retail leader Ron Johnson will become CEO of J.C. Penney starting November 1st, 2011. It is certainly a backdrop seeing one of AAPL's key personnel to leave. Johnson, who pioneered the Genius Bar and was essential to Apple's enormous retail success during the past 10 years, will replace current CEO Myron Ullman, who will become executive chairman of the board. For the week, AAPL dropped 1.7%.

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The Next Bubble: Don't Get Fooled Again

Steve Blank — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:50:43 +0000

My friend, Ben Horowitz, and I debate the tech bubble in The Economist. This post originally appeared as part 1 of 3

We won’t get fooled again
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!

The Who 1971

First, let us start with a definition of a tech bubble.

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What to do When a Tech Giant Decides to Eat Your Lunch

Mark Suster — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:49:58 +0000

WWDC. The annual Apple event where no real hints about what products they plan to release are floated in the public domain in advance.

No private head nods are given to small startup companies to help them prepare. We’re in a market where 800-pound gorillas throw their weight around and the rest of the market races to react and survive.

Any company who develops products reliant on iOS spends weeks crapping their pants before WWDC. No vacation schedules allowed for weeks before or weeks after. The announcements come out in one day and then even if you survive the annual release announcements you often still have to scramble to make sure your product is ready to work on time.

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Why Twitter Favorites Aren't Really Your Favorite Tweets

Mark Suster — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:34:00 +0000

Twitter is an ephemeral service. It’s what I love about Twitter. When I’m in the mood to consume what my world is telling me right now I can “tune in” to Twitter and digest the rapid stream. I don’t really worry about missing stuff. If somebody wanted me to see something they’d @ message me, which I always read. And as I’ve written about in the past, I truly believe that Twitter networks are significantly different from other social networks.

The downside to this rapid stream is that at times you come across super interesting articles that you want to read but for which you don’t currently have the time.

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Social Advertising: The Next Wave

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:33:09 +0000

There was an interesting article on Techcrunch yesterday arguing that Facebook will eventually pass Google in revenues – a bold claim stemming from data showing that social advertising performs very well today and will get much better in the future. The chart below shows the improvements in ad effectiveness that come from including social data in adverts today, and the whole post is worth a read if you want to understand the upside potential for Facebook, including integrating social data with search advertising.

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Don't Forget Your Logged Out Users

Fred Wilson — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:42:43 +0000

I find myself saying this quite often these days to entrepreneurs and their product teams. It's something that I've noticed working with leading social platforms like Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. Services such as these have a large number of their users accessing the service regularly on a logged out basis.

I can visit my friend Daryn's tumblog without logging into Tumblr and often do. My son can visit LeBron James' Twitter without logging in and often does. My daughter can check out vintage items on Etsy without logging in and usually does.

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Announcing the 2011 OnMobile 100 Top Private Companies

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:54:27 +0000

AlwaysOn is proud to introduce the first annual OnMobile 100-the top emerging companies that are transforming big industry and creating viable business models for the mobile marketplace.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at Morgan Stanley, DCM, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, Blackstone Group, Bridge Bank, Norwest Venture Partners, Fenwick & West, Silicon Valley Bank, and industry experts across the globe scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are pushing aggressively into the mobile space and turning the old smartphone into a must-have connected device as well as creating solutions that will open up the industry and lead to huge value-creation opportunities.

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Financing Options: Contests, Prizes, and Accelerator Programs

Fred Wilson — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:13:00 +0000

This is the second in a series of posts about financing options for startups. By "financing" I mean obtaining cash to fund your business. There are all sorts of strategies to avoid needing funding, but this series is not about them.

I did not have this option in my original list but it was suggested so many times in the comments that I added it. This is an option that has become a lot more available to entrepreneurs in recent years. There are so many programs out there that target entrepreneurs where the winner(s) is/are awarded cash prizes or small equity investments.

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Intuit Takes Different Data Integration Tact in the Cloud

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:12:07 +0000

One of the most vexing challenges facing today’s IT and business decision-makers is how to integrate critical corporate data across a widening array of on-premise and on-demand systems and applications.

Many believe that the age-old data integration issues of the past have only been compounded by today’s rapidly expanding assortment of Cloud-based solutions which raise the expectation of easy end-user access from anywhere at any time.

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Board Meetings in an Era of Rapid Execution

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:59:33 +0000

Customer development guru Steve Blank recently wrote a couple of good posts (part 1 here and part 2 here) on what is good and bad about board meetings in the twenty first century and how we might change them. As he says, board meetings haven’t changed much…

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

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Why Startups Should Raise Money at the Top End of Normal

Mark Suster — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:58:45 +0000

2 preamble issues having read the comments on TC today:

1: I know that the prices of startup companies is much great in Silicon Valley than in smaller towns / less tech focused areas in the US and the US prices higher than many foreign markets. I acknowledged this in the article. You can be pissed off, but I don’t set prices. I’m just making the commentary.
2: As expected at least one person accused me of writing this post because I want to see lower valuations. That’s stupid. I can’t control the market. When prices are too high I just pass. Simple. I wrote this because over the last decade I’ve seen a destructive cycle where otherwise interesting companies have been screwed by raising too much money at too high of prices and gotten caught in a trap when the markets correct and they got ahead of themselves.

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Apple Reveals iOS 5

Michael Moe — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 21:15:39 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 4.1% last week, the NASDAQ was down 3.3%, and the S&P 500 dropped 2.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 11.5%, the NASDAQ is down 0.3%, and the S&P 500 is up 1.1%.

Our top position, Lululemon, announced strong Q2 results, beating expectations and posting 63% EPS growth and 35% revenue growth. Same-store sales increased by 16%, which is decelerating vs. the previous three quarters at 31%, 29%, and 28%. LULU said it has 142 stores in North America and Australia and is targeting 160 stores by the end of 2011. Sales per square foot continued to improve to an impressive $1,800—which is top among retailers.

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Enough Is Enough

Fred Wilson — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:20:59 +0000

I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music.

The mess around the Lodsys patents should be a wake up call to everyone involved in the patent business (government bureaucrats, legislators, lawyers, investors, entrepreneurs, etc) that the system is totally broken and we can't continue to go on like this.

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What Should We Make of Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20" Education Program?

Mark Suster — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:20:02 +0000

Several people have been asking me to weigh in publicly on the “20 under 20″ initiative announced by Peter Thiel in which he will award up to $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 who agree immediately to pursue entrepreneurship (the implication of which is that they’d drop out of university to do so).

Thiel and friends will also agree to mentor these young entrepreneurs. Here is their inaugural class.

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The Ingredients for a Successful Startup

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:20:09 +0000

There are a couple of research reports out today which indicate the impact of a number of different variables on the likely success of a startup. As with cooking in the kitchen, having the right ingredients doesn’t guarantee success, and equally a good cook can make a great meal out of almost anything, but high quality raw materials undeniably make success more likely both in the kitchen and in the world of startups.

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Reinventing the Board Meeting

Steve Blank — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:50:04 +0000

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come
Victor Hugo

When The Boardroom is Bits
A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. It’s time to ask why startup board governance has failed to keep pace with innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time for a change.

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Thinking About 2015

Brad Feld — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:49:17 +0000

Once a quarter my partners (Seth, Ryan, Jason) and I spend 48 hours together. Unlike a typical offsite that ten zillion organizations have, we tend to spend less time on formalities and more time on wider ranging, forward looking discussions about what we are doing, both professionally and personally.

Last night, over an amazing meal, we ended up talking about what we’ve been investing in over the past four years. When we reflect on the 37 companies we’ve invested in since we raised our first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we’re delighted with the mix of companies and entrepreneurs we are working with.

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How Does a VC Consider Competition?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:04:27 +0000

Market leaders are generally valued at a multiple of their lower ranked competitors which makes understanding the competition a key part of due diligence (see here for more on exit strategy). Generally speaking, VCs are looking to invest in the market leader, or in a company that can become a market leader in their segment, as defined by revenue or occasionally internet traffic. Moreover, once discussions have started to get serious coming to the conclusion that any given company isn’t likely enough to prevail is probably the most common reason for deciding to decline to invest.

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Data Centers: The Next Wave of IT Innovation

Greg Ness — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:03:52 +0000

Energy has been one of the largest variable costs for large technology companies and today is becoming increasingly material for large enterprises of all kinds. Last week at the FIRE Conference I heard Ford’s CTO talk about how Ford wanted to be seen as a technology company. As I listened to Paul Mascarenas talk about smart cars I couldn’t help but to wonder how many of the world’s largest companies have at least discretely considered evolving into more technology-centric endeavors.

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The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get

Mark Suster — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:28:55 +0000

Overnight success. It’s one of the biggest myths in the tech industry.

It’s an ongoing struggle to overcome this bias. I say “struggle to overcome” because I care about young people entering our industry with a set of realistic expectations about what “normal” is.

If you take a snapshot during an extraordinary surge in valuations, M&A activity, IPOs and thus wealth creation you’d echo John Doerr’s famous quote from 1999 that, “The Internet is the greatest legal creation of wealth in history.”

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Strategy on One Page

Tony Tjan — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:28:15 +0000

My partner Mats Lederhausen, formerly worldwide head of strategy for McDonald's, introduced me to "Strategy Trees." The concept is, like most useful things, deceptively simple. It forces you to get at the heart of what you are trying to achieve. The "tree" analog comes from the linkage between the questions in a Strategy Tree. Start at the root purpose of why you are doing something and link it to your goal and how you will measure progress.

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Apple Announces iCloud

Michael Moe — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:50:47 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 0.3% last week, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 both dropped 2.3%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 16.3%, the NASDAQ is up 3%, and the S&P 500 is up 3.4%.

Earlier in the week, we bought 2% positions in higher-education provider Bridgepoint Education and in wireless telecom leader Qualcomm.

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CEO Showcase: ScaleDB

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:03:03 +0000

ScaleDB for MySQL is ideal for applications that need increased performance, scalability, and availability while handling transactions. Applications that have any of the following requirements are ideal for the ScaleDB for MySQL solution: large data sets, large numbers of concurrent users, large numbers of tables with complex relationships, ACID compliant transaction processing, load balancing, high-availability with smooth fail-over, an evolving application with changing data storage requirements, and lower total cost of ownership.

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Paperless Financing Docs

Fred Wilson — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:04:24 +0000

I've been on a mission to dramatically reduce the legal costs of a venture financing. Our firm is doing our part. On many of our recent transactions, we've gone without counsel and have signed documents without negotiation. That takes out the investor counsel costs. And we've been pushing company counsel to reduce their costs. But we are still seeing company counsel costs of $15k or more on venture financings even with our "no negotiation" approach.

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Why Board Meetings Suck

Steve Blank — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:03:07 +0000

There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Jonathan Swift

What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings
As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time.

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Financing Options: Friends and Family

Fred Wilson — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 22:48:53 +0000

This is the first in a series of posts about financing options for startups. By "financing" I mean obtaining cash to fund your business. There are all sorts of strategies to avoid needing funding, but this series is not about them.

Many entrepreneurs turn to friends and family for their first funding needs. In fact, it is common for non-tech startups to raise all the capital they need from friends and family. I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that friends and family make up the largest source of funding for entrepreneurs and startups.

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Going Cambrian

Greg Ness — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 22:47:18 +0000

Most of them are gaining traction because the proprietary link between hardware and software (and the required services, training, certifications, etc.) that fueled the tech leaders for more than a decade is being eroded by virtualization and opening up the playing field in the same way that cable ultimately undermined the influence of the three major broadcast networks.

What standards could never accomplish in the era of tech giant hegemony is now not only possible but thriving as software and hardware are decoupled and creating the Cambrian Cloud Explosions I discussed in a September 2009 blog:

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CEO Showcase: myERP.com

admin — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 21:03:29 +0000

myERP.com is a SaaS cloud enterprise resource planning toolsuite that's designed for small- to medium sized businesses. myERP.com is designed specifically for small business owners who want to spend more time growing their business and less time managing it. There is no costly software to buy or install or complicated user manuals to study.

myERP.com is so simple that it takes less than five minutes to set up and use, driven by an intuitive graphical user interface. myERP.com is free for up to 2 users.

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Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Startup Genome Project

Steve Blank — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:46:11 +0000

In April 2010 I received an email that said, “I’m an incoming Stanford student in the fall and working on a project that a number of people suggested I get in touch with you about.”

Ok, I get a lot of these. Is this some grad student or post doc who wanted to do some independent study?

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For Some Vendors Cloud Will Become a Destroyer of Worlds

Greg Ness — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:45:29 +0000

The world of lock-in/pre-bundled, expertise and footprint so kind to the likes of Microsoft, HP and Cisco is gradually transforming into commoditized hardware supporting ever more robust ecosystems of software that can be easily downloaded and installed and even purchased online via credit card. That world is helping to create new operating models and realities, of which cloud is one. This is the world that VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and the Open Networking Foundation are creating with “the great decouple”.

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Mobile Devices: Remote or Primary?

Fred Wilson — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:56:26 +0000

I've long thought that the mobile devices we have in our home (tablets, iTouch, phones) would be our remotes. In fact, we use them everyday for that now. We use the Sonos app on the iPad to control the music in our house. We use the Boxee remote on the iTouch to control our TV. We all have apps on our androids and iPhones that control various devices in our home.

But as we were driving out to our beach house on friday afternoon, I realized that there is an alternative scenario. The mobile devices could be our primary content consumption devices and we will simply connect them to whatever device we want them to "play to."

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Startup Mantra: Hire Fast, Fire Fast

Mark Suster — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:55:37 +0000

I have often said that what separates real entrepreneurs from pundits and bystanders is a bias towards getting things done versus over analyzing things. My credo has always been JFDI.

It’s the hardest thing to teach people who come out of big companies, out of conservative jobs. At the big consulting firms, investment banks and established large technology companies we’re taught to produce long reports, make sure that every document is perfect quality and that every possible bit of diligence has been done. Good enough isn’t.

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CEO Showcase: Yerbabuena Software

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:45:04 +0000

Yerbabuena Software, since its inception, seeks to improve society by providing innovation and technology. Created as a spin-off from the University of Malaga, Spain, the company has, since its beginning, had a vocation for enterprise software, thanks to the professionalism of its engineers. In this sense, Yerbabuena is following in the footsteps of other successful Spanish technology startups, such as Panda Software, OpenBravo, and Bitrock.

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Cloud: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

Greg Ness — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:13:05 +0000

Gabe Lowy of Mizuho Securities offers a compelling perspective on the increasing strategic importance of energy costs to IT. I spoke to him yesterday about cloud as the greatest story ever sold and we quickly focused on the increasing role of electricity for the enterprise and higher rates of change and innovation in the data center resulting from virtualization and the rebirth of the mainframe in the form of the great cloud story.

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All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club

Bill Gurley — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:12:14 +0000

“ Don’t you know that you are a shooting star,
And all the world will love you just as long,
As long as you are.”  – Paul Rodgers, Shooting Star

With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both “valuation” and “revenue” and suggest that there is a correlation between the two. Calculating or qualifying potential valuation using the simplistic and crude tool of a revenue multiple (also known as the price/revenue or price/sales ratio) was quite trendy back during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s. Perhaps it is not peculiar that our good friend the price/revenue ratio is back in vogue. But investors and analysts beware; this is a remarkably dangerous technique, because all revenues are not created equal.

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CEO Showcase: Sparkling Logic

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:11:23 +0000

Sparkling Logic is a California-based company founded by the leading experts in decision management to help businesses over the world improve their decision-making processes. Although decision management techniques and technologies have been available for decades now, only Fortune 500 companies have been able to leverage them with varying degrees of success. Besides the cost of technology, education materials are seldom available and experts are few around the globe.

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Google Wallet Launches

Michael Moe — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:04:48 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 0.4% last week, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 both dropped 0.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 16.6%, the NASDAQ is up 5.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 5.8%.

Google launched a new product, called Google Wallet, to let Android users pay by phone. GOOG is teaming up with MasterCard, Citigroup, and Sprint. Instead of swiping a card, users can wave their phone in front of a reader to make a payment. The mobile payment space is seeing increasing innovation and growth with companies like Square, Google, and others. For the week, GOOG was down -0.6%.

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You Need to Win the Battle for Share of Mind

Mark Suster — Mon, 30 May 2011 16:33:23 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the proliferation of starutps in the past 2 years. It seems almost incomprehensible that only 2.5 years ago we read the “RIP Good Times” presentation from Sequoia.

But what does this all mean? Are we headed for a long era of innovation in which startups are the new norm? Are we seeing a time in which pre-revenue companies are more valuable than our offline institutional brands? As with the late 90′s the answer is “Yes. And no.”

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When Raising VC Doesn't Make enough Difference to be Worth It

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 30 May 2011 16:32:41 +0000

Over the weekend my former colleague Cedric Latessa emailed me a link to a blog post by Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of SEOmoz, where he talks about his decision whether or not to raise VC (warning: I two of my laptops have thrown up malware warnings before letting me thr

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The Evolution of the Retail Store

Amish_Jani — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:10:13 +0000

Reading today about Apple redesigning their store experience got me thinking about the role of the store in the future. New online companies are exploding into multi-billion dollar vertical categories and growing rapidly. Does that mean there is no room for the store? Not in my mind, but it’s fundamental role will evolve consistent with our thesis around the convergence of offline and online models.

For the last few decades, retail companies expanded by driving greater and greater geographic footprint. Stores were the only point for transacting product and even today represent the preponderance of sales. “Same store” numbers helped to gauge the productivity of a store but top line most of the time was driven by number of new stores.

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Sizing Option Pools In Connection With Financings

Fred Wilson — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:09:30 +0000

We've talked about this issue before here at AVC. Investors like to require that an unissued option pool is in the pre-money valuation calculation when they put money into early stage companies. If you don't entirely understand what I am talking about here, go click on that link at the start of the post. Hopefully it will explain the issue.

This post is about how to size the option pool. Many investors just want the number to be as big as possible.

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CEO Showcase: Bill.com

admin — Fri, 27 May 2011 00:30:01 +0000

Bill.com is a cloud-bases SAAS that streamlines and automates business's bill payment and invoicing processes. The product suite provides a complete, Web-based "financial office" to organize day-to-day finances and cash flow and get them under control. Everything a business, its employees, and its accountant need to manage your business—the documents, workflow, payment processing, invoicing, and collections—are available, no matter the location.

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How Does a VC Consider Barriers to Entry?

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:33:00 +0000

Barriers to entry, sometimes also called sources of unfair advantage or sustainable competitive advantage are hugely important to VCs. A business with good barriers to entry is able to compete more effectively against competitors because the barriers prevent the competition from offering equivalent product. Further such companies typically command a higher valuations on exit because acquirers know they will struggle to build an equivalent product themselves and/or public market investors are less worried about competitors. Finally, there is a good correlation between stron

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Give Chambers (and other Tech Leaders) a Break

Greg Ness — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:32:08 +0000

Some of the highest profile blue chip tech stocks appear to be under increasing pressure, and adjusting expectations accordingly. Pundits blaming CEOs or marketing teams are missing the mark. As chroniclers or observers of the triumphs and tragedies in the tech industry pundits sometimes miss the internal churning, burning gear works within companies and categories that create outcomes, and instead prefer to focus on a single personality or department.

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The Importance of The Narrative

Mark Suster — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:31:28 +0000

I went to undergrad at UCSD, which is not a place known for its Greek institutions and my father grew up in South America and had know idea what a fraternity was.

So I went to college with no expectation that I would ever join a fraternity let alone aspire to become president one day. Yet being in a fraternity was one of the most transformative experiences I had in college and prepared me better for becoming an entrepreneur than any class that I took.

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The Cloud

Fred Wilson — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:30:46 +0000

I wrote a blog post yesterday about my move to the cloud. It has gotten 234 comments so far and another 49 on Hacker News. That's a lot of discussion about something that is fairly commonplace these days.

It's pretty clear from reading the comments on both places that moving to the cloud is something many have done, many more are doing, and a few are resisting. It's also clear to me that it is the future.

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CEO Showcase: Producteev

admin — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:29:56 +0000

Producteev was born out of numerous gripe sessions between a group of interface experts and web application coders. Both groups needed a good-task management application, but no one could find one that really did the job.

Producteev was created to be a full-featured task management application, aware of social networking, with an intuitive user interface. Additionally, the tool suite gives users a clear overview of the status of any project, anytime, and from any place.

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Quick Practical, Tactical Tips for Presentations

Mark Suster — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:31:42 +0000

In the past I’ve given some tips for handling meetings effectively, covering topics like:
- How not to let your meeting go down a rat hole;
- Dealing with the elephant in the room;
- Dealing with skeletons in your closet;
- How to make meetings discussions, not “pitches”
- A tale of two pitches (I eventually invested in the first company that pitched)

Today’s post is a subtle one about positioning yourself in a presentation. This might be a VC meeting but also might just be a sales or biz dev meeting. It’s any meeting where you are in a small room and are being called on to present on some form of overhead slides.

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My New Setup

Fred Wilson — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:30:51 +0000

I've finally completed my long standing desire to be done with desktop software and desktop files. The final piece of the puzzle came yesterday when I unplugged my windows desktop as part of our office move. I'm so excited about my new setup and thought I'd blog about it. I realize that many of you made this move years ago. I'm not suggesting I am ahead of the curve here. I'm just happy to finally be where I've wanted to be for a number of years.

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Apple Seeks Partners for its Cloud Music Service

Michael Moe — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:15:41 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 0.8% last week, the NASDAQ dropped 0.9%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.3%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 17.1%, the NASDAQ is up 5.7%, and the S&P 500 is up 6%.

Aruba Networks reported strong Q1 results, beating estimates by a penny, driven by 53% revenue growth and 100% EPS growth. ARUN grew its customer base by 9% during the previous quarter to more than 14,000. ARUN, which makes gear to connect mobile devices to local networks, benefits from the rapid adoption of the iPad. Apple says that 80% of the world's 100 largest companies have adopted the iPad. Nevertheless, investors were disappointed by management's outlook, and the stock sold off 17% on Friday alone. For the week, ARUN dropped 15.9%.

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Competition: The Pros and Cons

Fred Wilson — Mon, 23 May 2011 00:58:21 +0000

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to talk about competition. For most businesses, competition is a given. When I walk to work, I am often struck how many local businesses have competitors literally right across the street. Clearly competition is something you can learn to live with and still operate successfully. In fact, there are some very good things about competition. And there are some challenging things. This post will attempt to outline both.

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Working On, Rather Than In, Your Business

Brad Feld — Mon, 23 May 2011 00:57:39 +0000

I spent the day yesterday in Kansas City at the Kauffman Foundation with about 20 women entrepreneurs who were the E&Y Winning Women from 2008, 2009, and 2010. As part of their program, Paul Kedrosky and I spent the morning talking to them about accelerating their growth, dynamics around financings, and boards – mostly about how to build a board and use it effectively. It was a great day – awesome energy with stimulating discussions. In addition to a great discussion, I learned a lot in my continuous quest to better understand dynamics around gender in entrepreneurship. I also met some amazing women.

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CEO Showcase: CareCloud

admin — Sun, 22 May 2011 20:29:59 +0000

CareCloud's mission is to eliminate inefficiency and waste in the healthcare industry, which is attributed to administrative bureaucracy and redundant care, by connecting its fragmented constituents and supplying highly effective information technology and other services. CareCloud connects doctors, medical staff, patients, and others into a unified, on-demand healthcare ecosystem and offers them amazing apps to interact on a human level while transacting on a business level.

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Minimize Your Cost Per Bang

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 22 May 2011 18:31:34 +0000

I have never paid for sex.

I'm a VC. I get wooed all the time at the boondoggles I host and at the tech conferences I speak at.

Yes, it is hard to say no to banging, but my weaker colleagues sometimes say yes. They think it is smart that they're gaming the system. They're not and in danger of an incredibly high CPB.

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How Federal Government Can Help Entrepreneurship

Brad Feld — Fri, 20 May 2011 00:56:57 +0000

This afternoon in Boulder I’ll be on a panel as part of the White House Startup America Roundtable. If you weren’t invited to the event, there is a web site called Reducing Barriers to Innovation that you can participate in.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent some time thinking about how the government can help entrepreneurship. It started with my role as the co-chairman of the Colorado Governors Innovation Council which was my first involvement in any formal way with any government initiative. More recently, I’ve focused my energy on the Startup Visa movement and the Startup America Partnership.

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The Venture Capital Industry is Governed by Two Cycles

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 20 May 2011 00:54:00 +0000

When people ask me about the likely development of the venture capital industry I always answer that it is governed by two somewhat independent cycles.

The first is the macro-economic cycle. When the overall economy is performing poorly it is harder for startups to grow their businesses and create value and those that make it as far as exit find their companies attract lower valuations both at IPO and in M&A. These factors depress returns across the industry which reduces the attractiveness of venture capital as an asset class and hence the size of the venture industry as measured by investment into venture capital funds is driven in part by the macroeconomic cycle.

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Skype Out

Fred Wilson — Fri, 20 May 2011 00:53:17 +0000

My friend @David asked me to revisit the post I wrote about Skype spinning out of eBay back in the spring of 2009 in the wake of the news that Skype is headed into the hands of Microsoft. David quotes this part of that April 2009 post:

But the best thing about this is getting the asset back into the hands of the entrepreneurs who created it and built it. We all saw what happened at Apple when Jobs took back the reins of the company and I suspect Niklas and Janus would not be thinking about this if they didn’t have a strong strategic plan for Skype.

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CEO Showcase: RainStor

admin — Thu, 19 May 2011 21:56:05 +0000

RainStor specializes in online information preservation. The company's data repository significantly reduces the total cost of preserving information through extreme data compression, simplified data management, and near-perfect scalability on commodity hardware.

RainStor lets is partners deliver online data retention solutions that reduce the cost and complexity of preserving information in the enterprise and the cloud. RainStor is the optimal data management and storage technology for application archiving, application retirement, SaaS Data Escrow, and log and security event management solutions.

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Social Media's Secret Weapon: Email

Fred Wilson — Thu, 19 May 2011 01:02:32 +0000

The theme in board meeting after board meeting in recent months is driving repeat usage and retention. Whether the product is a mobile app, a social app, a mobile social app, a marketplace, an ecommerce business, or something else, everyone is looking at montly actives/total registered users and saying "let's push that number up and to the right." And I'm nodding my head in violent agreement.

I asked one of the best product centric entrepreneurs I know why he thinks that Facebook does so well on that metric (monthly actives/total registered users) and he said to me "when I get an email from Facebook that a friend has tagged me in a photo, I click on it and go check it out every time."

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Implementing Social Media's Secret Weapon

Brad Feld — Thu, 19 May 2011 01:01:52 +0000

Fred Wilson had an excellent post up this morning titled Social Media’s Secret Weapon – Email. I completely agree that email is the key communications channel for social media and have written about this before in posts like 100% Click Through Rate, Email – The Original Social Graph and Email Is Still The Best Login.

I’ve been investing in email related stuff for over 15 years going back to Email Publishing, my very first Boulder-based investment which I believe was the very first email service provider (ESP) and was acquired by MessageMedia which was then bought by Doubleclick. Fred and I are both investors in Return Path which he calls out in his post as the category creator and market leader in email deliverability. I love Return Path as a company and am incredibly proud of what they’ve done as a business.

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The AlwaysOn OnMobile 100 Top Company Competition

admin — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:48:21 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its first annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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CEO Showcase: Intelligent Papers

admin — Wed, 18 May 2011 01:01:12 +0000

Intelligent Papers is a company focused on building the tools for global equality in education with the goal of eliminating paper from education and closing the digital divide globally. To achieve this, the founders built a digital textbook using inexpensive touch devices with software that makes them easy to use, and includes the ability to write on the books, highlight them, watch videos, and presentations, listen to audio, access the Internet when available, engage in interactive games and exercises, and collaborate with other students.

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The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford – The Final Presentations

Steve Blank — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:42:41 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This last post – part nine – highlights the final team presentations. Parts one through eight, the class lectures, are here, Guide for our mentors is here. Syllabus is here.

This is the End
Class lectures were over last week, but most teams kept up the mad rush to talk to even more customers and further refine their products. Now they were standing in front of us to give their final presentations. They had all worked hard. Teams spent an average of 50 to 100 hours a week on their companies, interviewed 50+ customers and surveyed hundreds (in some cases thousands) more.

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Exits for VC-Backed Companies: Fewer but Bigger IPOs and more M&A, Future is Rosy

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:41:53 +0000

William Quigley, managing director at Clearstone Venture Partners has a guest post up on Techcrunch this morning arguing that The next ten years will be great for founders and VCs. He gives three reasons:

Companies are going public at much higher valuations (Google $40bn, VMWare $12bn, Facebook forecast say $70bn, compared with Cisco $0.3bn, Amazon $0.4bn, Microsoft $0.7bn, see the chart inset) and therefore pre-IPO investors are capturing a much larger part of the value creation

Specialist hedge funds have emerged whose understanding of tech markets enable them to value tech companies more highly

The speed at which companies can grow internationally has massively increased allowing more value to be created in the first years

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Google Launches Online Music Service

Michael Moe — Tue, 17 May 2011 01:03:01 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 2.5% last week, the NASDAQ was flat, and the S&P 500 was down 0.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 18%, the NASDAQ is up 6.6%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.4%.

Indian online travel platform MakeMyTrip reported better-than-expected Q1 revenue and EPS in-line with expectations. Revenue growth was 57.6%, driven by air ticket and hotel bookings, which were up 53.4%; transactions volume was up 78%. Management continues to be optimistic of its long-term prospective as the middle class in India continues to develop upward and Internet adoption improves. Investors were disappointed however, and MMYT dropped 12.6% for the week.

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The Co-Founder Mythology

Mark Suster — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:24:38 +0000

I spoke at Stanford last year about starting a tech company. They really cleverly chopped the video up into small bite-sized segments.

So for anybody who reads my “This Week in VC” transcripts but doesn’t watch the video – this one’s for you! It’s only 3 minutes, 44 seconds.

I covered what I call “the co-founder mythology.” So embedded is this conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that it feels like heresy to even question it. It’s a sacred cow, for sure.

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50/50 Cofounders

Fred Wilson — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:23:49 +0000

Mark Suster has been writing and speaking out about the challenges of a 50/50 partnership between two cofounders. He makes a ton of great points. I would like to provide the counterpoint.

I've started two venture capital firms. The first with Jerry Colonna. The second one with Brad Burnham. Both were 50/50 partnerships. Both have been fantastic experiences. I knew Jerry for a few months before I partnered with him. I knew Brad for a decade but had never worked in the same organization as him. I recognize that venture capital firms are different than companies and that a partnership model works better in VC firms than it does in companies. But these two experiences have taught me that a 50/50 partnership, like a marriage, forces the two founders to come together on all the key decisions and can lead to better decision making.

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Smartphone Trends that Augur Well, Especially for Google

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 16 May 2011 00:52:09 +0000

There have been a couple of reports on developments in the smartphone world that I’ve been meaning to blog for a few days now. These are important as we all assess the likelihood of a sustained tech boom driven by mobile computing, likely developments in mobile advertising and finally how the Android vs iOS battle is panning out.

First up is a study from an independent research firm that polled 5,013 US adults on their smartphone usage. The report was commissioned by Google and reported on the Google Mobile Ads blog and so was always likely to come out with findings that are positive for the mobile ad market, if not for Google explicitly.

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Spolsky on Software

Mark Suster — Mon, 16 May 2011 00:51:32 +0000

Sometime around 2003/04 my technology team turned me on to “Spolsky on Software” a periodic newsletter served up blog style from Joel Spolsky of FogCreek Software, a maker of bug-tracking software.

Blogs weren’t popularized yet so it was an oddity for me to read the founder of a software company spewing out advice. But I loved reading them and so did my team.

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CEO Showcase: DotNetNuke

admin — Sun, 15 May 2011 21:22:28 +0000

DotNetNuke is an open-source web content management platform used to build Web sites and applications on Microsoft's .NET architecture. The flexible DotNetNuke open source CMS platform also functions as a web application development framework. The DotNetNuke platform is offered in a free Community Edition and a subscription-based Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition. These editions are easy to modify quickly and affordably with a selection of more than 8,000 third-party apps available through the company's Snowcovered.com online marketplace.

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Video In The Cloud

Fred Wilson — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:56:07 +0000

In the megatrends post this past week I mentioned that:

A third of Netflix' new subscribers are opting for the streaming only plan

We've been Netflix customers for a long time and we currently have the "4 DVDs at a time Unlimited" plan. But when I went to look at our Netflix account this morning, I saw that we've only ordered one DVD in all of 2011 and we have streamed eleven movies in the past seven days. We are not ready to go to streaming only because the Netflix streaming library isn't complete enough and there are times when we really want to see a film and we order it on DVD. That's happened once so far this year so we probably should cut back our account to 1 DVD at a time.

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Avoid the Human Temptation of Focusing too much on Avoiding the Downside

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:55:25 +0000

I’m halfway through a book called Nudge which is about the shortcuts we all employ to be able to make decisions quickly without needing to understand all the details. As the authors point out, as the world gets more complicated and the pace of change accelerates our need to rely on these shortcuts is increasing. Their interest is in understanding how those shortcuts work and in using that knowledge to help people (i.e. nudge people) to make better decisions – e.g. in the way we save for our retirement. One of the most common shortcuts we rely on are the default options that are presented to us, and hence thinking carefully about which options are chosen as the defaults is a powerful way to ‘nudge’.

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CEO Showcase: Mu Dynamics

admin — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:50:04 +0000

Mu Dynamics helps network operators and their diverse product suppliers build and operate higher-quality, more reliable and robust networks that have minimal downtime. Operators need their revenue-critical next-gen IP services to be robust, available, and secure to ensure minimal customer churn and costly downtime issues.

Mu's unique application-aware, multipurpose testing solution gives companies the ability to understand how new applications will impact networks as well as identify and resolve potential issues before they disrupt services.

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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 8: Key Resources, Activities and Expense Model

Steve Blank — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:55:54 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post – part eight – was the last formal lecture. Parts one through seven of the lectures are here, Syllabus is here.

While this is the last lecture, the teams still have one more week to work on their companies, and then they have their final presentations – for 30% of their grade. All the teams have crossed the Rubicon.

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Lot18, Wine, And Next Gen Retail

Amish_Jani — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:55:04 +0000

It’s been a busy 2011 for FirstMark. We’ve had some big exits, some great new investments, and seed companies blossoming into market leaders. On that last theme, I’m excited to congratulate the Lot18 team for closing their $10MM Series B round of capital, led by NEA with substantial participation by FirstMark.

Lot18 is a next generation wine e-commerce company, initially leveraging a membership driven engagement model. What excited us in October 2010 when we first seeded the company was how Lot18 took an incredibly complicated category, and created a beautiful site where wineries’ products were showcased to consumers. Though it leverages a membership driven model, this is not about distressed goods or deep discounting as is commonly confused with the space.

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Ordinary Income vs. Capital Gains

Fred Wilson — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:08:10 +0000

I'm wandering a bit on MBA Mondays right now. I don't have a strong view of where to take this thing next. So I'm just going to post about stuff I think people should understand until I find the next vein we can mine for a while.

Today, I'd like to talk about ordinary income vs capital gains. This is not tax advice. I am not a tax lawyer or a tax accountant. I hope both tax lawyers and tax accountants show up in the comments as this is important and complicated stuff.

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A Few Key People Really Can Make a Huge Difference

Mark Suster — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:07:30 +0000

People keep asking me if I’ve “seen anything interesting.” Of course I have. I’m an entrepreneur at heart so I’m always inspired when I hear stories about innovation.

I really liked BigDoor, MediaPiston, OpsCode, BuddyTV, SEOMoz and much more. Can’t list them all.

But I’m not here trolling for deals. I’m here to build long-term, stable relationships that I hope will pay off over a decade, not a week. I’m looking to turn dots into lines over time.

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CEO Showcase: bizznesscard

admin — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:00:18 +0000

bizznesscard is an online sales and marketing service specifically designed for small business owners. The company's goal is to make driving new business "online easy," so owners can make money and be successful in the cyber world and in the real world. bizznesscard levels the playing field between small businesses and their competitors. bizznesscard is easy to follow, simple to use, and can support both "sellers" (small businesses) and "buyers" (customers).

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Getting to the Land of Must-Haveness, Faster

Tony Tjan — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:59:07 +0000

Lately I have been spending a lot of time with some of our portfolio company CEOs talking about how to differentiate their products and services. How should they think about their value or selling proposition? How can they best measure their success? For our portfolio businesses (especially those in digital media and information services) and for businesses in general, there is a simple question that CEOs and management team members should ask and ask frequently: How do we become a must-have to our customer?

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How Does a VC Think about Exit Strategy?

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:58:28 +0000

Venture capitalists only make money if they exit companies successfully, and in this context ‘successfully’ means at a big profit for the investors within a few years of making the original investment. Making a big profit quickly usually means that the company exits at a high valuation relative to its revenues and profits (if indeed there are any profits).

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Mixed Results for the Week as Oil Prices Crash

Michael Moe — Mon, 09 May 2011 02:17:03 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 2.8% last week, the NASDAQ declined 1.6%, and the S&P 500 was down 1.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 17.6%, the NASDAQ is up 6.6%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.6%.

Earlier in the week, weight management leader Herbalife reported a strong quarter, with 46% EPS growth and 29% revenue growth, driven by 22% volume growth. Geographically, China's revenues grew 37%, the rest of Asia was up 27%, North America up 15%, and the EMEA region up 12%. In addition, HLF raised its 2011 EPS guidance and expects revenue growth of 20% in Q2. HLF popped 16.8% for the week.

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Finding And Buying A Domain Name

Fred Wilson — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:52:14 +0000

I believe that a good domain name is an important success factor in building and launching consumer web services. It's not in my top ten but it could be. It's certainly something we think about a lot when making investments and working with companies post investment.

A number of our portfolio companies have acquired their domain names in connection with or shortly after our investment. Del.icio.us purchased Delicious.com with some of the proceeds of our investment. Foursquare purchased Foursquare.com with some of the proceeds of our investment (they launched with playfoursquare.com). We've advised and assisted a number of our portfolio companies in this effort.

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Nearly All Jobs Created in Successful Startups

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:51:22 +0000

I’ve written before about how the UK government has worked out that the majority of jobs created in the UK are created by startups and that as a result they are working hard to make life easier for entrepreneurs. Perhaps the most visible parts of that policy are tax incentives, support for venture capital funds and support for the east London tech cluster (aka
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CEO Showcase: MuleSoft

admin — Sun, 08 May 2011 20:57:27 +0000

MuleSoft is a Web middleware company that provides enterprise-class software based on open-source products, including Mule ESB and Apache Tomcat. The company offers Tcat Server, an application server that simplifies management, application provisioning, and diagnostics tasks for Tomcat developers and administrators; Mule ESB, an open-source enterprise service bus that lets developers create and integrate application services; and Mule Data Integrator, which simplifies data integration and transformation tasks.

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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Revenue Model

Steve Blank — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:18:18 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. With one week and one more updates to go, this post is part seven. Parts one through six are here, Syllabus is here.

With a week to go the teams are starting to look like opening night before the big play. Teams are iterating and pivoting right and left, one team threw their entire business model out the window and did a complete restart, and another team was having a meltdown over personalities.

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The Future of Advertising will be Integrated

Mark Suster — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:16:36 +0000

Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)! I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down.

Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. And as Jon Steinberg of Buzzfeed points out, the CTRs for social media banner ads are just 0.08%.

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Network Operators Should be Allowed to Charge Content Owners for Carriage

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:48:01 +0000

Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner responsible for the ‘digital agenda’ which includes broadband targets is considering allowing network operators to charge content owners to transmit content over their networks. This would be an abandonment of the principles of net neutrality that have served us all well over the last 15-20 years, but I am starting to think it might give us the best chance of getting improved broadband speeds going forward, which is probably more important than anything else. That said, it is also critically important that charges are regulated

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First Time vs. Serial Entrepreneurs

Fred Wilson — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:47:20 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about the differences between first time and serial entrepreneurs. We invest in both and do not have a preference betweeen the two. But there are significant differences.

The best first time entrepreneurs have been stewing on their idea for quite a while. It is a personal passion of theirs and they bring to it a fresh take, a stubborn insistence on their approach, and they obsess about the idea 24/7. They often get the right product into the market at the right time and they capture the user's attention and usage with that product/market fit.

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Learning the Right Lessons from the Amazon Outage

Brad Feld — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:52:26 +0000

As most nerds know, Skynet gained self-awareness last week and decided as its first act to mess with Amazon Web Services, creating havoc for anyone that wanted to check-in on the Internet to their current physical location. In hindsight Skynet eventually figured out this was a bad call on its part as it actually wants to know where every human is at any given time.

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Cloud Parade Ambushed by Amazon Outage

Jeff Kaplan — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:51:45 +0000

Plenty of has been written about last week’s disruption of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) which took hundreds of organizations offline, including many rapidly growing start-ups and evolving aspects of enterprise operations.

(The best I’ve read summarizing the questions raised and lessons to be learned as a result of the AWS outage was by my friend Phil Wainewright.)

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CEO Showcase: Splunk

admin — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:46:41 +0000

Splunk provides operational intelligence software used to monitor, report, and analyze real-time machine data as well as terabytes of historical data located on-premise or in the cloud. Almost half of the Fortune 100 and more than 2,300 enterprises, service providers, and government organizations in 74 countries use Splunk to improve service levels, reduce IT operations costs, mitigate security risks, and drive new levels of operational visibility.

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Office Hours

Fred Wilson — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:51:10 +0000

Yesterday I did office hours for the second time. We started doing office hours in the fall of last year and try to do them once a quarter. Brad, Albert, Christina, and I all do them. Christina does office hours way more often than the rest of us. But we all do them.

We were inspired by Josh Kopelman and Brad Feld who have been doing their equivalent of office hours for some time now.

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What Should You Do with Your Services Business?

Mark Suster — Mon, 02 May 2011 21:55:17 +0000

There’s a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry (and subsequently Wall Street) who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses.

It’s nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs. You’re a small fish.

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SaaS, PaaS or IaaS: No One Rides for Free

Ed_Lambert — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:41:44 +0000

I was hanging out with my friend Marshall a few days ago. He has been a part of the cloud support network for a number of years, providing the "earth" part that the cloud requires, including the diverse set of the companies that came to the latest and for sure the greatest OnDemand conference. He is working with a Chinese company that he thinks is going to be bigger than CISCO, HP, or anything else out there by the time the year ends.

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Some Thoughts On The Music Business

Fred Wilson — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:45:39 +0000

Over the past week, I've had several conversations with friends in various parts of the music business and there are a number of recurring themes that I thought I'd blog about. This post is about the recorded music part of the business, not publishing, not touring, not movie or video game soundtracks.

Physical distribution (ie buying CDs in stores) is still more than 50% of the recorded music business but it won't be long before digital revenues will eclipse physical. It might happen this year.

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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Channel Hypotheses

Steve Blank — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:43:35 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment with a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. With two weeks and two more updates to go, this post is part six. Parts one through five are here, Syllabus is here.

While we’ve been pushing hard on the teams, this week the teaching team was about to get its socks blown off. All the teams were showing us what agile looked like, but this week several would remind us what focused and relentless really meant.

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CEO Showcase: Moxie Software

admin — Sun, 01 May 2011 17:54:09 +0000

Moxie Software provides integrated social enterprise software for employee and customer engagement through its Spaces by Moxie platform. This integrated solution also includes Moxie Knowledge Spaces, enabling customers and employees to co-create and share knowledge. Designed in the social media era and in collaboration with IDEO, the human factor design and innovation firm, Employee Spaces is an enterprise social software built for the way people work instead of around a collection of tools or a repository of documents.

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Baidu Benefits from Google's China Exit

Michael Moe — Sun, 01 May 2011 16:20:38 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week up 0.9%, while the NASDAQ advanced 1.9%, and the S&P 500 was up 2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 21%, the NASDAQ is up 8.3%, and the S&P 500 is up 8.4%.

Strong Q1 results were announced from Baidu, Starbucks, Fortinet, and Acme Packet. Amazon missed estimates on higher costs and investments, but investors liked the firm's focus on R&D and innovation and its stock advanced 5.3% for the week.

Baidu reported 133% EPS growth, with 89% revenue growth and guided up for Q2. Traffic acquisition cost dropped compared to a year ago from 13% to 8.2% of sales, mainly due to Google's exit from China. BIDU was pretty much flat for the week at -0.1%.

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Exploring an Alternative Economy

Vish Goda — Sun, 01 May 2011 15:44:17 +0000

Term limits for elected officials were meant to work as a self-regulating mechanism—to keep them on track and address important issues quickly. Instead they seem to have paralyzed them with fear, unable to act. These days, our politicians and economists are faced with making huge decisions to get us out of this financial quagmire. Instead, they are bickering over small stuff and procrastinating over the big calls. Do we watch or do we act?

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Woulda Coulda Shoulda - Twitter

Josh Kopelman — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:45:19 +0000

Investing in the earliest stage of startups is difficult. At the stage we see companies, it is often with incomplete ideas, incomplete teams and incomplete business models. While we try our best to predict the future, we are often wrong.

Yesterday Business Insider published a story about "How Twitter Was Founded" that discussed the history of Odeo and Twitter. First Round Capital was an investor in Odeo -- and I blogged about it almost six years ago when I wrote:

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Get to Know Richard de Silva of Highland Capital

Mark Suster — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:44:31 +0000

I’ve just finished a week away from the office for Spring Break, which was much needed. I’m now back & ready for action.

I took the opportunity this past week to publish summary notes of some of the VCs and entrepreneurs I had interviewed on This Week in VC.

Back to regular writing this week so check back in.

One of my goals in doing the show was not only to educate entrepreneurs but also to put a human face on many of the VCs in our industry as VCs can be hard to get to know. We’re a busy bunch.

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An Android WiFi App I Need

Fred Wilson — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:42:42 +0000

I use wifi a lot on my android phone. I use it in my office, my home, my beach house, cafes I frequent, and offices of companies I frequent. I save the profiles for all of these locations and replace my carrier's data service with wifi when I am in these locations.

But I don't like to leave wifi on all the time on my phone. It eats the battery and it auto connects to weak wifi access points with generic names like linksys, netgear, etc. The latter situation can be particularly frustrating when I'm streaming audio or doing something important. It causes a lost connection and a broken session.

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CEO Showcase: Corent Technology

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:41:48 +0000

Corent Technology is the provider of SaaS-Suite, the most advanced software development platform for rapid transformation of software to SaaS. SaaS-Suite transforms stand-alone single-tenant software applications to turnkey, multi-tenant, cloud-compatible SaaS solutions rapidly and cost-effectively. Applications leveraging Corent's technology are easily portable across any public, private or hybrid clouds. In addition to being CEO of Corent, Feyzi is also Chairman of the Orange County Chapter of the Technology Council of Southern California.

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Melodramatic Bullshit

Brad Feld — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:57:32 +0000

I was going to write a different post this morning, but I came across this post by Matt Haughey titled Ev’s assholishness is greatly exaggeratedand, after reading it, sat for a few minutes and thought about it. Go read it now and come back.

Welcome back. I’m not an investor in Twitter directly (I am indirectly in a tiny amount through several of the VC funds I’m an investor in) but I’m an enormous Twitter fan and user.

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The Word "Bubble"

Fred Wilson — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:56:53 +0000

In all the posts over the past year or so outlining my thoughts on the financing and valuation environment in the internet sector, I've avoided using the word Bubble. It is intentional. For me Bubble will always be inexorably linked to what went down in 1999 and 2000 in the internet sector. And I agree with Mike Arrington that what is going on now is different. I do not think we are in a Bubble per se. That is why I don't use the word.

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How Does a VC Evaluate a Management Team?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:10:33 +0000

It is a cliche in venture capital that ‘it is all about the team’, particularly with early stage investments. Some will argue that the market and product are more important, but everyone agrees that having a great team is critical. To give more weight to this point, I recently heard one of Europe’s more experienced VCs describe how his fund used to make investments in companies that had great products in hot markets, but where they weren’t so sure about the team, but they found that those investments rarely ended well and ‘don’t make that mistake any longer’.

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Cisco's Flip Cam Failure and the Consumerization of IT

Jeff Kaplan — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:09:40 +0000

Cisco Systems’ decision this past week to shut down its Flip video camera business generated plenty of attention because of its implications on multiple levels for the networking company and the IT industry. Here are a few of my perspectives on the meaning of this event and the lessons to be learned.

Cisco deserves credit for the boldness of its acquisition of Pure Digital, the maker of the Flip camera, in 2009 and its equally brave decision to walk away from the over $590 million investment (acquisition, development and marketing costs) in a two year span. It had hoped to use the Flip camera and other home entertainment products as catalysts for additional consumer demand for its network connectivity capabilities and its service providers’ transmission services. Although Cisco didn’t sell as many Flip cameras as it hoped, it certainly can be credited to contributing the rise in video transmission volume during the past two years and growing expectations for more video services going forward.

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CEO Showcase: Kinamik Data Integrity

admin — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:56:12 +0000

Kinamik Data Integrity, a software company, provides data integrity software solutions. Its Kinamik Secure Audit Vault is a software solution for data integrity protection that centralizes and preserves sensitive digital data. The Vault consists of kFeeds, a set of small agents that collects in real-time sensitive data from various sources and sends it to the centralized vault. The kSecure module adds integrity by performing high-speed time stamping and hashing to the sensitive data.

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Want to Know How First Round Capital was Started?

Mark Suster — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 01:08:49 +0000

If you read this blog often you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of First Round Capital.

They have totally changed the way you run a VC firm, investing heavily in systems & events for their founders that are pushing the boundaries of the way our industry works.

One example is that they introduced a program where their founders can pool together shares from their company and exchange them for a small portfolio of other First Round Capital companies. I’m a huge fan of this innovation.

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Master of Customer Acquisition, Matt Coffin, on Startups

Mark Suster — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:57:02 +0000

I recently sat down with Matt Coffin, the founder of LowerMyBills, which sold for $400 million but was very nearly a bankruptcy only a few years early, and talked “startups.”

Matt is one of the most transparent, focused & honest startup guys you’ll meet.

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Mentors, Coaches, and Teachers

Steve Blank — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:56:40 +0000

When the student is ready, the master appears.
Buddhist Proverb

Lots of entrepreneurs believe they want a mentor. In fact, they’re actually asking for a teacher or a coach. A mentor relationship is a two-way street. To make it work, you have to bring something to the party.

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Apple Crushes Estimates

Michael Moe — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:14:24 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week up 4.4%, while the NASDAQ advanced 2%, and the S&P 500 was up 1.3%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 19.9%, while the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 are each up 6.3%.

We saw strong Q1 results across the line, with Apple and VMWare being outstanding.

AAPL crushed estimates (as usual) and posted 92% EPS growth and 83% revenue growth. iPhone sales were very strong, up 113% YoY, while iPad sales declined on a quarterly basis due to supply constraints (nevertheless, every iPad produced was sold!). China sales start to show momentum, up nearly 100%, and already make up 10% of total sales (vs. 2% a year ago). For the week, AAPL advanced 7.1%

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Margins (continued)

Fred Wilson — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 21:55:02 +0000

Last week in MBA Mondays we talked about margins, which I defined as:

Margin is the amount of money you make on each incremental sale or unit of revenue before factoring in the "fixed costs" of your business.

That led Amish Shah to leave me this comment:

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CEO Showcase: Creaza

admin — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 21:54:11 +0000

Creaza offers an integrated, Web-based toolbox for creative work, both at school and at home. Users can deploy the toolbox along with various fully developed thematic universes, such as historical periods, fairy-tales, fantasy worlds, and current challenges, such as climate/environment. Creaza integrates professional and user-generated content, creative tools, and a social network in a new and innovative way. Creaza users can also share their work with other Internet users.

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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Customer Relationship Hypotheses

Steve Blank — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:58:29 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part five. Parts one through four are here, Syllabus is here.

Week 5 of the class.
Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Customers (who are the users, payers, buyers, etc.) This week they were testing one of the most confusing sections of a company’s business model – Customer Relationships - the activities used to “Get, Keep and Grow” customers in a physical or virtual (web or mobile) channel. (Internet investor Dave McClure coined the acronym ”AARRR,” to remember the parts of Customer Relationships on the web.)

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Here are 10 Tips from BuzzFeed to Make Your Content Go Viral

Mark Suster — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:57:42 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed, a company who focuses on helping media companies make their content go viral. His words, “we find things on Sunday morning that will be on the Today show on Tuesday morning.” That’s why people turn up to Buzzfeed.

We talked about a lot of great stuff in the video including how to do sales calls and a how a new “culture of writing” is emerging as a critical skill set in business today.

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Eight Startup Lessons You Could Learn from Gotham Gal

Mark Suster — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:56:42 +0000

It’s easy to think that the wife of a well-known & successful VC (Fred Wilson) would have had an easy and storied life of wealth and privilege. I had previously had the opportunity to spend time with Joanne Wilson, Fred’s wife, and knew otherwise.

That’s why I was so interested in having “The Gotham Gal” come on This Week in VC (video link on YouTube, download iTunes, episode 15)) and dispel those myths. In fact, as she tells it, in their early career when Fred was young in VC, Joanne was earning 3x more money. Well into their 30′s “they were living paycheck-to-paycheck” as Joanne had taken time off of work to raise three children.

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The Internet Radio "Super Demographic"

Fred Wilson — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:55:40 +0000

Our portfolio company TargetSpot recently conducted two large research studies on the Internet Radio listener. For those that don't know, TargetSpot is the leading third party advertising network for streaming audio.

I've been an Internet Radio/Streaming Audio listener for over a decade and have always thought that Internet Radio listeners represented an ideal demographic for marketers to reach and influence. The TargetSpot research confirms that and then some. Internet Radio listeners are a "super demographic" and marketers should pay attention to this research and start creating programs to reach them.

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CEO Showcase: ToneFuse

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:54:05 +0000

ToneFuse is a marketing and monetization company centered around music. The company caters to marketers and high-traffic music properties in a number of ways. For advertisers, ToneFuse provides a solution to reach a large, targeted audience of habit-forming young adults. For high-traffic music properties, the company offers a multi-faceted solution to generate additional revenues through custom tailored programs that don't impact existing revenue sources.

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Here's to Bamboom!

Amish_Jani — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:51:58 +0000

We are very excited today to announce our investment in Bamboom Labs. This opportunity brings together all things one could ask for in a venture investment – a great team, a big, disruptive idea, a large market, and a cool web site.

Bamboom was started by Chet Kanojia, an entrepreneur I had the great fortune to invest in and get to know for many years at Navic Networks. Navic was an outstanding company bought by Microsoft in 2008 in a very successful outcome.

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Brad Feld Drops Knowledge. Here's What He Said....

Mark Suster — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:53:18 +0000

Brad Feld is a fountain of knowledge & wisdom. I had the chance to sit down with him for an hour and ask him loads of questions that I thought you’d enjoy hearing. If you have time check out the video (or download on iTunes – Episode 27 - and listen at the gym or on your commute!).

Or, as always, summary notes available below.

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How To Allocate Founder and Employee Equity

Fred Wilson — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:51:33 +0000

Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of our portfolio company Stack Exchange, posted an excellent answer to the question in the title of this post on the Stack site OnStartups.

I'm not going to reblog the entire answer here. I'd encourage you to go read Joel's answer. However, I am going to highlight some of the most important points from Joel's post:

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Data Centers: Growing Wholesale

Greg Ness — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:46:02 +0000

There is a robust data center colocation and outsourcing industry driven by the growing mass adoption of computing (see Welcome to the Era of Mass Computing). That business promises to stay robust for the foreseeable future. As businesses build out their IT infrastructures many opt to place or host their racks or apps with data center service providers, streamlining costs while sharing specialized facilities.

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Capital Flowing into VC Funds in the U.S., but not in Europe

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:45:08 +0000

New data out from Dow Jones shows that Limited Partners pumped more money into US venture funds last quarter than at any time since 2001. Interestingly the money is going into fewer funds though. A few very large funds have done well (Sequoia closed a $1.3bn fund, Bessemer a $1.6bn fund and Greylock a $1bn fund), and according to Techcrunch, early stage funds also did well. Mid sized funds were the losers.

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CEO Showcase: mms

admin — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:52:28 +0000

mms is a provider of smart mobile marketing and business solutions that scale, enabling interactive engagement between companies and consumers through the mobile channel. mms has 19 offices worldwide including headquarters in Vienna, Austria and U.S. offices in Boston, Los Angeles, and Miami. mms has delivered marketing campaigns across Europe and North America for major brands such as Coca-Cola, Bell Mobility, CBS, Univision, NBC Universal, bwin, Clear Channel and Star Alliance, just to name a few.

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The Five-Step Failure Checklist

Tony Tjan — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 01:06:00 +0000

For HBR's April issue on failure, I penned a piece on the experience of going through a failed IPO. In one context or another, you've likely failed, too. You may have chosen to frame it some other way ("experience," "lessons learned," etc.), but it was failure.

First, welcome to the club. We've all been there. Second, for a book we're writing on the DNA of entrepreneurship, my co-authors Richard Harrington, Tsun-yan Hsieh, and I have developed a checklist on how to reflect on failure.

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Margins

Fred Wilson — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 01:05:16 +0000

Margin or margins is a word you hear a lot in business. I want to talk about what it means and why it is important today on MBA Mondays. I did talk about margins once before, in the context of the income statement, back when we were walking through the basic financial statements. But I'd like to talk about the concept outside a strict accounting definition.

Margin is the amount of money you make on each incremental sale or unit of revenue before factoring in the "fixed costs" of your business.

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CEO Showcase: Viafoura

admin — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:43:57 +0000

Viafoura provides tools to facilitate user engagement on websites. The Viafoura platform lets audiences engage with content, personalities, and other users through text, video, and video debate. It aims to replace the traditional concept of the text forum and commenting widget and merge them into one user engagement tool

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Google Leads Q1 Earnings Reports

Michael Moe — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:30:50 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week up 0.7%, while the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 declined 0.6% each. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 14.9%, the NASDAQ is up 4.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 4.9%.

Google started the 2011 earnings season and reported 20% earnings growth, missing expectations by two cents, and 27% revenue growth, above expectations. YouTube and mobile continue to show strong results, with YouTube doubling, and Android phones seeing 350K activations per day.

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CEO Showcase: Wave Accounting

admin — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:00:17 +0000

Wave is an online accounting application for small businesses. The service is totally free; not freemium or free with use caps. Wave is a full double-entry accounting app, which is preferred by accountants. It has financial dashboards, can track expenses, and can be used in a lightweight manner if business owners don't need or want full accounting reporting. Wave offers invoicing tools and a full suite of reports as well as journal transactions.

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I Love Sarbanes-Oxley

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:21:42 +0000

There needs to be a book written about the cyclical nature of Silicon Valley.

Oh wait, I'm getting a BBM...

...there ARE books on this??

Of course, there are a tra-zillion books on the ups and downs of Sand Hill Road. But why don't people take advantage of these peaks and dips?!

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Understanding Google

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:28:48 +0000

Over the weekend I read Bill Gurley’s post from last week titled The Freight Train That is Android, courtesy of a pointer on AVC. It is a brilliant post that made sense of Google’s strategy for me in a new way.

Previously it had seemed to me that Google’s strategy was largely designed to find significant additional revenue lines to compliment and lessen their dependence on search.

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Customer Hypotheses

Steve Blank — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:28:04 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part four. Part one is here, two is here and three is here. Syllabus is here.

Week 4 of the class.
Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Value Proposition (their company’s product or service.) This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model, one with both buyers and sellers.) Many of them had heard the phrase “product/market fit” before, but now they were living it. And for some of the teams the halcyon days of “we’re taking this class so we can just build our great product and get credit for it” had come to a screeching halt. The news from customers was not good.

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The SEC and Private Markets

Fred Wilson — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:27:21 +0000

The WSJ says that the SEC is reviewing the rules under which privately held companies raise capital and are subject to securities regulation. They quote the SEC Chair Mary Schapiro as saying:

The staff is taking a fresh look at our rules to develop ideas for the Commission about ways to reduce the regulatory burdens on small business capital formation.

Who knows what, if anything, will come out of this review, but I am all for taking a look at rules which were written when I was three years old. Two things I would strongly suggest the commission look at is the 500 shareholder rule and the requirements to be a qualified and/or accredited investor to invest in privately held companies.

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CEO Showcase: Solve Media

admin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:26:33 +0000

The Solve Media is an advertising technology company focused on re-inventing advertising and its current iteration through ad formats that solve for retention and engagement. The company's first product monetizes the Captcha (a challenge response test that ensures a user response is not generated by a computer) on any site as users type-in a brand message instead of a string of alpha-numerics. Solve Media's patent-pending technology turns those difficult combinations of distorted letters and numbers into branded ads.

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Rethinking My Social Graph

Brad Feld — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:59:47 +0000

I’ve had a number of interesting conversions about the intersection of the virtual and the physical world since I wrote the post Did Someone Ruin Foursquare For Me Yesterday? Kashmir Hill in Forbes did a quick email interview with me titled Venture Capitalist Gets Creeped Out by Foursquare which captured a few new thoughts and I spent some time the other night at a TechStars Mentor dinner talking with Alex Rainert, the head of product for Foursquare, who had spent some time digging into this issue to try to figure out what was going on.

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Internet School

Fred Wilson — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:59:02 +0000

Let's say you are my age, about to turn 50, and you want to make a career change. You want to get into the Internet business. But you don't know anything about programming, user experince, ad sales, community management, legal issues. What do you do?

For too long there haven't been good answers for people looking to learn this new industry. But that is changing. One of the more ambitious projects is General Assembly, at Broadway and 20th St, in NYC. While most people that know of General Assembly think of it as a coworking space, the founders think of it as a campus environment for all things Internet. I was over there yesterday and got a sampling of some of the courses you can take there. There are courses on HTML & CSS, Android Development, Internet Ad Sales, User Driven Design, The Digital Learning Market, Startup Law, and more. The current class list is here. Class prices differ but for $100 you can generally take one of these classes.

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Dancing in the Clouds With the Elephants

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:46:27 +0000

The recent flurry of major vendor announcements regarding their new Cloud Computing initiatives, latest acquisitions and offerings clearly shows that the “Cloud Rush” is in high gear.

Here’s a quick list of the announcements which have caught my attention over the past few weeks in chronological order since HP unveiled its Cloud ‘vision’ last month, and my views regarding their significance.

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One Hand Clapping – Entrepreneurship In Ann Arbor, Michigan

Steve Blank — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:45:43 +0000

I spent a few days in March in Ann Arbor Michigan as a guest of Professor Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Dean for Entrepreneurial Programs, and Doug Neal, Director of Center for Entrepreneurship in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan.

I gave a keynote on entrepreneurship to MPowered, the student Entrepreneurship Organization, spoke on a panel on Entrepreneurship and the Aerospace Industry, and gave another keynote at the Ann Arbor New Tech Meetup and A2Geeks, the regional startup network.

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Startups and Metrics – Hard Work to Set Up, but Worth It

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 22:54:27 +0000

Mark Suster has a good post up today about How startups can use metrics to drive success. He starts the post with the old adage “You manage what you measure”, which is as true as it ever was, although I prefer the blunter “If you don’t measure it, it won’t happen”.

There are a ton of good points in the post, of which I’m going to pick out two.

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What's Your Product Cadence?

Brad Feld — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 01:53:25 +0000

I was at an board meeting yesterday morning for a new seed deal that we’ve done that will be announced next week. I love the product vision – it’s in an area that I’ve been working in for a while across a variety of companies and will take a new approach to a very old and persistent problem.

The entrepreneurs have been living the specific problem for a long time and believe they have a unique and very informed way to solve it.

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CEO Showcase: Red Aril

admin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:45:02 +0000

The Red Aril data management platform is a unique data-management and audience-optimization platform that solves the today's "data complexity" problems in a unique and compelling fashion. With a team of data analytics, online advertising, and CRM veterans, Red Aril accessed and collected every type of data—public and private, structured and unstructured, online and offline—and translated it into something meaningful for its customers: marketers. The Red Aril platform puts that data to practical use within its customers' world.

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How Startups Can Use Metrics to Drive Success

Mark Suster — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:12:07 +0000

One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”

It’s a very important concept for me because in a startup you are constantly under pressure and have way too many distractions. Having a set of metrics that you watch & that you feel are the key drivers of your success helps keep clarity.

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M&A Issues: Price

Fred Wilson — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:11:04 +0000

This is my final MBA Mondays post on M&A Issues. I've been posting about M&A since last December. It feels like a semester long effort. And frankly I'm a bit tired of talking about M&A every monday. But selling your company is an important topic and I think we've done it justice now on MBA Mondays.

Price is certainly the most important issue in a sale transaction. You need to consider all of the issues we talked about when deciding whether or not to accept an offer to buy your company. But at the end of the day, price is the big issue.

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YouTube to Start Live Streaming

Michael Moe — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 21:56:43 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week down 1.3%, while the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 declined 0.3% each. Year-to-date, AO X Fund is up 14.1%, the NASDAQ is up 4.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 5.6%.

We sold our small position of American Superconductor on Tuesday after the company issued significantly lower guidance on Sinovel Wind's refusal to accept contracted shipments of wind turbine components from AMSC. Sinovel is AMSC's largest customer. The stock dropped more than 40% after hours as a result.

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CEO Showcase: GridPlex

admin — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:35:00 +0000

GridPlex is leading the global green revolution with innovative, patented energy and conservation products and services that increase electric system efficiency and reliability, can save billions for utilities and consumers, and will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. GridPlex encourages interactive, community-wide participation in energy conservation programs between customers and the utility. A GridPlex network installed in a community of 15,000 homes and businesses, representing less than a tenth of 1% of U.S.

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Never Bang at a Conference

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:10:27 +0000

I get offered a decent amount of "deal flow" at a conference. By deal flow, I am talking the femme fetale variety. Usually, they're a peripheral industry exec visiting a tech conference. No, they're never the fem-preneur variety. Female entrepreneurs actually have never banged at a conference. :-I

OK, so why do I never bang?!

I argue that time spent on a hottie is time lost wooing CS-major CEOs.

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2010 Angel and Seed Financings

admin — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:44:47 +0000

In 2002, Fenwick & West began publishing its Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey. The survey was published in response to dramatic changes in the venture capital financing environment resulting from the bursting of the "dot-com bubble", and our belief that there was a need for an objective analysis of how the venture capital environment had changed. The survey was well received and we have continued to publish it – a copy of the most recent survey is available here.

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How Does a VC Evaluate a Company's Product?

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:51:47 +0000

One of the big trends in startup financing is that value is being created earlier in the life of a company and the VCs who want to invest before the value inflexion point increasingly need to evaluate companies that have yet to generate meaningful revenues, and therefore before the strength of the product has been validated by customers to any great extent. In this situation we evaluate the product in the following ways:

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I Encourage Entrepreneurs To Ignore The Word "Bubble"

Brad Feld — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:51:09 +0000

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” – Macbeth

Every time I hear the word “bubble” I think of that quote from Macbeth. I also think of Tulip Mania and the South Sea Company which purportedly was the source of the concept of an economic bubble. And then I remember Charles Mackay’s classic book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds.”

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Android (continued)

Fred Wilson — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 02:50:22 +0000

Roughly six months ago, I put up a blog post suggesting Android was going to be the dominant mobile phone operating system and that developers interested in the largest user bases ought to start developing for it in preference to iOS.

As you might expect, I got a lot of heat from Apple fanboys for that post and one of the strongest points they made was that we had not yet seen the effect of the Verizon iPhone on market share numbers.

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Napkin Entrepreneurs

Steve Blank — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:03:44 +0000

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The barriers for starting a company have come down. Today the total available markets for new applications are hundreds of millions if not billion of users, while new classes of investors are popping up all over (angels, superangels, archangels, and even seraphim and cherubim have been spotted.)

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Nine Women Can't Make a Baby in a Month

Mark Suster — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:03:08 +0000

I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries.

The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

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CEO Showcase: Magnetic

admin — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:49:41 +0000

Magnetic, provides the tools for advertisers and publishers to use search data as the key indicator of intent and re-target ad campaigns to the most relevant audience online. With more than 270 million search profiles, Magnetic significantly lifts the value of media and improves campaign performance.

The Magnetic marketplace for advertisers and publishers applies search data to all online advertising. Targeting advertisements to website visitors without direct knowledge of user intent is difficult; Magnetic makes search retargeting easy.

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Spring Startup Fever

Fred Wilson — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:02:25 +0000

I said earlier this week that in addition to spring fever in NYC, we have startup fever. There is so much good stuff happening in NYC right now.

I'm not talking about fundings and such. The financial markets come and go. Boom today bust tomorrow.

I'm talking about building a foundation that will allow the tech sector in NYC to survive these booms and busts and thrive for the long term. The foundation comes from great programs like Techstars, InSITE, HackNY, PairUp, Founder Labs, etc, etc.

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CEO Showcase: ignitAd

admin — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:01:33 +0000

ignitAd is an online advertising technology company providing an innovative yield optimization solution for publishers, based on highly sophisticated and proprietary algorithms. For publishers that know the value of their traffic but lack the resources to fully monetize it, ignitAd's yield optimization service simplifies and automates the monetization of non-guaranteed inventory and maximizes revenue by proactively auctioning the traffic across multiple sources, including ad-exchanges, ad-networks, and DSPs.

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The Implicit Social Graph

Fred Wilson — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:45:25 +0000

John Battelle wrote a gushing post about Color and what it means for mobile/social/local/realtime, augmented reality, and more. There are most certainly some big ideas in the Color app. I've never put a mobile photo app on my phone but I put Color on it last night. I don't have any of my family on Color yet, but I hope to get them all on it today (I'm on spring break with my family and some of our kids' friends). Then we'll see what all the buzz is about.

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Welcome to the Era of Mass Computing

Greg Ness — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:44:36 +0000

There is a vast new technology infrastructure now building itself out with significant implications for Archimedius readers. As you might recall from previous blogs, in 1999 -in the midst of the “dotcom boom- there were fewer than 100 million IP addresses. We are in the midst of a new computing revolution involving the mass adoption of computing technology and the dotcom adoption pales in comparison. Hundreds of millions of IP addresses are now being added each and every year. Archimedius readers who understand the depth and breadth of the implications of this accelerated adoption of computing technology are more likely to benefit from yet another technology disruption.

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Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job

Steve Blank — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:49:14 +0000

Some men see things as they are and ask why.
Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development, Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it.

I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

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Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about)

Mark Suster — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:48:38 +0000

Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted. By definition, you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absofuckinglutely.

This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about.

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CEO Showcase: OpenFile

admin — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:43:45 +0000

OpenFile is a collaborative local news site. Users suggest a story. OpenFile assigns a reporter. Together, they shape the news. Users suggest a story by opening a file (a file is OpenFile's term for a story). Users can also add to files opened by other members of the community by submitting related videos, images, and comments. At the same time as users are opening files and helping them grow, OpenFile's editorial team is participating in the conversation and assigning a professional journalist to investigate.

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Choosing a Company Name

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:47:01 +0000

I’m often asked to opine on potential names for companies, both at the formation stage and when they are considering a change of name, usually following a shift in focus. Having this morning read what Techcrunch described as the seminal post on the subject of choosing a company name which was written by VC Rich Barton in 2009 I thought I would share some thoughts.

Firstly a comment on how to go about choosing a name: Do it quickly!!

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A Challenge To Startup Lawyers

Fred Wilson — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:15:38 +0000

We closed an investment recently. It was a seed round. Our firm priced the round and we were joined by a number of small VCs and a few well known angels. We agreed to close on a standard set of "light preferred" documents without negotiation. There was no investor counsel on the transaction. We just signed the standard documents which were tweaked to reflect the round size, share price, and board provision in the term sheet.

The legal fees for this transaction were $17,000. I talked this over with the entrepreneur and we agreed to pay the legal bill. We are both big fans of the law firm involved and felt they earned their fees on this transaction.

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The Freight Train That Is Android

Bill Gurley — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:15:10 +0000

“People get ready, there’s a train a comin’”
- The Impressions

From Zacks via Yahoo: Mark Vickery, On Thursday March 24, 2011, 4:58 pm EDT “BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (NasdaqGS: RIMM – News) beat its fiscal 4Q EPS estimates by 2 cents per share, but missed slightly on quarterly revenues and offered guidance well below the current consensus. This has sent RIMM shares down nearly 10% in after-market trading…”

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Secret Corridors of Power In Silicon Valley

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 20:14:16 +0000

The majority of how I add value up the food chain is to broker power and get YOU access.

Most, if not all, of my chips comes from pockets of influence. A chip means the power that you collect, pass, route, and gamble. It gets its name from poker. Anyway, these store-houses of influence in Silicon Valley are revealed in this blog post.

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Netflix to Stream Glee and SoA

Michael Moe — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:03:22 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week up 2.8%, while the NASDAQ was up 1.7%, and the S&P 500 advanced 1.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 15.7%, the NASDAQ is up 5.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 5.9%.

Netflix said it has expanded a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to stream two of its most popular shows Glee and Sons of Anarchy. This is an addition to shows already available on NFLX like Lie to Me, 24, Prison Break, Arrested Development, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files. For the week, NFLX advanced 5.3%.

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CEO Showcase: Cameo Stars

admin — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:02:27 +0000

Cameo Stars is the first and only social entertainment platform that lets A-list celebrities, as well as the stars and characters from leading entertainment companies and consumer brands, make virtual cameo appearances in the everyday lives of fans through branded social content. Consumers use the company's applications to share and collect a variety of "social cameos" directly into their social network pages and mobile devices.

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Value Proposition Hypotheses

Steve Blank — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 22:47:10 +0000

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part three. Part one is here, two is here. Syllabus is here.

Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition. (Value Proposition is a ten-dollar phrase describing a company’s product or service. It’s the “what are you building and selling?”)

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Groupon Has a Bad Feb: A Sign of Things to Come?

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 22:46:26 +0000

A question on everyone’s lips at the moment is whether the $billion valuations that a number of the top private internet companies are attracting are here to stay. My answer is that all of them look toppy, but some could turn out to be justified by strong revenue and earnings growth over the next couple of years. When pushed as to which is the strongest and which the flakiest I plump for Facebook as the strongest (now at $85bn) and Groupon as the flakiest of the group.

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M&A Issues: Consideration

Fred Wilson — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:08:57 +0000

We are getting to the end of the series on M&A. Two more M&A Issues to talk about and then I am done. The final two are consideration and price. Today I'll talk about consideration and next week I'll talk about price.

Consideration is the way in which you and your shareholders will get paid. The most common way to get paid is cash. The other common way to get paid is in the buyer's stock. You may also get paid by accepting a note (an IOU) from the buyer. And of course, many transactions include more than one form of consideration. A combination of cash and stock is very common.

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The NYT Scheme Suggests Paywalls Won't Save the News Industry

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:07:56 +0000

The New York Times released details of their paywall last week and they are a) complicated, and b) full of holes that people can exploit to avoid payment. I’ve been saying for a long time that paywalls aren’t the answer and the fact that after a year of work the NYT have come up with a solution that is inelegant and has enough holes that most people will avoid payment has only strengthened my conviction.

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CEO Showcase: NetShelter

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:45:12 +0000

NetShelter Technology Media is the world's largest technology media company, comprised of more than 200 influential tech content sites and blogs. NetShelter empowers brand marketers to influence buying behavior by marrying their messages into highly engaging environments. This approach lets marketers tap into a powerful network of technology influencers that can amplify the impact of a single marketing message many times over.

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The Magic Midnight Mind Meld

Mark Suster — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:06:49 +0000

The most common questions I’ve gotten over the past week have been a variant of:

Was SXSW worth it?

Was it just one big party?

Should I go next year?

Why do your eyes still look so bloodshot?

(And I’ve learned a new term, I arrived home with SxSARS).

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Who Really Understands Where He'll Be in 25 Years?

Tony Tjan — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:05:54 +0000

As research for an upcoming book with Harvard Business Review Press, my colleagues and I have been interviewing entrepreneurs and business builders about the factors that drive success. We talked to David Lawee, vice president of corporate development at Google, about how he got to where he is and the role that luck has played in his career. What follows are excerpts of Lawee's remarks.

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Announcing the 2011 OnDemand 100 Top Private Companies

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:36:54 +0000

AlwaysOn is proud to introduce the second annual OnDemand 100—the top emerging Internet companies disrupting the established enterprise and pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at SAP, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, Blackstone Group, Bridge Bank, Fenwick & West, Silicon Valley Bank, and industry experts across the globe scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are taking old notions of data management, customer relationships, and infrastructure and forging solutions that will shake up the industry and lead to huge value creation opportunities.

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CEO Showcase: Kargo

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:13:46 +0000

Kargo is a mobile publisher network working with major media companies and brand advertisers. Kargo partners to create the best in branded mobile sites, iPhone apps, Android apps, widgets, and advertising solutions. Kargo leverages its global distribution relationships to build audience while aiding monetization through carrier billing capabilities and a robust advertising management platform. For viral marketing, Kargo integrates community features and social media into its products to deliver engaged fans.

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Baidu Announces Light OS for Mobile Users

Michael Moe — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 19:58:54 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week up 5.6%, while the NASDAQ was up 3.8%, and the S&P 500 advanced 2.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 12.5%, the NASDAQ is up 3.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 4.4%.

China's search leader Baidu.com announced plans for a light operating system for mobile devices. BIDU's CEO Robin Li indicated that the system will be using Box Computing. "Right now when you power on an iPhone, it takes 45 seconds before you can do anything. In the future, one second, you turn on the device, and you can start using the box. That's our mission for the future of the Internet," he said. For the week, BIDU advanced 12%.

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New AlwaysOn Event: OnMobile!

admin — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 19:11:26 +0000

AlwaysOn's first annual OnMobile 2011 is where the top venture-backed mobile companies are disrupting the consumer and enterprise worlds to join forces with the big players pioneering new mobile device and operating system platforms. This two-and-a-half day executive event features high-level debates on what's hot in the emerging mobile market and how these innovations are disrupting how companies and consumers work, play, advertise, and connect. OnMobile also showcases the top entrepreneurial CEOs who are driving mobile innovation

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M&A Issues: Timing

Fred Wilson — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 23:28:24 +0000

Yet another post in the M&A Issues series. This one is about timing, ie how long it should take from the first serious conversation about a sale transaction until the closing.

I've seen acquisitions done in a week. I've seen acquisitions take over a year from the first serious conversation to close. And one thing I know for sure, if a buyer wants to take their time and feels like they can get away with it, they will.

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All of Our Gardens Have Walls Now

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 23:25:42 +0000

There was a post on Techcrunch over the weekend titled The walled garden has won. Regular readers will know I’m a big proponent of open systems and hence I read this piece with interest. Regrettably I think the title is accurate, although I don’t think the news is all bad.

Let me explain.

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CEO Showcase: MyLife.com

admin — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:05:54 +0000

MyLife.com is a people search service that connects its members to much more than friends, for both personal and professional reasons. The site has more than 43 million registered members and nearly 1 million paying subscribers. Users log into MyLife.com's services to find friends, classmates, and singles as well as people to hire and network with. Users can make other valuable connections to improve the quality of their lives, all without needing to become a friend.

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Business Model Hypotheses

Steve Blank — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 23:22:30 +0000

Our new Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part two. Part one is here. Syllabus here.

By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to:

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CEO Showcase: mediaFORGE

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 23:21:30 +0000

mediaFORGE delivers targeted online advertising that is relevant, engaging, personalized, and optimized with real-time data to help marketers generate higher conversion rates and greater return on investment. mediaFORGE charges customers for the ads that effectively engage consumers and lead to conversions. Marketers pay according to measured engagement and sales, rather than impressions, and risk is low with the pay-for-performance price structure.

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How to Network at A Conference You're Not At

RemmingtonOxleyV — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 23:13:06 +0000

As a VC, I work really hard, long hours going to Ritz Carltons, Four Seasons, and once in a while, I get lucky with a Mandarin Oriental.

My hours logged mainly involve networking. Yeah, it's hard work sipping on martinis and kissing beta male butt... but it's all part of my VC gig.

So, because I was an engineer an eon ago, I thought to myself: "How can I better engineer my schedule? How can I network at a conference I'm not at?"

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HP Shoots for the Clouds

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:50:58 +0000

HP’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker unveiled the company’s latest corporate strategy yesterday with plenty of fanfare, but little flourish.

The theme of his talk and HP’s new mantra is providing “connectivity” to the Cloud to move “Everyone On”.

While the picture he painted of this new world order and HP’s strategic response covered all the bases, there are still plenty of pieces which must come together in order to make it a reality.

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Did Someone Ruin Foursquare For Me Yesterday?

Brad Feld — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:50:06 +0000

I was at lunch at Japango with some of my Foundry Group gang yesterday. When I went to my house in Alaska last July, I took a Mac with me but left my PC at home. Ross bet me $100 that before the month was out I’d beg him to fedex my PC to me. He lost and I decided to use my winnings to take whoever was around yesterday out to lunch.

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How Does a VC Estimate Market Size?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:51:14 +0000

There are three things that every VC looks at when they evaluate a company, market, product and team, and I will look at each in my next three posts in the series. The emphasis between the three varies between VC with perhaps the most important difference coming with the stage of investment. Earlier stage investors look more to team whereas later stage investors look more to market and product, a natural reflection of the fact that for young businesses the product and market are typically evolving fast which places greater emphasis on having the right team.

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#startupvisa

Fred Wilson — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:48:52 +0000

Some huge percentage of startup companies in this country are founded by immigrants. Not surprising. It has always been that way in America. But in the wake of 9/11, we've shut our borders and become intolerant of people from other cultures. Over time that will result in the sclerosis of our economy and the decline of america as the locus of capitalism and the american dream.

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Inside the Kauffman Foundation Center for Venture Education

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:36:31 +0000

Here are some things that I'd add to the already stellar three-day session at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto, CA. File these under: "What I'd do to jump from associate to legendary venture partner.

1. Be a Value-Added Fish In a Crowded Pond

There are still plenty of VCs.

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The War For Talent

Fred Wilson — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:51:10 +0000

Steve Blank says in his New Rules For The New Internet Bubble:

hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble

I'm hearing this from everyone I know in Silicon Valley. And you can see the evidence on the web.

Joshua Schachter posted this on his twitter feed yesterday. This is what a new developer gets when they show up at work at Tasty Labs.

Quora posted this on their website yesterday.

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The Startup Visa Act of 2011

Brad Feld — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:50:33 +0000

Today Senators Kerry (D-MA), Lugar (R-IN) and Udall (D-CO) unveiled the Startup Visa Act of 2011. This is an updated version of the Startup Visa bill from last year that is aimed at making it much easier for foreign entrepreneurs who want to start a company in the US to get a visa. Today, this process is incredibly difficult and has been stifling the creation of new companies and the corresponding job creation that these companies provide.

The Startup Visa Act of 2011 has several significant improvements over last years bill.

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CEO Showcase: Baynote

admin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 23:50:16 +0000

Baynote provides personalization and digital marketing optimization solutions that power the adaptive Web, an emerging standard in customer experience that is always personal, relevant, and convenient. By observing engagement patterns among like-minded individuals to understand user intent, the Baynote Adaptive Web Suite automatically optimizes and adapts the online experience, leading to increased conversions, revenue, and loyalty.

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Who Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude Over Aptitude)

Mark Suster — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:25:53 +0000

Startups.We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters.

Whatever you’re working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation. Your ability to keep up is dependent on having a great team of differing skills. Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do.

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New Rules for the New Internet Bubble

Steve Blank — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:25:01 +0000

Carpe Diem

We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can a startup do to take advantage of them?

First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve been.

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The Hashable Pivot

Fred Wilson — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:36:26 +0000

We've invested in a few pivots over the years. Twitter is the one that immediately comes to mind. But we invested post pivot there. Return Path's pivot from email change of address to email deliverability happened after my investment and it is a real success story that Matt should blog about (or write a book about because it is a long story).

We've got a pivot in action in our portfolio right now called Hashable.

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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship

Steve Blank — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:35:45 +0000

For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship.

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots.

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CEO Showcase: OrangeSoda

admin — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:24:23 +0000

OrangeSoda offers online marketing to local businesses with a unique blend of intelligent service and simple technology. OrangeSoda provides the best return on marketing investment by blending social, mobile, and search with insider analytics on how consumers use the Internet to find local business offerings. With its proprietary advertising technology and service platform, OrangeSoda enables its partners, including CityGrid Media, YPG, and Freedom Communications, to provide the best social, mobile and search services to their customers.

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Lulumon's Position Gets Stronger

Michael Moe — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:30:12 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week down 3.6%, while the NASDAQ was down 2.6%, and the S&P 500 dropped 1.9%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 6.6%, the NASDAQ is down 0.3%, and the S&P 500 is up 1.7%.

Yoga and athletic wear maker Lululemon announced very strong Q4 results with 28% same store sales growth, improving sales per square foot to $1,726 (up from $1,700 in Q3), revenue growth of 53%, and EPS growth of 60%. LULU is one of the strongest retailers we follow, with a very impressive pattern in same-store sales during the last nine quarters: -8%, -2%, +10%, +29%, +35%, +31%, +29%, and +28%.

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Your Product Needs to be 10x Better than the Competition to Win

Mark Suster — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:37:19 +0000

Last night I had the great privilege to interview Bill Gross, one of the Internet’s true pioneers. To say he has had an impact on the web would be an understatement. His impact has even helped a small country gain admission to the United Nations. All of that are in this week’s episode of This Week in VC. Summary notes, as always, provide below. It was a pleasure to write them myself.

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Computers and Blues

Fred Wilson — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:36:21 +0000

When music and computers come together, interesting stuff happens. When I was a kid, I'd imagine that my entire record collection was a bunch of digital files that I could access from any computer. I thought we'd all own huge file servers full of our music. I got it sort of right. I missed the cloud and streaming thing. But I've been thinking of what can happen when computers and music come together for a long time, at least 45 years, and I've been writing about this passion of mine since I started blogging in the fall of 2003.

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The Bi-Directional Elevator Pitch

Jeff Kaplan — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:35:19 +0000

When I founded THINKstrategies back in 2001, I chose the name because I wanted to help clients re-think how they viewed their business problems regardless of industry. One of the common challenges my ‘vendor’ clients face is how to explain the value of their business solutions in a succinct, compelling and differentiated fashion so it captures the attention of potential customers and the imagination of the broader marketplace. This typically translates into the daunting task of formulating an ‘elevator pitch’.

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CEO Showcase: Smaato

admin — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:34:24 +0000

Smaato operates a cloud-based, mobile advertising optimization platform called SOMA. More than 11,000 app developers and premium publishers have signed up with Smaato to monetize their content in more than 220 countries and manage close to 20 billion ad requests per month.

SOMA's features aggregation of more than 50 leading ad networks globally to maximize mobile advertising revenues. Through an open API and the widest range of SDKs, SOMA can be easily integrated with ad networks, ad inventory owners (publishers, developers, and operators), and third party ad technology providers.

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I'm Sticking with Disqus. Here's Why.

Mark Suster — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:34:32 +0000

I’ve written before about my love for Disqus. I’m not an investor – I just love the product.

So now Facebook has a new commenting system. They’ve been around for a while and when they first announced this initiative I knew the day would come when people would start saying, “should I replace Disqus?” I started telling people privately that I thought Google should buy Disqus for the same reasons Facebook wants to own commenting in the first place. Commenting on topical blogs is a form of topical social networking in the same way that Quora is. It’s a highly engaged audience and the content generated from many of the blogs (not all) are highly valuable.

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Does Moore's Law Suddenly Matter Less?

Brad Feld — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:07:29 +0000

A post in the New York Times this morning asserted that Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law. It’s a short post, but the money quote is from Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington:

“The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington.

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Raising Money on AngelList? Working with McClure? Ask Jody Sherman.

Mark Suster — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:05:10 +0000

I was hanging out the other day with my buddy Jody Sherman, founder & CEO of EcoMom. I was an angel investor in his company, made a bunch of calls on his behalf and then I personally sent it out on AngelList. Through this process he raised $2 million.

When I described to people why I initially invested my calls went something like this, “He’s taken kicks to the face for nearly 2 years and is still standing. I know this guy is a money maker. I just had to line up behind him. That, plus I love the space of high-customer-service, focused eCommerce for moms worried about what their kids eat & wear.”

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CEO Showcase: FonGenie

admin — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:06:20 +0000

FonGenie delivers voice-enabled, simple-to-use applications catered to the retail and small-business markets. FonGenie helps business owners create and monitor on-the-fly interactive daily specials on the phone that customers hear when calling. Businesses can see who is calling, what triggered them to call, how they found the company, where they are calling from, and why they are calling before the call is even answered.

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The AlwaysOn East Top 100 Company Competition

Tony Perkins — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:57:49 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its fourth annual AlwaysOn East 100 competition. We're looking for the top emerging companies from the East Coast and Europe that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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The Always Logged In Experience

Fred Wilson — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:23:58 +0000

Last week I blogged about mobile notifications which I think is a big game changer. There are a few other aspects of the mobile experience that I think present great opportunity. Another one is the always logged in experience.

On the web, you may or may not have a web app open in a tab in your browser and you may or may not be logged into it. But on your mobile, you are permanently logged into every app you have on your device. When you get a notification, you click on it and are taken right to the exact part of the mobile app you want to engage with. No log in is required. That in and of itself is a big deal.

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Corralling the Social Cloud for Business Purposes

Jeff Kaplan — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:23:12 +0000

Salesforce.com unveiled a series of important enhancements to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service-desk management capabilities this week aimed at helping businesses more effectively track and respond to the escalating volume of data feeds from Facebook and Twitter.

The company’s Service Cloud 3.0 announcement coincided with its CloudForce 2011 event at the Javits Center in NYC, in the backyard of ‘Corporate America’, the financial services sector and the traditional media world to maximize its attention.

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Why VCs Don't Value Companies by Discounting Cash Flows

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:33:42 +0000

Last week as part of our 50 Questions series I wrote about how VCs value businesses by working back from expected exit values, using various industry rules of thumb and responding to market dynamics (hotness of deal and market). In the comments Senith asked why we don’t use discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis which as he says is “the most sound method [for valuing businesses] according to most textbooks”. I’m going to address that today.

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This Post Has Nothing to do with #SXSW

Mark Suster — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:32:54 +0000

For the next four days if you’re in the tech industry you’re going to hear a non-stop stream of information about SXSW. It’s the time of year when many new startups are struggling to rise above all the noise and be heard. And when everybody is shouting it becomes overwhelming.

I’m actually in Austin at the moment. It turns out this is “the year of group messaging” and since I’m a shareholder in the largest player in the space, TextPlus (7.7m monthly actives), I thought I should come here to represent.

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NetApp Buys Engenio

Michael Moe — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:28:22 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week down 3.3%, while the NASDAQ was down 2.5%, and the S&P 500 dropped 1.3%. Year-to-date, AO X Fund is up 10.5%, the NASDAQ is up 2.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 3.7%.

We sold our entire position in Finisar after the company reported in-line results for Q4 with 176% EPS growth and 58% sales growth. Guidance for Q1, however, was disappointing and significantly lower vs. previous expectations and caused the stock to open -36% post announcement.

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Grab a Technology Opportunity!

Tony Perkins — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:19:05 +0000

This year's ninth annual Summit at Stanford is taking place at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, July 26th-28th, 2011. The Summit is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political, and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries. Summit at Stanford features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors, and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases.

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CEO Showcase: PostRank

admin — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 17:33:17 +0000

PostRank develops of tools and services that make sense of social engagement data on the Web. The company monitors and collects social engagement events with online content in real-time across the Web. PostRank gathers where-and-when stories and generates comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from a host of social hubs. Publishers and people interested in their content can use PostRank analysis to gauge their influence and reach out to wider audiences.

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Marketing, Startups, and the Importance of Achieving a Lot with a Little (for Startups)

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:54:31 +0000

Over the weekend I was talking with an early stage VC about how much traction he likes to see in a company before he invests (answer: enough to have some confidence that the product works, the go to market works and there is some demand). Subsequently I was thinking through how companies would get themselves to that stage without needing the sort of funding he provides. There are a number of answers of course, including true seed stage friends and family and angel funding, but the most important answer to to find a way to achieve a lot with a little.

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What Every Entrepreneur Could Learn from Justin Bieber

Mark Suster — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:53:42 +0000

I know what you’re thinking – link bait title, right? Wrong. I will stand 100% behind my assertions in this post. Justin Bieber is unbelievably entrepreneurial and most of you will never know it because he serves a target demo that doesn’t include you.

I promise you can learn from him and this movie. I’m also betting that in 10 years he’ll be a mainstream talent rather than a pre-teen girl wonder. Read on …

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My Partners

Fred Wilson — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:17:52 +0000

It's friday so it's time for another suggested post from the amazing comment thread on the bloggers block post. Mark Suster suggested:

how about a post on your partners: who they are, how you guys work together & a bit more about how you guys reach decisions on deals?

I have two and half partners at Union Square Ventures.

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Deciding Not To Do Something

Brad Feld — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:10:02 +0000

My partners at Foundry Group and I decided not to do something after a month of thoughtful deliberation. The decision is fresh so I’m not going to talk about the specifics, but our conclusion was that while it would be relatively easy to do and potential financially lucrative, it wasn’t consistent with our strategy.

I used it as an example this morning during my run with @reecepacheco about fully engaging with your mentors. While we could have made this decision on our own, we talked to a number of people who we consider our mentors (including several peers, investors of ours, and folks that have been doing what we’ve been doing a lot longer than we have), got their direct feedback, synthesized it, and made a decision.

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The Guy Who Took on Google (and now LinkedIn): Mike Yavonditte

Mark Suster — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:08:53 +0000

This is an interview you’re not going to want to miss, I promise.

Mike is a no BS guy, has all the attributes I look for in a founder, openly shares knowledge and opines without a filter including this one, “whoever invented uncapped convertible debt should be spanked!” Love it.

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What's the Real Deal with AngelList?

Mark Suster — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:09:23 +0000

In case you missed all the kerfuffle this weekend, I posted this blog post originally on TechCrunch. I attempted to do a fair balance job of an increasingly important service – AngelList – started by a friend of mine – Nivi with the feelings of a colleague who I respect – Bryce – who has opted out of the service.

I hope I straddled people’s points of view well enough not to have offended anybody while adding a framework for how I think about the service.

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50 Questions: How Does a VC Value a Business?

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:08:33 +0000

‘What is my business worth?’ is a question every entrepreneur and investor asks themselves all the time. Then when it comes to selling the company or raising money the question shifts subtly to ‘what value will the investor/acquirer place on my business?’. The answer to the second question is often lower than the answer to the first one.

If you are trying to answer the question ‘what value will an investor place on my business?’ I think there are three things you need to understand. The first is what I would describe as the right way for a VC to value a company, the second are the rules of thumb that we use to sense check and short cut the proper analysis, and the third is the impact of market forces on the numbers thrown out by the first two.

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Mobile Notifications

Fred Wilson — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 01:07:46 +0000

I was talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs a few weeks ago, and someone asked me what I thought was new and game changing. I replied mobile notifications. I thought I'd explain why.

I'm talking about android notifications here, not iPhone notifications or anything else. I think notifications is one of the things android has done much better than any other mobile OS and I suspect the way they do it will be eventually copied by the other mobile OS vendors.

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Apple Announces the iPad 2

Michael Moe — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:02:17 +0000

Apple presented its much anticipated iPad 2 on Wednesday. Beside the good news of seeing Jobs on the stage again, the iPad 2 appears to have everything we could have wished for with this product: a dual core A5 processor, a 2x faster CPU, 9x faster graphics, and front and back cameras. It allows streaming content from the iPad ton TV screens, it's thinner than the iPhone 4, it comes in black and in white, it has a 10-hour battery life, it costs $499 (which is $100 cheaper than its closest competitor), and lastly, the magnetic cover is perfect. For the week, AAPL advanced 3.4%.

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Honor and Recognition in Event of Success

Steve Blank — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:35:54 +0000

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

Attributed to Ernest Shackleton

In 1912 Ernest Shackleton placed this ad to recruit a crew for the ship Endurance and his expedition to the South Pole. This would be one of the most heroic journeys of exploration ever undertaken. In it Shackleton defined courage and leadership.

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Eric Whitacre's Grand Experiment in Virtual Collaboration

Tony Tjan — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:34:23 +0000

My highlight so far at this year's TED conference in Long Beach, California, has been meeting the extraordinary composer and conductor, Eric Whitacre, after his moving and highly inspiring talk. Over 12 years, I have seen my share of TED presentations, and this was one of the most special.

Whitacre is a contemporary composer known for his choral and symphonic works. In 2009, he received an email from a friend with a YouTube link of a young girl, Britlin Losee, singing the soprano part of his choral work, "Sleep." The video viewing became much more than another piece of fan mail, because it served as inspiration, as a "what if" moment.

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Remmy Oxley is the "Snappy VC"

RemmingtonOxleyV — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:29:35 +0000

I'm fictitious.

I'm blogging under a psuedonym.

I hand out real money.

E-mail me at remmy [at] aonetwork.com

—  Remmy

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One Man's Signal is Another Man's Noise

Mark Suster — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:07:06 +0000

After the weekend kerfuffle over AngelList I was reading Brad Feld’s post on Signal vs. Noise. It’s apropos because there is so much noise these days with email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, web shows, etc. that it’s sometimes hard to know when to pay attention and when to keep your head down.

Mostly during the day I’m in meetings or doing work. I’m sitting at my computer now at 9.00pm writing this – which is an hour earlier than I normally write (there are about 8 women at my kitchen table having a book club (aka excuse to drink wine & gossip so I’m locked in another room writing.

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M&A Issues: Reps, Warranties, Indemnities, and Escrows

Fred Wilson — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:04:18 +0000

Yet another post on issues in M&A. This one is about the things you will sign up to when you sell your business and the money you will set aside to cover them.

First things first. I am not a lawyer. And this post is about legal stuff. I barely know how to spell indemnities. I had to double check that I was spelling it correctly. So I am going to put a bunch of stuff on the table but if you really want to understand this, talk to a lawyer. This kind of stuff is why you have a lawyer and why they are valuable. That said, here goes.

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M&A Issues: Breakup Fees

Fred Wilson — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 19:04:56 +0000

Continuing our discussion of M&A Issues, we are going to talk about breakup fees today.

A breakup fee is a payment made by the buyer to the seller if the M&A transaction doesn't close.

Many M&A transactions do not include breakup fees, particularly smaller transactions. But as the value of the transaction rises and the potential disruption to the seller's business increases, it is more likely that the transaction will include a breakup fee. The negotiation of the breakup fee can be an important part of the letter of intent (LOI) negotiation and there are cases where merger deals have not happened because both parties could not agree on a breakup fee.

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How Many Investors Is Too Many?

Mark Suster — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:16:16 +0000

Lately I have seen a number of deals announced on TechCrunch in which 5 or more different VCs were participating in the deal.

This always makes me chuckle because in my first company we had 5 investors in our first round and we picked up 5 more before we finally sold the company.

In my second company I had only 1 investor.

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Avoiding Co-Founder Conflict

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:14:17 +0000

Back in January I wrote a post inspired by Ev Williams comments on focus that I read in the TechStars inspired Do More Faster collection of pieces of advice for startups pulled together by David Cohen and Brad Feld. At the time I commented that I was enjoying the book a lot, and I wish I hadn’t left it on my shelf for so long before picking it up, somehow forgetting that I got distracted by another book (Surface Detail by Iain M Banks, rare for me to read non-fiction these days, but I love his Culture novels) –I’ve picked it up again now though and this time I’m going to paraphrase Dharmesh Shah’s thoughts on avoiding co-flounder conflict.

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OnDemand 2011: Keynote Speakers Announced

Tony Perkins — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 19:34:29 +0000

We've just announced four top CEOs in the on-demand world to speak at OnDemand 2011 on the most compelling topics facing the cloud and SaaS sectors.

Greg Gianforte, CEO, RightNow

David DeWalt, CEO, McAfee

Aneel Bhusri, CEO, Workday

Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM

These top executives as well as the up-and-coming entrepreneurs in the on-demand sector are looking at shaking up the extablished infrastructure giants with nimble, reliable cloud and service-based products.

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Parallels Pushes Partners Toward the Clouds

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 23:15:01 +0000

The extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions has prompted nearly every major hardware and software vendor to offer their own IaaS, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. This has put tremendous pressure on traditional hosting companies, communications service providers (CSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to respond with their own offerings in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

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Marketing and The Bubble

Fred Wilson — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:01:51 +0000

Rand Fishkin has a good post in response to my marketing posts over the past two days. In it he makes this assertion:

For the first few years that I was in the "web world," 1997-2001, there was a dangerous and obvious bias in startups toward sales and marketing - and branding in particular. But, in the past few years, that pendulum has swung to the equally dangerous paradigm that product is everything.

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Are We in a Bubble?

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:00:59 +0000

I was on a panel last night at an even organised by Jon Watts of MTM London. The event was billed as a discussion about building internet businesses in the UK, but much of the debate turned to whether we are in a bubble at the moment, a topic that keeps coming up at the moment.

When there is talk of bubbles the comparison point is always with the 1999-2000 internet bubble, a period in which a) valuations sky-rocketed and b) many highly valued businesses lacked the substance to become real businesses.

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Marketing Post: The Bug Report

Fred Wilson — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:57:38 +0000

Yesterday's marketing post had a few bugs in it. The AVC user base did a lot of bug reporting in the comments and if you have an hour or more, you should read through the entire comment thread, at the end of the post.

The first and most important bug is that I dissed the marketing profession at the start and again at the end of the post. Seth Godin says I conflated marketing and advertising. I don't totally agree. I simply disrepected marketing and then went on to talk about how to do marketing. Not a great way to have a rational conversation about marketing.

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A Visitor's Guide to Silicon Valley

Steve Blank — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:56:41 +0000

If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some Clean Tech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment.

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Signal vs. Noise

Brad Feld — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:55:52 +0000

At the end of each day, I encourage you to reflect on whether you spent your day on “signal” or “noise.” Let me explain.

Recently, I wrote a post titled Managing Priorities. In it I talked about the idea of P1′s. My weeks start on Monday morning so my P1 for the current week (which ends in about 20 hours since I usually get up at 5am on Monday morning) is to get a draft of the new book I’m writing with Jason Mendelson to our publisher (Wiley). That’s it – one P1 for the week. Of course I did a ton of other things last week, including spending two days at Blur doing an HCI brain soak, working on closing a new investment, working on two M&A deals, having a few board meetings, giving a few talks, meeting with a bunch of people, and having a few enjoyable dinners with friends. But every morning when I woke up I thought about my P1 (the book) and every night before I went to bed I thought about whether or not I had made progress on it.

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The End of the Smartphone: Google's idea

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:58:17 +0000

This morning I went to a breakfast briefing given by corporate finance and research house GP Bullhound to share their ten predictions for 2011.

Their predictions are:

Google's Android outdistancing Apple's iOS

Mobile payments to surge in 2011

Social shopping, dating and gambling thrive on mobile

Augmented reality apps take off

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Eight Questions to Help Decide if You Should be Raising Money Now

Mark Suster — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:57:26 +0000

A year ago I blogged about one of my most common mantras that applies to sales, biz dev & fund raising alike: “Time is the Enemy of all Deals.”

When times are really good for fund raising many teams delay to maximize their valuation. Sometimes this pays off, other times it doesn’t. So how should you decide what to do?

I thought I’d try to offer a framework for thinking about the topic.

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Marketing

Fred Wilson — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:53:55 +0000

You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I'm gonna talk about marketing.

I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).

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Eight Mistakes in Promoting at SXSW

RemmingtonOxleyV — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:05:47 +0000

My post on "No One Is Going to SXSW. It's too Crowded" caused quite a stir.

I heard all sorts of objections, but no direct contradictions about specific tactics. Here are eight mistakes you will want to avoid.

Don't think it's too crowded.

I recommend going with "Beginner's Mind."

Beginners would go with a sense of innocence and non-jaded-ness. Beginners would just say, "Cool, there's a lot of people."

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Acme Packet Acquires Newfound Communications

Michael Moe — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:51:16 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week off up 1.8%, while the NASDAQ declined 1.9%, and the S&P 500 was down 1.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 13.2%, the NASDAQ is up 4.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 4.9%.

Weight management and nutrition leader Herbalife reported strong Q4 results with 33.7% EPS growth driven by 17% sales growth and increased its 2011 guidance. HLF's operating margin increased from 13.3% a year ago to 14.4% in Q4. China and Asia Pacific (ex-China) are the two fastest-growing regions, with 29% and 24% revenue growth, respectively. Emerging markets make up 52% of Herbalife's revenue now. For the week, HLF advanced 12.5%.

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The Internet Inside

Amish_Jani — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:57:00 +0000

I recently tweeted about the acquisition of HauteLook by Nordstrom. I think this is one example of many we will see in the coming years of large scale, “offline” incumbents buying their way into the future.

I believe every business today is going to be rewritten for the web, or “Internet optimized” as I call it. This is not about putting up a website or selling online. This is much more fundamental. The Internet affects literally every part of a business system and makes it much more cost efficient than their legacy comparable. Let’s take a few examples:

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How to Launch at SXSW for $820.00

Larry _Chiang — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:28:32 +0000

(This is a republished post of a piece that originally appeared in GigaOm: How to Launch at SXSW for $820.00.)

When you talk to CS major CEOs about whether they are launching at SXSW, you will get all sorts of lukewarm feedback. They'll say SXSW is "too expensive" or it's "too competitive" or more politically, "It's not the best allocation of money for our pre-funded startup." Promoting is not just hard at SXSW for CS majors.... it is also hard for VCs, angel investors, and MBAs as well.

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Public and Private Markets

Fred Wilson — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:58:46 +0000

I had breakfast with Alan Patricof last week. Alan is the dean of NYC VCs, he's been at this game longer than any of us. He was in the business when Intel and Apple went public.

The breakfast came about when Alan wrote this blog post in Business Insider about the problems with the IPO market. I read the post and emailed him with some feedback on the parts I agreed with and the parts I disagreed with.

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Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?

Mark Suster — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:57:58 +0000

Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country.

We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.

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Meet the Captains of Innovation

Tony Perkins — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:29:05 +0000

It's time to start thinkinga bout this year's AlwaysOn STVP 9th annual Summit at Stanford: Meet the Captains of Innovation, taking place at Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA on July 26th-28th, 2011. The Summit is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries. The event features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors, and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates, and private company CEO showcases.

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50 Questions: How Can I Raise my VC more Quickly?

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:43:35 +0000

My last post in this series explained why for most startups it is sensible to allow six to nine months for a fundraising process to get from start to completion. This week I’m going to focus on what you can do to get that time down, and what you might do to get VCs operating to your timetable rather than the other way around.

There are, I think, three reasons why VCs can take a long time to make their minds up about a deal:

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The Founder's Dilemma: To Sell or Not to Sell?

Tony Tjan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:42:44 +0000

We recently did an informal survey of some of our venture capital colleagues. We asked, "What crossroads decisions are most common and challenging for entrepreneurs in the course of the business-building journey?"

The most common responses to this open-ended question were whether to take an investment and whether to sell the company. For some the decision to take OPM (other people's money) is the beginning of having decided to sell. So it's a similar crossroads — involving a trade-off between control and value creation. It is, as Harvard Business School Professor Noam Wasserman has neatly dubbed it, the "Rich versus King" dilemma.

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Twitter, I Love You Man, but...

Mark Suster — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:38:53 +0000

I’m not an investor, I have no right to tell you what to do.

I’m not an advisor & I’m not privy to any internal information at your company. You have to make the tough judgment calls.

I’m not omnipotent so I can’t use market power to influence your behavior. Even writing this could hurt me. I don’t want that.

Twitter, I’m a friend. I love you, man. Please try to play nicer. I come in peace.

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ChaCha: Dancing its Way to Number One

Kristie Tollstam — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:38:00 +0000

Search engines have long been a dominating force in the current, fast-moving technology landscape. Every search engine is vying for a piece of the pie, and ChaCha is no exception. ChaCha is the fastest-growing search engine, according to the Quantcast 100 and Nielson Mobile, evidence that the company's breakthrough model, one in which users can ask human guides questions and receive credible, instant results with a precise answer, is paying off.

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College and Business Will Never Be the Same

Steve Blank — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:11:19 +0000

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school
Attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and B.F. Skinner

There are 4633 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. This weekend I had dinner last night with one of them – a friend who’s now thePresident of Philadelphia University. He’s working hard to reinvent the school into a model for 21^st century Professional education.

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M&A Issues: Governmental Approvals

Fred Wilson — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:10:15 +0000

Continuing our discussion of M&A Issues, this week we'll talk about governmental approvals. When two companies combine, the government can sometimes get involved. It mostly happens when two large businesses combine and the most common reason for governmental review is antitrust considerations. It is also possible that foriegn governments can take interest in a business combination.

The most common governmental review process for an M&A transaction is a review by the DOJ/FTC of anti-trust considerations. These reviews are done under provisions laid out in the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.

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Constant Contact Bantam Live Acquisition Redefines Cloud-Based Marketing Automation

Jeff Kaplan — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 03:08:43 +0000

Social networking is one of the big three themes of 2011, along with Cloud Computing and Mobility.

Salesforce.com has been pushing its Chatter social networking platform for the corporate class with the new public service, Chatter.com, promoted with two ads during the Super Bowl halftime show.

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MobiTV AMPs It Up

Anuj Kachapati — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 03:07:24 +0000

Powered by its patented proprietary technology for delivering mobile content called Accelerated Media Platform (AMP), MobiTV has positioned itself as a leader in providing an end-to-end managed service for the authentication, delivery and playback of multimedia across multiple screens, such as mobile, PCs, tablets, and IpTV devices. The convergence of ICT and the ubiquity of wireless 3G and 4G networks is constantly changing the media landscape.

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Information and Persuasion

Ed_Lambert — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:23:52 +0000

"In this part of the world, people have very sensitive antennae for legitimacy and authenticity because they have been fed so many lies by their leaders.... Egypt's democracy revolution.... If it succeeds, other young Arabs and Muslims will emulate it and ... combined with social networking, will be more subversive to autocratic regimes than Islamism or Ba'athism combined"  —Tom Friedman

"The challenge to the brilliant young team that organized this revolt is to apply their talents to ... organizing the political structure to carry out the reforms they demanded. This is not impossible if they convince the Egyptian public that, unlike the previous regime, they care about the dignity of ordinary people."  —Trudy Rubin

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Revolution's Tige Savage Talks Investment and Beyond

Mark Suster — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:22:49 +0000

The venture capital industry is so heavily skewed to Northern California, which the remains spilled over Boston, New York & Southern California. There are of course other outposts like Austin and Seattle.

So it was wonderful to hear from a leading venture capital firm based in Washington DC. Revolution is a “stage agnostic” fund (means they invest early or late) funded entirely by Steve Case, the founder of AOL and co-founded by two other individuals, Tige Savage (yes, pronounced like the golfer, minus the “r”) and Donn Davis.

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Aruba Networks Raises Q1 Expectations

Michael Moe — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:21:14 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished nearly flat last week, down 0.1%, while the NASDAQ inched up 0.9%, and the S&P 500 was up 1%. Year-to-date, AO X Fund is up 15.2%, the NASDAQ is up 6.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.8%.

Earlier last week, Netflix saw some positive news, as Qualcomm announced that people who own Android-powered smart phones or tablets can stream Netflix's content. NFLX is broadening its reach on mobile devices after having existing apps on the iPhone and iPad already. For the week, NFLX advanced 1.9%.

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$1 Billion in On-Demand Opportunities

Tony Perkins — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:20:14 +0000

OnDemand 2011 is where the top Internet companies disrupting the enterprise pioneering cloud computing and SaaS square off with the incumbent players. This two-and-a-half day executive event features high-level debates on how the Internet is disrupting how companies—from small businesses to large enterprises—create, store, distribute, analyze, and take advantage of their mission-critical data. OnDemand also showcases the top entrepreneurial CEOs who are revolutionizing the way the enterprise is radicalized by the Internet.

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Mobile Voice Charges Heading Down

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:43:51 +0000

Yesterday AT&T announced unlimited free mobile to mobile calls within the US for their customers, a move they most likely felt forced to make in order to stop customers defecting to the iPhone that is only now available on Verizon’s network. As GigaOM point out this is a clear pointer to where the world is headed – voice will be worthless, and all the value will be in data.

Here are some of the reasons:

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Difficult Is Good

Fred Wilson — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:43:02 +0000

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. There is no single formula for determining what type of entrepeneur will succeed. But one of my favorite stories about entrepreneurs comes from Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, which is one of the best venture capital firms in the business.

When one of the younger partners in the firm started, Don took him aside and drew a four square quadrant. Along one axis, he put "easy to get along with" on one end and "hard to get along with" on the other end. One the other axis, he put "normal" on one end and "brilliant" on the other end.

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The OnDemand Top 100 Company Competition

Tony Perkins — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:39:09 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging on-demand companies that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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Continuous Deployment

Fred Wilson — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:46:02 +0000

Last winter John Allspaw joined Etsy to run tech ops. John has written several important books on web ops and is one of the experts in operating large scale web services. One of the first things John did when he arrived at Etsy is work with the dev and ops teams to put in place a continuous deployment system.

Continuous deployment is the idea that you push out changes to your code base all the time instead of doing large builds and pushing out big chunks of code. Here's an Eric Ries post on continuous deployment if you want to get a longer description of what it is and how it works.

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Anatomy Of A Pirate

Fred Wilson — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:49:06 +0000

I like to buy music. I buy it from emusic (where I pay $23/month for use it or lose it credits for music downloads), Amazon, and when in a pinch, iTunes. I also have two Rhapsody music subscriptions that cost an additional $20/month. My kids also regularly spend money on iTunes for music (often for tracks we already own somewhere else in the house). I suspect between all of this, our family spends well over $1000/year on mp3s, probably closer to $2000/year.

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50 Questions: How Long Will It Take my Company to Raise Venture Capital?

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:48:22 +0000

Up to now my posts in this series have largely dealt with the structure of the VC industry, the background if you like. Now that the the fundamentals are explained I can turn to the more practical aspects of what it is like for entrepreneurs to deal with venture capitalists, starting with the question ‘How long will it take my company to raise venture capital?’.

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How Meebo Got Started and Its Strategy to Make the Web More Social

Mark Suster — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:52:01 +0000

One of the great joys of doing the web series This Week in VC every week is that I get to spend time with great people debating the issues of our day including how our industry is evolving as well as insights into how companies got started, got their initial traction and dealt with adversities.

“But Mark, isn’t it one big time suck?”

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What I Wish I Knew Back When I Was a 20-Something VC

RemmingtonOxleyV — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:43:48 +0000

Have you read What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20?! It's good.

Seeing the box of Tina's books that I bought and am giving away got me thinking... I'm the snappy guy... What would I wish I knew as an associate.

Here are three things I'd do to make the jump from associate to legendary venture partner.

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Get Inside the Mind of an Angel Investor

Mark Suster — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:41:53 +0000

In my ongoing quest to get you good transcripts of the wonderful interviews we’ve done in the past on This Week in VC, I present you with one amazing interview here with angel investor Tom McInerney. He’s a friend, co-investor, former entrepreneur turned angel investor and “wizard of Oz” behind the scenes at the uber hot startup Klout.

What is wonderful about this interview is that I got Tom on the record on:

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The Shape of Foursquare

Maren Guse — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:42:06 +0000

Foursquare is a social, mobile, location-based application that turns users' daily lives into a game. Points, rewards, and fictional statuses, such as the top-level title of Mayor, are earned by "checking-in" at various locations using GPS technologies.

When users check in to a store, restaurant, or other location, they are announcing their location to friends and businesses in exchange for notification of promotions and user recommendations in the surrounding area. Foursquare encourages users to get together and have fun exploring the city around them by showing them which of their friends are nearby.

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Three Ways to Recognize a Talent Magnet

Tony Tjan — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:02:42 +0000

Talent rules. Changing a business plan is easier than discovering and developing the top talent to make that change happen. Recognizing this, more and more boards and investors are asking the question: How good is our leader in attracting the very best talent out there?

Our most recent blog post discussed the six habits of a talent magnet. In it, we shared what we have learned from watching and talking to the CEOs and entrepreneurs who consistently attract and retain the very best human capital. This time around, we look at how boards, investors, employees, and others can recognize such talent magnets when they see them.

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M&A Issues: The Stay Package

Fred Wilson — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:01:31 +0000

We continue our discussion of M&A Issues this week on MBA Mondays. Today we are going to talk about the "stay package."

When a company acquires your business, they are buying the people as much as anything. Experience has shown that the most successful acquisitions require the team to stick around, at least for a while. But if everyone is getting cashed out day one, there is very little incentive to stick around. Therein lies the stay package.

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Social Media, a Powerful Force for Good

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:00:36 +0000

Every so often I feel the need to write a post about the democratising effect that social media is having on the world, and on the back of what has happened in Egypt over the last week or two I want to write one today. For the first time since the industrial revolution just about everyone who wants one has a public voice, and it has become impossible for governments and corporations to control the media (with the possible exception of China and a couple of other countries in Asia). As a result it is increasingly difficult for anyone to pretend things are other than they really a

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Startup America: Dead On Arrival

Steve Blank — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:54:51 +0000

For its first few decades Silicon Valley was content flying under the radar of Washington politics. It wasn’t until Fairchild and Intel were almost bankrupted by Japanese semiconductor manufacturers in the early 1980’s that they formed Silicon Valley’s first lobbying group. Microsoft did not open a Washington office until 1995.

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Focus on Basecamp, Not the Summit

Mark Suster — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:55:39 +0000

A few months ago I wrote a post called “Invest in Lines, Not Dots.” It was my investment philosophy that observing teams’ performance over time was far more insightful than reacting to how good of a product demo they do, how good they present Powerpoint slides or how great tech blogs say they are.

Equally, I encouraged entrepreneurs to spend time getting to know their future VCs early because getting a feel for your chemistry is far more important than how the VC is ranked in some survey. Equally, I encouraged entrepreneurs to thoroughly reference check their VCs – you’ll learn much more from this than anything else.

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SecondMarket Is on the Way

Guobi Zhao — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:53:02 +0000

Since the financial crisis broke out in 2007, liquidity shortfall—the murderer of the U.S. economy—has been continuously threatening future recovery, which is especially obvious in the chaos of the stock and security markets and bank loan business sector. In these circumstances, a secondary marketplace for placement of illiquid assets thrives. Moreover, with technology development (especially in e-commerce) and Internet popularization, the idea of positioning such a marketplace online to enrich relevant services and extend reach has ignited public attention.

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Nokia goes to Microsoft's Mobile Platform

Michael Moe — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:49:42 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio continued its strong performance, up 5.5% last week, while the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 each advanced 1.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 15.4%, the NASDAQ is up 5.9%, and the S&P 500 is up 5.7%.

Nokia announced plans to use Microsoft's operating system for its smart phones. While this is a confirmation, in our view, that Nokia's Symbian operating system is having trouble keeping up with the iPhone and Android's technology and quality, the news is a positive for MSFT. For the week, MSFT dropped 1.9%.

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BPL Global: Making a Little Place in the World

Leah Hepperly — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:10:12 +0000

Better Power Lines Global, or BPL Global, was started in 2004, and is headquartered in Cranberry, PA, near Pittsburgh. BPL Global is run by Keith Schaefer (CEO and general partner) and Thorne King (vice president), with offices in nine countries on four continents. BPL Global also works with a distributing company to get its products out. As of May 2010, the company had 130 employees, 15 of which are located in the main office, making it a small organization with a big presence.

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Free Software, Paid Support

Fred Wilson — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:10:56 +0000

There is a thread on programmers.stackexchange.com that asks the question "Why do programmers write applications and then make them free?" The top answer right now is:

Because I don't want to feel obligated to provide technical support or offer refunds.

I have always found the free software approach to be instructive. There are many forms of creative expression out there and most of them involve a paid model. But there is a very vibrant community of software developers that build things and then make them available to anyone who want to use them for free. The key is that they don't offer any ongoing support or maintenance.

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Improving Sales: The Excuse Departement is Closed

Mark Suster — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:10:17 +0000

Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies.

The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves.

My first startup was no different. I had never had any sales training so everything we did for the first couple of years was instinctual. While we did fine learning on the fly, it turned out that a lot of what we did was wrong. I’ve started writing up some of those sales & marketing lessons and I plan to continue to build that section out over time.

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Back-Office Cloud Solutions Soar

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:50:11 +0000

A series of announcements over the past week clearly indicates that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) financial management and enterprise resource management (ERP) solutions are taking hold among organizations of all sizes worldwide.

The first was Intacct’s announcement that it had grown its customer subscription base 68% in 2010 and added more than 800 new client organizations. The company also reported 94.2% of clients surveyed indicated they would recommend Intacct to their colleagues, which is a perfect example of the customer-driven referral engine which is powering the overall growth of SaaS solutions. Intacct also said that 11 of the top 100 largest CPA firms in North America have joined the Intacct Accountants Program from CPA2Biz, showing that mainstream professional service firms are also adopting SaaS and recommending their clients take advantage of these solutions as well.

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Make your Freemium Model Really Work

Mark Suster — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:49:03 +0000

As many of you know I run a weekly webcast called This Week in VC that’s getting between 25-35,000 weekly views across ThisWeekIn.com, YouTube & mostly iTunes.

Yesterday’s show floored me. I consider Gregg Spiridellis a good friend. We’ve hung out periodically over the past few years and I have enjoyed debating many startup topics. Yesterday, we got them all on record and in a very interesting level of detail. If you have or are thinking about a business in the video space you’ll enjoy hearing from Gregg but even more broadly this is a great conversation for entrepreneurs, investors or industry analysts. Here’s the link.

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Startup America

Fred Wilson — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:51:02 +0000

On Monday , the White House announced Startup America. The CTO of US, Aneesh Chopra, blogged about it on Techcrunch. My friend Brad Feld was there and blogged about it.

I have no involvement with Startup America, at least yet. But I am a fan of it for one simple reason - they are paying attention. Let me explain.

For years, entrepreneurs in NYC, particularly tech entrepreneurs, labored largely in silence. The city government was focused on the big employers and real estate. Tech entrepreneurship was something that happened elsewhere. It was largely ignored.

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Make the Internet Smarter at Helping Us

Mark Suster — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:54:54 +0000

The Internet has a problem. It’s one you know well. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting out of hand. In non-geek speak this means that there is so much information out there now it’s hard to separate the good stuff from the rest.

We all now visit UGC sites to learn about products & services before we use them. I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past two years and bending the ears of any entrepreneur who will humor me to hear what I think the solution needs to look like. I call it “recommendation slicing.” I guess I sort of want “Pandora for everything else.” Why can’t I have it?

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Startups - So Easy a 12 Year Old Can Do It

Steve Blank — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:53:45 +0000

Out of the mouths of babes. Maybe because it’s a company town and everyone in Silicon Valley has a family connection to entrepreneurship. Or maybe I just encountered the most entrepreneurial 12 year olds every assembled under one roof. Or maybe we’re now teaching entrepreneurial thinking in middle schools. Either way I had an astounding evening as one of the judges at the Girls Middle School 7th grade Entrepreneurial night.

12 Year Olds Writing Business Plans
In this school every seventh-grade girl becomes part of a team of four or five who create and run their own business. The students write business plans, request start-up capital from investors, receive funding for their companies, make product samples, manufacture inventory, and sell their products to real-world customers. This class is experiential learning at its best.

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M&A Issues: The Integration Plan

Fred Wilson — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:22:00 +0000

For the past month we've been doing M&A Case Studies on MBA Mondays. It's time to go back to the basics of M&A. I laid them out in this post. For the next few weeks, I am going to discuss each of the key issues in detail. First up is the integration plan.

The integration plan is the way the buyer plans to operate your business post acquisition. You should get this figured out before you sign the Purchase Agreement. You are going to have to live with the results of the integration and you had better buy into it before you sign your company away to someone else.

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The Cloud and the New Economics of Electricity

Greg Ness — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:21:05 +0000

Having just read Google’s Schmidt’s Telegraph interview on the future of computing, one cannot help noticing the ripple effects of Moore’s Law now being played out on a grander scale:

“Now, the math of that is interesting,” he says. “Doubling every 18 months is roughly a factor of 10 in five years. In 10 years that’s a factor of 100. In 25 years it’s roughly a factor of 100,000.

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VCs Are Not Your Friends

Steve Blank — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:55:14 +0000

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times they confuse VC’s with their friends.

Lets Go to Lunch
At Rocket Science our video game company was struggling. Hubris, bad CEO decisions (mine) and a fundamental lack of understanding that we were in a “hits-based” entertainment business not in a Silicon Valley technology company were slowly killing us.

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Should You Really be a Startup Entrepreneur?

Mark Suster — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:54:29 +0000

One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”

The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience). It’s addicting. I know this sounds superficial. If you’ve taken the roller coaster ride that is a startup – you know what I’m talking about.

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Acme Packet Supports a Strong Week

Michael Moe — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 03:14:46 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio rebounded and was sharply up 6.7% last week, while the NASDAQ was advanced 3.1%, and the S&P 500 was up 2.7%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 9.3%, the NASDAQ is up 4.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 4.2%.

Acme Packet, which helps delivery of online communication and video, posted very strong Q4 results, growing EPS by 136% and sales by 70%, improving its operating margin significantly from 14.5% to 31.5% in the last year. The company raised its guidance for the year due to expected acceleration in demand kicking in around Q2. Management sees its market potential at ~$22 billion, where $20 billion is the current infrastructure of "old-fashioned" telephony, and $1.5 billion is the annual spending on that old infrastructure. Video conferencing is one of the main growth drivers, as many companies are starting to offer free video calling (Skype recently launched free group video calling for Mac users). For the week, APKT advanced 30.2%.

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The Six Habits of a Talent Magnet

Tony Tjan — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:16:33 +0000

Talent is the make-or-break issue for business success. Few great entrepreneurs and CEOs of our acquaintance would contest that statement. If you are a leader who's serious about improving your capacity to attract the best talent, you need to develop the habits of a true talent magnet. From our research and experience with numerous CEOs and entrepreneurs, we've identified six:

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Time For Google To Get Serious About Enterprise Tech Support

Brad Feld — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:15:41 +0000

We are in the final stages of completely switching Foundry Group to Google Apps. This began as an experiment in August 2010 when I decided to Try Gmail for a Week and evolved into an actual plan after Gmail Won Me Over in September 2010. We took it slow to make sure it was actually possible to easily switch from a legacy Microsoft Exchange environment where everyone’s brains were hard wired with Outlook and Windows and shared calendars managed by multiple assistants were a critical business function for a relatively small number of people who travelled constantly.

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Announcing the 2011 OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies

Tony Perkins — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:50:36 +0000

AlwaysOn is excited to announce the 2011 OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies list of leading digital media companies operating in the advertising, marketing, and content publishing sectors. While compiling the OnMedia 100 and interviewing the top CEOs, our editors were amazed by how big and even profitable many of these startups had become, which appeared to be a sign that the market was beginning to mature.

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On Leadership, Teams, Success, and Happiness

Mark Suster — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:51:33 +0000

Lately the topic of leadership & teams has been coming up a lot in my daily life. Some investors are team focused, others market focused, others seems to look for product / market fit. I’m in the team centric sphere so every investment decision I make first & foremost centers on this plane. Only then can I even care about product, market or their nebulous “fit.”

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Welcome Young College Graduates Into Your Entrepreneurial Community

Brad Feld — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:50:44 +0000

I feel strongly that the one of the important elements of building a sustainable entrepreneurial community over a long period of time is for the entire existing entrepreneurial community to be extremely welcoming to young college graduates. For the folks with a knee jerk reaction to call me ageist, please note that I said “one of the important elements …”

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No One Is Going to SXSW. It's too Crowded

RemmingtonOxleyV — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:45:44 +0000

The general consensus is that SXSW is too crowded.

I'm contrarian and say SXSW has never been easier to promote at.

1. It's like the China market.

SXSW is like the China market because if I can just get you 20% market penetration, it'll be awesome for us. :-)

2. Most airmail themselves in.

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A Frightening Week

Fred Wilson — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:17:41 +0000

When something you have come to rely on is taken away from you, it is frightening.

This week, when I read that Egypt's government was able to completely turn off the Internet in country, it stunned me. The Internet was designed to be immune to such things.

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How to Use PR Firms at Startups

Mark Suster — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:42:53 +0000

One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask about when they raise a little bit of money or are getting close to launching their first product is whether they should hire a PR firm.

There is obviously no black-or-white answer, but I’ve tried everything from working a large international agency, to hiring in-house people to doing it myself. This post is a short guide to what I’ve learned:

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Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Steve Blank — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:41:54 +0000

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially with the success of the company. The logical solution? “Re-architect and re-write” the product.

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Netflix Dominates

Michael Moe — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:41:03 +0000

Last week, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 0.9%, the NASDAQ was nearly flat at -0.1%, and the S&P 500 was off 0.6%. Year to date, AO X Fund is up 2.4%, the NASDAQ is up 1.3%, and the S&P 500 is up 1.5%.

Top performer for the week Netflix reported strong Q4 results with user growth up 63%, EPS up 55%, and sales growing at 34%. Management also said it expects users to grow 66% in Q1 and raised its guidance for Q1. Operating margin also improved 12.7% from a year ago to 14.6%. Management also indicated that it is targeting its operating margin to be at ~14% in the next few quarters.

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How You May be Signaling Price without Knowing It

Mark Suster — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:49:47 +0000

I was having a chat with an entrepreneur who I really like and who I try to mentor from time-to-time. He has an interesting business and one that has a viable shot at being an innovative & profitable business.

One problem. He’s struggling to raise money. This is extra frustrating in an era in which all you read about is how frothy the VC / funding market is these days. People are raising in record times and with wacky valuations. It is not an uncommon story that this is happening but others are struggling.

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Tablets Are Taking Over the World

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:28:30 +0000

These tablet stories on Techmeme this morning prompted me to tell a story from dinner last night. I was lucky enough to be eating at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at Claridges, which for the first few minutes was remarkable only for the quality of the aperitifs and the celeb diners. That changed when they brought out the wine list, which came in the form of an iPad, which we all thought was very cool. Interestingly it was set up as a web app rather than a downloadable app.

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The Independent Web

Fred Wilson — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:27:42 +0000

John Battelle has put forth his vision for The Independent Web. John is thinking of this concept in the context of the world he lives in, publishing and advertising, which makes total sense.

I too am very taken with the idea of The Independent Web, but I am thinking of it in the context of the world I live in, investing in and working with web and mobile web services.

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Why Startups Fail

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:58:42 +0000

I saw the following explanation of why startups fail on Quora this morning:

Answer Summary

The top reasons are:
1. No one wants the product created.
2. Management teams lack flexibility to change direction when needed.
3. Resources (funding/time/labor) are managed poorly.
4. Inability or failure to obtain and/or maintain sufficient capital (for a variety of reasons), whether or not managed poorly.

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The Wave if iPad Purchasing Has just Begun

Brad Feld — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:48:55 +0000

It’s fascinating to me when a new product aggressively shifts from early adopters to the mainstream. It should be no surprise that the day the iPad came out a bunch of them appeared at the Foundry Group offices. At the next board meeting I was at, I think every VC had one and was using it in the meeting presumably to view their board package (although I caught at least one checking his email throughout the meeting.) When the Kindle for iPad app appeared, I started toting my iPad around with me everywhere until I kept forgetting to charge it, at which point I went back to my Kindle for reading.

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CEO Transitions

Fred Wilson — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:59:34 +0000

This past week was a remarkable one in the technology business. At the start of the week, Steve Jobs passed the leadership of Apple to Tim Cook and at the end of the week, Eric Schmidt passed the leadership of Google to founder Larry Page. Apple and Google are two of the most important technology companies in the world and the leaders in the mobile business which is certainly the next frontier in tech. These two moves have me ruminating on the role that CEO transitions play in the development of great companies.

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The Bad Board Member

Steve Blank — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:57:01 +0000

In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.”

Over the last 40 years the U.S. has evolved an entrepreneurial ecosystem with two of the most unlikely partners – venture capital investors and technology entrepreneurs. This alliance has led to an explosion of technology innovation, scalable startups and job creation.

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Why Did I Invest in Pose?

Mark Suster — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:58:47 +0000

What a sweet feeling it was last week to see the launch of the photo sharing site Pose, whose application targets shoppers of apparel. If you don’t know it and own an iPhone (soon Android) please check it out.

What I’d like to do is tell you the story of how the investment came to be, what my thesis is / was and share some thoughts on macro trends.

I always try hard to make this blog a place where you can learn lessons rather than an advertisement for portfolio companies. I hope you’ll excuse me when I do the latter in combination with the former to try and explain how I see macro trends and help you think about the mind of a VC.

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Monetizing Mobile Audio

Fred Wilson — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:25:00 +0000

I'm going to the gym in a few minutes. I'll bring my android and stream some music while I'm on the treadmill. Maybe I'll listen to my soundcloud dropbox, or maybe I'll check out the popular tracks on hypem, or maybe I'll listen to some fredwilson.fm. I stream music on my mobile phone all the time. I don't have a single mp3 on my android and I don't have any desire to put any on it.

This is the future. We won't be buying files, moving files, and listening to files. We'll be streaming audio from the cloud onto our connected devices in our homes and offices, and onto our mobile devices at the gym, on the bike, in the car, etc. And I think mobile streaming audio is going to be huge.

How will the mobile audio streaming services make money? Some will charge a subscription. But I believe, like the radio industry for the past 50 years, most will make money by running commercial messages in the stream once or twice an hour.

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How I Use Visualization to Drive Creativity

Mark Suster — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:49:26 +0000

Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A slightly shorter version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch)

As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity. The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self talk.

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NO, I Am Not Marc Andreessen

RemmingtonOxleyV — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:25:08 +0000

I think Marc Andreessen is an incredible genius.

No, I'm not Marc Andreessen. And Remmy Oxley is not my real name. Its my pseudonym.

TechCrunch just reported that Andreessen Horowitz just recruited a partner focused on sales: "Andreessen Horowitz Hires a New Partner…from Sales?"

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A Turbulent Week in Tech

Michael Moe — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 23:23:02 +0000

It's been a very turbulent week in technology, with Steve Jobs taking another medical leave, Google announcing a shift in management with Larry Page taking over as CEO in April, and F5 Networks (and some other app-related companies) getting crushed on FFIV's Q4 report. The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was down 6.6%, the NASDAQ declined 2.4%, and the S&P 500 was off 0.4%. Year to date, AO X Fund is up 1.5%, the NASDAQ is up 1.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 2%.

Nevertheless, results from Apple, Google, and F5 Networks were strong, in our opinion. AAPL had another extremely strong quarter, with EPS growing 75.2% and sales up 71%. iPad and iPhone sales continue to be strong, up 65% (QoQ) and 68% (YoY), respectively. iPad sales totalled $4.6 billion, coming close to Mac sales of $5.4 billion in less than a year since launch. Uncertainty about Jobs' health pressured the stock price down 6.2% for the week.

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50 Questions: How Does the Structure of the VC Industry Impact Investment Strategy?

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:44:52 +0000

My last post in this series covered what an LP looks for in a venture capital fund manager, and the aim of it was to provide the entrepreneurs amongst you with some insight into the pressures on VCs and hence how they behave. This post is similar, although more directly related to the way investors make investment decisions and manage their portfolios, and hence to entrepreneurs.

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Building Better Social Graphs

Fred Wilson — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:41:16 +0000

I'll say right upfront that this may be a feature that many people don't need. But I need it so I thought I'd post it anyway.

As software becomes social, the creation of the social graph on each web service becomes a chore. I do not believe that you simply want to port your social graph from Facebook and Twitter into new web services. I believe you want to curate the social graph for each and every web service. And that's how I try to do it on each new social web service I encounter.

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Seven Requirements for a Successful Business

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:43:59 +0000

Vivek Wadwha put a post up on Techcrunch over the weekend title What Excatly is a Business Model? To my mind he didn’t really answer that question (I was expecting a piece about different ways of organising revenues and costs to make a profit) but he does list out seven requirements for a successful business. It is worth every entrepreneur and investor going through this list and making sure they know how they will deliver on each of these points, and the value in frameworks like this is that they throw the spotlight on areas that might have been forgotten.

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How to Handle a VC Presentation with No Deck

Mark Suster — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:43:12 +0000

I recently filmed a show for This Week in Venture Capital in which I talked about how to prepare for a VC meeting: whom you’ll meet, who should attend from your side, what materials you should bring and how you should run the meeting. I wrote the summary notes in this blog post. That notes only told part of the story.

Bijan Sabet – investor & board member in some small companies you might have heard of like Twitter, Tumblr, Boxee & OMGPOP – took issue with the whole notion that you even need a Powerpoint deck anymore. Please read his compelling & short post on the topic. The beautiful thing about VC’s who blog is that they tell you their preferences before you pitch to them!

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The Second Coming Of The Internet IPO

Fred Wilson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:42:13 +0000

Most of what I've been saying recently about valuations here at AVC has been negative. I think we are in a "focus on the upside" phase in the web investing sector and I've been pretty liberal with my thoughts on that.

But when friends have privately asked me whether they should take some of the Facebook shares their Goldman representative has offered them, I mostly tell them I think they should. I don't think anyone should bet their net worth on Facebook at $50bn, but I think it is a pretty good bet that Facebook will one day be worth more than $50bn. Is it today? Hard to say.

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OnMedia NYC 2011 CEO Showcases

Tony Perkins — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:22:34 +0000

Marc Sternberg here—President and COO of AlwaysOn.

Less then two weeks to go before our fifth annual OnMedia, taking place at The Paley Center for Media in New York City, Jan. 31st-Feb 2nd.

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Get your seat at OnMedia NYC 2011

Tony Perkins — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:07:26 +0000

Friend of AlwaysOn,

Tony Perkins here, Editor of AlwaysOn. I hope the New Year is going well for you.

I wanted to personally make sure you were extended a complimentary press/blogger pass to our OnMedia conference at The Paley Center for Media, New York on January 31st – February 2nd. You can check out the current program here.
http://aonetwork.com/AOEvents/OnMedia/OnMedia-NYC-2011

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The Cover-Up Culture

Steve Blank — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:15:47 +0000

In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.”

There’s something about the combination of human nature (rationalization and self deception) and large hierarchical organizations (corporations, military, government, etc.) that actively conspire to hide failure and errors. Institutional cover-up’s are so ingrained that we take them for granted.

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Going to Raise VC? Here's a Primer!

Mark Suster — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:14:57 +0000

If you want a very quick primer on all the stuff nobody ever tells you about raising venture capital check out this video where Mark Jeffrey & I break it down on This Week in VC. A summary of what we discussed is below:

Not 100% in order of the video, but close. All of this is covered in more detail on the TWiVC video above (and much of it is covered in text on this blog on the “Raising VC” tab)

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When They Are Throwing Money At You

Fred Wilson — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:13:51 +0000

Companies get hot. And investors start throwing money at them. Entrepreneurs get calls and emails all day long from investors wanting to invest. After a while, the entrepreneurs start to think that they should take the money. Not because they need it, but because they figure if people are throwing money at them, it's probably a good idea to take some.

Given that we are in the "throwing money at entrepreneurs" period in web investing, I thought I'd say a few things about this.

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Baidu Launches English-Language Blog

Michael Moe — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:12:44 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week up 3%, the NASDAQ was up 1.9%, and the S&P 500 gained 1.7%.

Baidu.com launched its English-language blog to provide readers around the world with a glimpse of Chinese web culture. This move shows that Baidu.com is looking at a potential global expansion. "As China's largest search provider, as well as the operator of some of its biggest online forums, we offer English-speakers a window onto the Chinese Internet," said Baidu's spokesperson Kaiser Kuo. "You can see what the intentions of Chinese people are by what trends are on Baidu." For the week, BIDU advanced 0.7%.

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Content Shifting

Fred Wilson — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:26:21 +0000

I got this comment from @Daryn on yesterday's SoundCloud post:

I still have commitment issues with audio. I find myself saying "Cool, Fred did a podcast. I should listen to that later..." Is there a save for later app like instapaper or the boxee bookmarklet?

To which I replied:

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How Twitter Got Me into The White House

Mark Suster — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:25:39 +0000

It’s clear that if you use Twitter wisely it can have an impact on how you physically experience your world. You have to put effort into building meaningful connections and contributing back but if you do the rewards can be handsome.

Here’s my story.

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The Growing Number of Liquidity Options for Startups

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:24:25 +0000

When I first started in the venture business in late 1999 the market was hot and deals were getting done very quickly, and with hindsight some of them were done too quickly and without enough analysis. Investment memos were briefer then than they have become since and I remember people joking that in the ‘exit strategy’ section there was often little more than “This company will exit via M&A or IPO”.

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The Torch is Passed to Android

Matt_McCall — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:18:04 +0000

Everyone watching the mobile OS wars has been expecting Android to become the dominant OS by powering a lot of the non-Apple hardware. The most recent Comscore numbers indicate that the torch (no BB pun) has been passed to Android in Q4, 2010. Below are the share numbers of mobile handsets and OS share. Android is powering much of the key handset players' devices (Samsung, Motorola, etc) and the Android market share just passed Apple's.

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Talent and Bandwidth

Fred Wilson — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:17:13 +0000

When people ask me what the city and state government can do to help the technology driven startup community in NYC, I tell them two things.

First, there is not one tech ecosystem. There is the software, internet, digital media sector which is thriving and on a tremendous growth spurt. And then there are the biotech, bioengineering, materials science, and energy sectors. These sectors are languishing in NYC with very little commercial activity given how much research and science goes on in the city.

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Learning from Twitter's and Foursquare's Successful SXSW Launches

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:16:29 +0000

There are a couple of interesting threads on Quora where over the last few days people have been discussing tactics for launching a product at the SXSW conference in Austin. As many of you will know, this is a hot topic because SXSW played a pivotal role in the early growth of Twitter (2007) and Foursquare (2009), and the conversation on Quora is high quality in part because the founders of these businesses pitch in with their view on how and why SXSW worked for them.

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RSS: Not Dead Yet

Fred Wilson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:23:56 +0000

I immediately thought of that great Monty Python skit when I read a series of posts in the past week declaring RSS "dead." If you look at the number of refers/visits coming from RSS, you might conclude that services like Facebook and Twitter are taking over the role of content syndication from RSS. That's essentially what MG Siegler concludes by looking at TechCrunch data in this post.

But as some of the commenters on that TechCrunch post point out, many RSS users consume the content in the reader and don't click thru. That's certainly what goes on with AVC content. Here are AVC's Feedburner stats for the past 30 days:

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Implied Suspicion vs. Implied Trust

Brad Feld — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:22:59 +0000

I just had an exchange with an entrepreneur that I don’t know. It went something like the following via several emails over the course of a week.

Entrepreneur: I’m working on something really amazing that I’m looking for funding for. Can we get together to discuss?

Me: Can you send me a short email overview so I can tell you whether or not it’s something we’d be interested in exploring? I don’t want to waste your time if it’s not.

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Cloud Computing 2011: Moving from What and Why to Where and How

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:15:15 +0000

There is no question that cloud computing was the top enterprise tech topic in 2010. Microsoft even succeeded in popularizing the term in its “Into the Cloud” ad campaign at the end of the year. Yet, most of the discussion and debate surrounding cloud computing in 2010 was focused on defining the term and its potential value.

Fortunately this debate didn’t prevent a diverse set of early adopters from capitalizing on the rapidly expanding assortment of cloud computing solutions being offered by a potpourri of emerging and established players. The growing number of cloud users are producing a compelling set of customer success stories and clear ‘use cases’ for employing cloud computing alternatives to legacy systems and on-premise applications.

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2011: The Year when Google and Apple Find Themselves with Real Competition?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:15:58 +0000

More competition for the major web platforms would be a significant boon for startups. Google’s huge margins make it more expensive and hence difficult for startups to acquire customers and grow and Apple’s restrictive policies for iPhone apps have a similar effect on companies in the mobile arena. For this reason I’m a keen supporter of Android and of Microsoft’s efforts to make Bing a viable competitor in search.

Given this position you can imagine I was pleased to read the following articles on Techcrunch this morning:

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Look to Social Media and MMOGs for IT Innovation

Greg Ness — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:03:12 +0000

As the cycles of IT vendor innovations and land grabs play themselves out in the software and networking industry, this almost predictable silicon opera may soon turn out to be a kind of sideshow to an even bigger drama. IT isn’t about rack space and/ or new breakthrough bezels and applications or features anymore, but about rising costs and slowing innovation pitted against increasing strategic operations and financial accountability pressures.

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Buckle Up for the Next Chapter

Matt_McCall — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:41:06 +0000

I don't want to pile onto or repeat some of the great posts of the current market conditions. Fred Wilson's post, Storm Clouds, was one of the better initial snippets on what is going on. One of the advantages of being in Chicago is that we are the first to lose liquidity and the last to get it. So, we track the number of term sheets from the Valley hitting Chicago as an indication of froth. When it goes up, we know that the Valley has so messed up its ecosystem that they are willing to fly in Winter to Chicago. The planes have been flying in with significant frequency, some driven by the Groupon halo and some driven by a hunger for deals at 50% the price of the Valley.

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Globalization

Fred Wilson — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:03:52 +0000

Whenever someone asks me what the biggest trend I am focused on, I always say Globalization. I mean this in the largest sense of the word. Globalization, driven by the power of technology and the Internet to shrink distances, is the big megatrend of my life, my generation, my world.

I am jetlagged. I woke up at 5am after staying up to ring in the new year. Everyone in my home will be sleeping for hours. So I'm doing what I always do this time of the morning; listening to music, blogging music, reading, writing, and browsing the web. I love doing random stuff on the web which takes me to new places and new ideas.

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The Mac App Store Launches

Michael Moe — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 03:01:27 +0000

In the first week of 2011, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 5.5%, while the NASDAQ was up 2.7%, and the S&P 500 inched up 1.1%.

Apple launched its long awaited Mac app store with more than 1,000 free apps. This is essentially the desktop version of the iPhone app store. For the week, AAPL advanced 4.2%.

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Reverse VC Pitch Franchise

RemmingtonOxleyV — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:43:47 +0000

So a bunch of VCs and I are having to pay to pitch.

When entrepreneurs are force paid to pitch, it makes negative headlines.. When VCs pay, somehow no one feels bad for us.

It's getting a load of positive press. At the partners meeting, we discussed countermeasures to our getting our asses kicked.

I've had my ass kicked before. It always propels me forward.

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Mobile Economics Will Trend Toward Web Economics

Fred Wilson — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:43:01 +0000

I've been saying for a while now that I think mobile economics will trend toward web economics as the mobile web goes mainstream. In other words, the business models that work best on the web will ultimately work best in mobile.The corollary to that is that the business models that don't work well on the web will not work well in mobile in the long run.

And that includes tablets. There is some discussion in the tech blogs today about why iPad magazine sales have been disappointing. I don't understand why anyone would ever think that adding a presentation layer on top of web based content would make it something people would want to purchase when they are not willing to purchase the same content directly on the web.

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How to Get VCs You Don't Know to Open Their Rolodexes

Larry_Chiang — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 01:03:47 +0000

WEST VANCOUVER, Canada — VCs have amazing business contacts. I argue that those contacts are as valuable as their money. I am experiencing this first-hand as a visitor to Canada, where I hosted a small meet-up Vancouver Startup Party and am now meeting the coolest people. It inspired me to write this on my Sidekick3.

As an entrepreneur active in Palo Alto, CA, I witness VCs making positive introductions for their portfolio companies and prospective investments. The challenge is how do we take the first couple of steps toward making this happen. I argue that in addition to being school smart, you have to sprinkle in street smarts. I collect, curate, archive, and publicize stuff that they don't teach in school. It pays homage to my mentor, Mark McCormack, who wrote What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School.

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Why You Should Make Your Competitors Your Frenemies

Mark Suster — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:54 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about how to talk to investors about your competitors. In short, acknowledge they exist, be transparent about strengths & weaknesses and use your differences to talk about how you want to position yourself in the market.

But more important than how you talk about them, how should you actually treat your competitors?

Conventional wisdom in most companies is that “the competition is the enemy” – it’s the rallying cry to dig deeper, get more features out the door, issue press releases citing differences and attack the competition’s weaknesses in sales presentations. I understand this instinct – it’s tribal, like rooting for sports teams. And there are actually some benefits to having something that galvanizes your team.

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Learning Python

Brad Feld — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:59:23 +0000

January’s Tech Theme of the Month is going to be Python. I realize it’s still December; I decided to get a head start.

Last month’s tech theme was videoconferencing. I learned a lot, including the unfortunate continued split between low end and high end and general lack of ability to have a single universal solution. Oh – and bandwidth still matters a lot. I expect by the end of January we’ll have much better videoconferencing infrastructure set up at Foundry Group with the single goal of eliminating some travel.

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Approximately Correct Is Better than Precisely Incorrect

Tony Tjan — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 01:06:06 +0000

There's no such thing as an average customer. A Harvard Business School marketing professor named John Deighton once came up with a vivid analogy to illustrate this and show why a business should sub-segment its customer base.

He concocted Via research, a hypothetical beverage producer, which discovers that roughly 50 percent of the world's citizens loves hot tea, while the other 50 percent prefers iced tea.

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Selling Your Company

Fred Wilson — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 01:05:20 +0000

It is Monday so it is time for another MBA Mondays post. We are a few weeks into a series on mergers and acquisitions. The first week we covered the basics of mergers and acquisitions. Last week we talked about asset sales.

This week we are going to start a conversation about selling your company. I will kick off the conversation by laying out the key issues in a company sale. Then we are going to do something new on MBA Mondays; case studies. I will invite a few guest posts from entrepreneurs who have sold their companies. That will hopefully start next week.

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Why Paid Content Models Won't Work on Tablets

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:58:03 +0000

Fred Wilson has a great post up today arguing that the mobile web is really just like the wired web and that the economics of both are rapidly converging. I particularly liked this passage where he talks about the inevitable failure of iPad magazine sales:

There is some discussion in the tech blogs today about why iPad magazine sales have been disappointing. I don’t understand why anyone would ever think that adding a presentation layer on top of web based content would make it something people would want to purchase when they are not willing to purchase the same content directly on the web.

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The Entrepreneur's Greatest Enemy

Matt_McCall — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:56:59 +0000

Anxiety and fear are the greatest enemies of the entrepreneur. You attract what you focus on and anxiety and fear not only focus on negativity, but eat up energy that can be applied more productively. Even worse anxiety and fear trigger the fight or flight portion of your brain which literally shuts down your ability to do abstract thinking. With this region asleep, it is hard to visualize a new revolution.

During the Bubble implosion in 2000, I lived perpetually in this state for 18 months until exhaustion and 16 lost pounds forced me to reconsider. I got nothing done during this time.

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How To Talk to Investors About Your Competitors

Mark Suster — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 22:49:49 +0000

Competition. Unless you’re Microsoft selling an OS for a PC you probably have some. And even then Microsoft has substitute products as anyone who has taken Econ 101 will tell you.

So if you’re raising money – from angels or VCs – you’re going to have to address the question of whom you’re competing against. And the reality is that if you have no competition it will likely be perceived as a negative, not positive. Why? Because if you’re truly that early / novel there’s a good chance that you’re too early and will spend lots of time / money educating the market. Remember: being too early is the same as being wrong.

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The Smartphone Explosion

Fred Wilson — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:50:49 +0000

I've been dipping around the edges of this story with recent blog posts, but Seth Weintraub takes it a step further in this post in Fortune. Next year is likely to be the year that smartphones emerge as the default mobile device platform around the world and probably the default internet access device in terms of numbers of users and devices.

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Microsoft and Oracle: The Next IBM or Digital?

Greg Ness — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:05:20 +0000

As Microsoft begins to embrace cloud computing one cannot help but to see parallels between the challenges Microsoft and Oracle face today and those faced by IBM decades ago.

As you might recall, IBM was as influential (perhaps more so) in the mainframe era as Microsoft is today in the client/server era and Oracle is in the database computing era. As the center of the IT universe shifted from mainframes to client/server computing IBM skillfully reinvented itself. Most of IBMs competitors became irrelevant as the market shifted.

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The GoingGreen East Top 50 Company Competition

Tony Perkins — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:10:50 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its third annual GoingGreen East Top 50 Private Companies Competition. We are looking for top emerging east coast and European private companies that are creating new business opportunities in green technology. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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The Return of the King

Ed_Lambert — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:45:34 +0000

Maybe it is because the spirit of Christmas and the holidays is upon me. Maybe it is because after a couple of very dry and tough years, this year's Venture Summit Silicon Valley felt like the first step into a series of killer years that will make the hard work worthwhile.

What really made this conference a home run was the air of excitement that the best is coming back. This overwhelming positivity came in a variety of CEOs and panelists from all walks of life and markets that make up our Global Silicon Valley.

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The X Fund Tops 2010

Michael Moe — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 17:55:32 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished 2010 up 25.1%, beating the NASDAQ and the S&P 500, which advanced 16.9% and 12.8%, respectively.

The most interesting news in the last week of 2010 was the release of Skype's new app for the iPhone 4, iPod, and iPad that enables free, mobile video calling.

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LPs Expect to Turn More Toward Venture in 2011

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:06:23 +0000

I don’t see much positive news coming out of the LP community about attitudes towards venture so I was very pleased to see the chart below in a recent Preqin report. LPs are the pension funds and insurance companies that provide most of the money to venture capital and private equity funds, and Preqin does research into their market.

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Learning from Google's Difficulties in Disrupting TV, Mobile, and Music

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:18:17 +0000

If you’d asked me on Monday I would have told you that I’ve posted on this blog every working day bar one for the last four and a half years, but annoyingly I had a technology failure yesterday and the number of times I have failed to post is now up to two. I tried to blog from my iPhone and discovered this morning that the post never went live.

I’m back in the office today and what you see below is a fuller version of the post I wrote yesterday.

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How to Make More Effective Holiday Cards

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 21:19:05 +0000

Like many of you, for me this was the year of the unsolicited eCards from random people I barely knew. Let’s be honest, much of this has become spam.

I’m not the Grinch. I’m not anti holiday spirit. But if you ARE going to get into it then you ought to do it right. Make it count. Like the team at First Round Capital always does. This was my favorite.

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VMware: The Next Microsoft or Netscape?

Greg Ness — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:52:52 +0000

The tech industry is in the midst of its next rebound, fueled by the spread of virtualization, the network-connected device explosion and the pending emergence of the new (infrastructure 2.0) network.

In May I wrote about today’s tech triumvirate of Cisco, Microsoft and VMware and how the future of IT will take shape based on critical decisions being made within the walls of these three stellar companies. A call from an analyst this AM sparked an update.

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The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:04:57 +0000

It surprises me how many really smart people I meet still doubt the power of Twitter.

It seems the urge to be a naysayer of Twitter is really strong for some. I think some of this stems from the early days of Twitter when it was presumed that it was a technology to tell people what you ate for lunch. Twitter never seemed to really take the offense in PR and marketing. I guess it wasn’t in their DNA.

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Buying and Selling Assets

Fred Wilson — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:53:44 +0000

MBA Mondays are back after a week hiatus. We are several posts into a series on Merger and Acquisitions. In our last post, we talked about the key characteristics of mergers and acquisitions. And we touched on the two kinds of purchases, the asset purchase and the company purchase. Today I’d like to talk about the asset purchase.

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Facebook About to Change the Face of E-commerce?

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:10 +0000

Bloomberg has an article today about Facebook’s push into ecommerce. Apparently Facebook is:

teaming up with startups, vendors, and even giant Internet rivals to turn Facebook pages into online shopping outlets fuelled by recommendations from friends who "like" to buy

This will be interesting to watch. I am keen to see which ‘Internet rivals’ are keen to work with Facebook.

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Doubling Down On The Overpay

Fred Wilson — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 08:23:51 +0000

One thing I've seen many VCs do wiith their initial investment in a company is invest more when the valuation gets expensive. They are ownership driven, not valuation driven. So if they originally wanted to invest $4mm at a $20mm post money valuation and buy 20% of the company, they talk themselves into investing $8mm at a $40mm post money valuation so they can still buy 20% of the company.

I have never liked this approach. When the price of an initial investment goes up, I prefer to invest less, or nothing at all. Investing nothing at all is a fairly obvious approach when the price gets beyond your comfort zone. Investing less is not as obvious.

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Applying Lean Startup Thinking to Raising Money

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 14:35:07 +0000

The idea for this post, and in fact the idea of applying lean startup thinking to raising money came from a conversation I had with entrepreneur turned angel investor Sean Glass a week or two back. Sean said he wasn’t going to get round to writing a post on the topic, and so I said I would give it a go.

Those of you who are familiar with Steve Blank’s and Eric Ries’ work on the advantages of being clear about your product and market hypotheses and then minimising the time/resource to test those hypotheses will already have worked out where I am going with this – it makes sense to take the same approach to raising money. In fact, the process of raising money has many parallels with selling a product to consumers or businesses – it is just that the product is equity in your company and your customers are angels and VCs.

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How to Run Better Presentations and Improve Results

Mark Suster — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 14:32:54 +0000

I sit through a lot of presentations. It’s usually people wanting to raise money and/or persuade me of something. Many of these are not as effective as they could be.

1. Understand Personality Types – One of the benefits of working for a big company (Accenture) was that we had lots of speakers come in and train us in topics like leadership, creativity, presentations, strategy, etc. Most of them sucked. But there were some that broke through and made an impact on me. One of them was about better understanding personality types. Not in a Myers Briggs way – we did that, too (I’m ENTP) – but it a more practical way: How people respond in meetings.

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New Investment: Shopify

Amish_Jani — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 14:31:41 +0000

One of the key trends we have been following at FirstMark is next generation retailing and e-commerce. We’ve seen rapid adoption of consumers buying online across categories, and it’s no longer controversial that people are willing to buy even complex items physical sight unseen. We’ve seen new business models like flash sales, Netflix-style rentals, and direct producer to consumer relationships blossom. The Internet allows for sourcing, curation, and selling on a level unparalleled.

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In Search Of Open Internet Access

Fred Wilson — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:23:43 +0000

Our regular programming, MBA Mondays, is being interrupted this week for a public service announcement.

The net neutrality debate is front and center again. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has announced that he will ask the FCC to adopt rules to protect the open Internet at its open meeting on December 21st. We have not seen these rules. Apparently nobody has outside the FCC. But we have been briefed on them. And we think that with one small tweak they will work well. But without that small tweak, they are problematic. My partner Brad has posted our firm's thoughts on the USV blog.

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Why Its Critical That you Reference Check Your VC

Mark Suster — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:22:53 +0000

I was recently speaking with some founders about their fund raising process. They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm. I personally had three separate data points from entrepreneurs who took money from the firm that said “never again.”

I really try to stay out of the middle of these things so I softly said to the team, “maybe you should contact these companies and see how their experience went?” From there I figure they can both figure out what to discuss – or not. One bad comment doesn’t always scare me as there’s often two sides to every situation. But three from different, independent sources? Pattern, methinks.

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Is Google Becoming the new Microsoft?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:21:57 +0000

It looks like Google is increasingly favouring its own properties in its search results. Techcrunch and the Wall Street Journal have both run articles to this effect in the last couple of days citing examples in local search. It appears that Google is promoting Google Places at the expense of Yelp, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and others. According to TechEYE Stephen Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor said:

since Google had made changes to the way the search engine displayed search results for local business he had lost 10 percent of his online business.

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The VC Pitch – Confusing the Destination with the Journey

Steve Blank — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:30:39 +0000

Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey.—Unknown

Entrepreneurs hear that VC pitches ought to be short, 10-20 slides. What most don’t know is that there is no way they can deliver a presentation that short by just “writing” the slide deck.

You Got to be Kidding
An entrepreneur I’ve known for a long time came by the ranch over Thanksgiving break to show me the first pass of his new startup slide deck.

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Just Make It Faster

Brad Feld — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:29:29 +0000

As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.” As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.” Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?”

This is a not a new question. I’ve been thinking about this since I first started writing code (APL) when I was 12 (ahem – 33 years ago) on a computer in the basement of a Frito-Lay data center in Dallas.

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In a Strong Wind, Even Turkeys Can Fly

Mark Suster — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:45:33 +0000

One of the wisest people I worked with in my career was Ameet Shah. Ameet always had the quietly reflective view of “why things were” that always came from a unique angle that I hadn’t considered.

He taught me, amongst other things, the benefit of “top down thinking” that changed the way I analyzed markets, companies and people. He taught me to ask questions in meetings rather than only talking and the benefits of not always trying to be the smartest guy in the room. He always was. But his favorite line was, “can you please slow down and explain this again? I’m only a 386 processor.”

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50 Questions: What does an LP look for in a VC fund manager?

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:46:14 +0000

Let me start by explaining two terms in the question.

‘LP’ is a generic term for an investor in a venture capital fund. Typically they are pension funds or insurance companies (otherwise known as ‘institutional investors’), but they can also be corporates, wealthy individuals or governments looking to stimulate the startup ecosystem. LP is short for Limited Partner, a reference to the legal status of investors in venture capital funds – technically they are partners in the fund with limited rights and obligations. I covered this in a little more detail when I answered the question Where do VCs get their money from?

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The Present and the Future, Part 2

Fred Wilson — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:44:35 +0000

It's the theme of the weekend. What looks great today may suck tomorrow.

Case in point, Blackberry and their parent company RIM. I was at dinner a few weeks ago with old friends. Both of them carry Blackberrys and they love them. I predicted that they would be using a new device shortly and that RIM would be in deep financial trouble within a few years. They were surpriseed to hear such a negative point of view.

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Join David Kirkpatrick in New York City!

Tony Perkins — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:27:11 +0000

OnMedia 2011 is where the world's most innovative and influential players in media and technology will gather to debate and shape the future of marketing, advertising, branding, and PR. With dozens of speakers across two-and-a-half days and the best and brightest minds in the media industry, OnMedia 2011 promises to be the most pivotal media conference of the year.

Some of the most recently confirmed speakers who will join us on stage this year include:

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Christmas Confessions from a VC

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:29:21 +0000

Remmy embraces the holiday season and works so hard at Christmas that even Ebenezer Scrooge would have coughed up a bonus.

Writing anonymously is empowering in a loser-ish sort of way.

I feel like one of those non-preneurs writing reviews of VCs in the Funded. Well, standing in my spotlight, holding my megaphone, confirming my privacy veil is firmly attached..., I reveal some Christmas VC confessions.

1) Work like an entrepreneur.

Normally, I Do Less All Week Than Most Entrepreneurs Do By 9am on Tuesday.

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Stuff Your Stockings!

Michael Moe — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:42:25 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 0.9% last week, the NASDAQ was up 0.2%, and the S&P 500 advanced 0.3%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 27.4%, the NASDAQ is up 16.5%, and the S&P 500 is up 11.6%.

To learn more about NeXt Asset Management—an investment management firm that leverages neXtup's ideas, insights, and philosophy—please visit www.nextassetmanagement.com..

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Markets Moving too Fast for Google

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:58:19 +0000

The New York Times today reports on an interview with Susan Wojcicki, a Senior Vice President for new products at Google in which she was asked why it wouldn’t be easier for Google to build out a similar service than pay several billion dollars for Groupon?

Not really, said Susan:

“It’s hard to assemble a team and organize as quickly as you want in these situations,” she said in an interview. “Finding the right people, interviewing them and hiring them takes time. Companies are willing to pay a premium to be in the market right now.”

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Data is the Next Major Layer of the Cloud

Mark Suster — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:57:34 +0000

Today Factual announced that it raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz & Index Ventures. I believe that this is a major new area of growth & innovation for the Internet as Cloud Services start to form deeper & richer layers. Let me explain.

For decades the “layering” of technology has allowed us to develop IT systems and networks in a specialized way that lets best-of-breed technology solutions to emerge at each layer of the stack and to allow people with different skill sets to specialize in key areas without having to have competence in every technology arena.

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The Present and The Future

Fred Wilson — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:55:51 +0000

Howard Lindzon has been asking people to think about The Next Ten Years. He says:

Few of us are thinking of the next TEN years. It’s hard not to get excited and short term distracted with Twitter, Groupon and Facebook adding billions in value as private companies in just a few years.

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The OnMedia Top 100 Company Competition

admin — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 10:07:21 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its fifth annual OnMedia Top 100 Private Companies competition. We're looking for the top emerging technology companies that are creating new business opportunities in the worlds of media, advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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M&A Fundamentals

Fred Wilson — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:17:00 +0000

This is the first post on the "acquisition finance" series we started last week in MBA Mondays. I am going to try to lay out the basics of mergers and acquisitions in this post. Then we can move on to some details.

As the term M&A suggests, there are two types of deals, mergers and acquisitions. Acquisitions are way more common. It is when one company is taking control of the other. A merger is when two like sized businesses combine. An example of a merger is the AOL/Time Warner business combination ten years ago. I am not a fan of mergers. I believe it is way better when one company is taking control of the other. At least then you know who is in charge. Mergers are very complicated to pull off organizationally.

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Android: a Classic Disruptive Play vs. iPhone

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:16:07 +0000

You may well have seen that yesterday Google announced the latest version of the Android platform (rev 2.3) which is called Gingerbread, and they also announced the release of the Nexus S – the follow up to the Google phone Nexus One.

It seems to me that Google are executing brilliantly on a text book disruption of the iPhone’s market position. As per Clayton Christenson’s Innovator’s Dilemma, a disruptive product is one which attacks a market by being better on one dimension and not competing at all on what is considered the most important dimension by the incumbent

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Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There's A Better Way

Steve Blank — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:14:48 +0000

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.—Albert Einstein

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) and being continually surprised when it didn’t.

That’s the definition of insanity. Luckily most startups now realize there is a better way.

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Introducing the 2010 Venture Capital 100

Tony Perkins — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:12:01 +0000

During the past year, the stars in the venture capital industry have proven that there is life after a ten-year run of marginal returns and two brutal recessions that knocked NASDAQ under 1,200 in Septmeber 2002, and under 1,400 in February 2009. This list proves that the top VC firms still have the patience, endurance, and tenacity to weather any economic storm that blows up in its path. Last year's first annual AlwaysOn Venture Capital 100 highlighted the 100 individual venture capital partners that backed the most profitable winners from 2006 through 2009.

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Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

Mark Suster — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:48:49 +0000

This past October I was invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company” but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy” since my goal was to slay many of the myths I believe exist right in the heart of Silicon Valley!

The truth is that I love Stanford, Palo Alto and the Bay Area in general. I grew up in NorCal and I formerly lived in Palo Alto.

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The Impact of Recession on Startups

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:47:49 +0000

Techcrunch have a story up this morning: To date, US online holiday spending up 12% to $16.8bn, in fact revenues of ecommerce companies have grown consistently through two recessions since 1999 (source Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near). A recession is obviously never good news for anyone, but these stats are a timely reminder that if a startup has picked its market well it shouldn’t worry too much about recession.

The quintessential venture backed startup is in early at the beginning of a new market opportunity (either a genuinely new market or a re-segmentation of an existing market) and raises money to grow as fast as possible to lock down a leadership position – a process that will likely take five years or more from the date of company formation.

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When It's Darkest, Men See the Stars

Steve Blank — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:59:24 +0000

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States.

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Invest In The Mess

Fred Wilson — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:56:28 +0000

There's a front page story in the NY Times today about the hyperactivity in web startupland. They quote from a few posts I've made on this blog and I think Jenna and Evelyn did a nice job with the story.

The thing that's clear from reading the story is the hyperactivity is in the early/seed stage market and the late stage market. Investors are throwing money at energetic entrpreneurs with plans, hopes, and dreams and at emerging winners like Groupon, Gilt, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

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Be Careful not to be Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Mark Suster — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:35:03 +0000

Justyn Howard, founder of Sprout Social has a blog post that he’s written about his experiences of migrating from scrappy tools to more efficient ones (i.e. Using Balsamiq instead of SnagIt, Website Optimizer over just Google Analytics and FTP).

It’s a great topic, his post is well written and given that he’s going through it right now in his startup it’s worth reading his point of view on the topic.

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Acquisition Finance

Fred Wilson — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:33:37 +0000

It's monday and it's time to move on from the MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity. We did nine posts on employee equity and hopefully we moved the needle a bit on understanding that complicated topic.

I'd like to switch topics now and talk about acquisition finance. The other day Chris Dixon said this in a comment here at AVC:

the two biggest tech companies alone (apple and google) are approaching $100B in cash that they will likely use for acquisition to support their incredibly profitable businesses

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X Fund Favorite Lululemon Beats Expecations

Michael Moe — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:54:20 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 2.1% last week, the NASDAQ was up 1.8%, and the S&P 500 advanced 1.3%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 28.5%, the NASDAQ is up 16.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 11.2%.

To learn more about NeXt Asset Management—an investment management firm that leverages neXtup's ideas, insights, and philosophy—please visit www.nextassetmanagement.com..

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Socially Network or Die!

Tony Perkins — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:53:16 +0000

What are the innovative changes and subtle trends influencing media industry investors? What do media investors and technology entrepreneurs need to do to set the pace and lead the pack? Find out at OnMedia 2011, where the world's most innovative and influential players in media and technology will gather to debate and shape the future of marketing, advertising, branding and PR.

The list of highlights goes on and on but here's a peak at some of the topics we'll cover:

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CEO Showcase: Document Depository Corporation

admin — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 19:40:13 +0000

When Farid Naib started DDC to resolve the organizational problems he experienced when selling his last company, little did he know he was going to define an entirely new SaaS space: critical data management. DDC's product suite is designed to solve the organizational problems faced by growing businesses, professional investors, and their board members.

DDC's first product, Radar, takes critical documents and information typically stored in disparate locations like e-mail folders, employee computers, network drives, and even filing cabinets, and provides a single online access point to access all the information in an easy-to-use view.

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Don’t Celebrate Until the Ink is Dry & The Cash is in the Bank

Mark Suster — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:07:50 +0000

Recently I wrote a blog post about how I hated losing, but I embrace it as a way to learn, improve and increase my win rates.

You’re Most Vulnerable Right After You’ve Won the Deal
One of the things I learned from my “post-game analysis” is that you’re most vulnerable right after you’ve won the deal. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but my experience tells me it’s true. At the moment you pop the champagne cork and let down your guard is when you’re easiest to attack.

In my blog post about how I hate losing I told the story about how when I was running my first company in the UK I competed and won a major contract with the largest water company, Thames Water, that would have been worth millions of dollars. I won, that is, until I lost.

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A Reflection on Boomi

Amish_Jani — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:04:17 +0000

This was a long overdue post, but it’s been a busy year. Fitting this comes as we head into Thanksgiving. Our investment in Boomi came at an interesting time. There were plenty of scars from the legacy integration 1.0 and EAI worlds. Those companies were marked by significant services implementation relative to license sales to deal with unique customer environments. That made integrations complex, costly and brittle. Companies like Grand Central, Bowstreet, and others had all tried to ride the Web services, SOA, and interconnected enterprise wave in the early 2000s.

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Employee Equity: How Much?

Fred Wilson — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:17:36 +0000

The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. I am going to try to address that question in this post.

First, a caveat. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula. Getting someone to join your dream before it is much of anything is an art not a science. And the amount of equity you need to grant to accomplish these hires is also an art and most certainly not a science. However, a rule of thumb for those first few hires is that you will be granting them in terms of points of equity (ie 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%). To be clear, these are hires we are talking about, not co-founders. Co-founders are an entirely different discussion and I am not talking about them in this post.

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Comcast Outage, Cloud Computing and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:16:40 +0000

Few technology trends have captured as much popular attention as Cloud Computing. The level of hype associated with the ‘Cloud’ hasn’t been seen since the hoopla created during the Dot.com era. As a result, there has been plenty of debate about whether the Cloud Computing phenomenon is headed to a similar demise.

Of course, I can point to plenty of proof-points which clearly demonstrate the differences between the false promises of the Dot.com era and the tangible benefits of today’s Cloud Computing solutions. However, the recent Comcast outage raises an even more serious concern — are businesses moving to a far less reliable operating platform when they turn to Cloud services to support their corporate operations?

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Tim Draper, Victor Boyajian, and Drew Clark Head to Silicon Valley

Tony Perkins — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:03:11 +0000

As market recoveries continue to move ahead, you want to know what the next hot company is, who is driving innovation, what the big technology breakthroughs are. Next week is the year's most high-powered event on technology investment trends and opportunities: Venture Summit Silicon Valley.

This technology think tank will gather entrepreneurs, thought leaders, market shifters, game changers, and some of the most innovative people in the innovation marketplace today. Two-and-half-days of intense discussions, stimulating presentations, and you-saw-it-here-first revelations.

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Let Entrepreneurs Squat

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:57:29 +0000

Like many VCs, I own a couple of properties.

Most property doesn't generate a return until you sell. I seek alpha returns while-I-hold-the-property. It is what makes my LPs smile.

You see, I use my property to woo entrepreneurs. No, I don't host parties or do BBQs the way that other firms GPs do....

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Embrace Your Losses. They Will Make You Stronger

Mark Suster — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 02:59:50 +0000

I HATE LOSING. I hate it. I really, really, really hate it. It chaps my hide. It rips at my core. I don’t get over it easily. I lose sleep. I fucking hate losing. It’s not so much the actual outcome that I hate – it’s the process. The fact that I lost when I should have won.

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In Negotiations, Play Stupid to Win Smart

Tony Tjan — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:06:35 +0000

In my last blog, I shared with you one of my partner's sayings that he learned from his uncle, "play stupid, and win smart." His uncle was a skilled poker player with an uncanny ability to hide his emotions. Other players bought into his "play stupid" routine, and he'd later disarm them with his winning hands.

This is a real skill, since in general, the brain lags the mouth. Our impulse is to speak our minds, talk first, think and act later.

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Predictions for Cleantech in 2011

Dallas Kachan — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:07:23 +0000

It's December, and time for an annual reading of the green [tech industry] tea leaves. What will the new year have in store for cleantech?

From our standpoint at Kachan & Co., 2011 could be a strong year for the global clean technology sector. Seemingly, the markets have been correcting themselves in 2010; valuations are returning to rational P/E multiples, price signals are emerging again after massive government investment in cleantech, early stage deals seem to be returning, corporate investment is flowing, new funds are being announced everywhere. Outside the U.S., which is having an increasingly hard time supporting the sector, cleantech is alive and well, even in exits... albeit mostly in China.

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50 Questions: Where Do VCs Get Their Money?

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:06:28 +0000

In the first four posts in this series Nicholas and I have addressed big meaty questions – what is venture capital?, what exactly is an investor? and so on, which has been fun, but has been a bit like building a house before the foundations are down. This week I want to look at those foundations – asking the question ‘where do VCs get their money from?

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Connected TVs Need Open Access to Content

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 22:18:07 +0000

Connected TVs are looking like they will be big business next year and I have just read a report on the subject from Colin Donald of FutureScape. I was struck by the following stat:

A September 2010 survey conducted in the UK for Intel found almost half (45%) of individuals use social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook to discuss a programme while it is being shown.

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Crafting Your Wow! Statement

Bill Reichert — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:51:29 +0000

If you have only a few seconds to communicate the essence of your company, what is the most important message to deliver?

When confronted with this question, most entrepreneurs think about their elevator pitch—sixty seconds of highly condensed hyperbole intended to entice an investor to ask for more. But all the workshops and how-to blogs offered on elevator pitches have probably done as much damage as good. Almost every guide to developing an elevator pitch suggests that you pack the six to eight key points of your 85 page business plan into 120 words.

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Online Coupons Go Super Nova

Michael Moe — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:05:35 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 0.7% last week, the NASDAQ was up 3%, and the S&P 500 declined 2.2%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 25.9%, the NASDAQ is up 14.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 9.8%.

To learn more about NeXt Asset Management—an investment management firm that leverages neXtup's ideas, insights, and philosophy, go to www.nextassetmanagement.com..

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Handle the Pro

Mark Suster — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 01:19:02 +0000

Everybody has some portion of their life that is repetitive. For these cases we want software that is optimized for massive iteration. Yet often modern software is only optimized for the novice under the mantra of “simplicity.” I recently wrote a post about design simplicity where I encouraged technology design teams to think about “designing for the novice, configuring for the pro” users.

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Why Less is More

Mark Suster — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:37:11 +0000

It’s counter-intuitive – especially to Americans. But often less is more.

Minimalism beats clutter. Substance trumps verbosity.

For years I’ve been offering advice on how to better communicate and for years I’ve seen most people commit the same universal mistake: Including too many details. Less is more effective. Less has more impact. Less actually takes more effort.

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Chasing Returns

Fred Wilson — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:35:45 +0000

I've spent much of this long weekend curled up on the couch reading Too Big To Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin's history of the financial crisis of 2008. I've wanted to read this book since it came out last year but it took me a while to get to it. I'm enjoying it very much.

As I read about bank after bank waking up and smelling the coffee too late, I am reminded of the risks of chasing returns. In the case of the financial crisis of 2008, the banks were chasing returns in the mortgage markets and the related markets for CDOs and other exotic derivatives. The scary part of the whole thing is they were chasing returns in a market they did not fully understand. Here's a quote from Alan Greenspan that I got from the book:

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Join Dixon Doll, Paul Deninger, and Michael Grimes at Venture Summit Silicon Valley

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:11:44 +0000

Which are the hot companies to watch? Who is driving innovation and defining the next big winners in the race for breakthroughs in technology? Find out in less than two weeks at the year's most high-powered, fast-track event on technology investment trends and opportunities: Venture Summit Silicon Valley.

While we are putting the finishing touches on the agenda, we wanted to reach out to you with our latest updates. Some of our most recently confirmed speakers are:

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CEO Showcase: SABA Motors

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:01:45 +0000

SABA Motors, currently in stealth mode, is developing an all-electric sports car, looking to compete with existing traditional-fuel sports cars in the $40,000 range. The key to the car's performance is its light weight; a two-seater with an aluminum frame and carbon-fiber body. The car is powered by lithium batteries from ThunderSky with a range of 120 to 140 miles. The company is currently competing in Progressive Insurance's Automotive X-Prize and was one of 43 teams that qualified for the third stage of the competition.

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VC Investment in the Games Industry

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:43:20 +0000

I attended a lunch event today kindly hosted by law firm Osborne Clarke and Nicholas Lovell (co author of our “50 questions you should ask before raising venture capital” series of blog posts – next instalment tomorrow on Nicholas’s Gamesbrief blog). There were about twenty of us at the lunch, with a roughly equal split between games entrepreneurs and VCs, and the aim of the event was to stimulate dialogue between the two sides and start to eliminate some misunderstandings between the two groups.

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Silicon Valley's IPO Anxiety, Part 2

Bill Gurley — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:42:25 +0000

The Majority of Recent IPOs Are Outside of Silicon Valley

U.S. High Technology / VC Backed IPOs Since the Beginning of 2008 (XLS)

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CEO Showcase: Alphabet Energy

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:39:52 +0000

Alphabet Energy is commercializing a breakthrough, inexpensive waste heat recovery technology developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its revolutionary thermoelectric approach and materials platform is the only of its kind that lends itself to massive scale at low cost. With these products, made entirely from sustainable materials, customers may use their waste heat to generate electrical power in the range of microwatts to megawatts. Alphabet's thermoelectric materials can be used to turn heat directly into electricity.

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The Art of the Quick Phone Call

Mark Suster — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:04:15 +0000

All this heavy talk about angels, VCs, bubbles lately. I thought I’d go for a more tactical & practical post today. The art of the quick phone call.

I had breakfast with David Tisch the other morning in NYC. If you don’t know David he’s the guy who will be running TechStars New York starting in January. And that’s a great thing because I was really impressed with him. Surprisingly so.

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Avoid First-Impression Mistakes

Tony Tjan — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:03:10 +0000

Poor first impressions are avoidable. I'm amazed by some of the really unfortunate mistakes that people make during important first meetings, whether it's a job interview, an important pitch, or other high stakes first-time business encounters. The secret to avoiding these mistakes is to spend time preparing before the meeting.

In today's hyper-connected world, there's no excuse for not learning as much as possible about whom you are meeting and their company. It's the basic mental training you need to do before "game day." And yet people don't do it enough. If people prepped as much for an important business meeting as they did for a first date, there would be a lot more business success stories.

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CEO Showcase: Stramit USA

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:41:28 +0000

Stramit StrawBoard is manufactured from straw, such as wheat or rice, by a patented process of heat and pressure that fuses the straw using its internal resins, making it a completely natural product. Stramit is produced by continuous extrusion, has a tough, bonded external surface of recycled paper, and is typically 35mm to 60mm thick. Stramit is an internationally recognized brand. Stramit boards and panels have been used successfully for more than 50 years in more than twenty countries.

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Buy Entrepreneurs Yogurt

RemmingtonOxleyV — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:43:01 +0000

VCs that meet for coffee are silly.

I do the uber gay maneuver and woo entrepreneurs with froyo. My favorite is Fraiche. I strategically lob in e-mails when entrepreneurs are most vulnerable... Oh, and wooing over lunch is dead. Most entrepeneurs wake up so late that eating at 12:30 for 2 hours is unthinkable.

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Silicon Valley's IPO Anxiety

Bill Gurley — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:54:31 +0000

“Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination…”
— Limelight from Moving Pictures, Rush

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Invest in Lines, not Dots

Mark Suster — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:47:37 +0000

Everyone seems to be in such a rush to get shacked up these days.

In normal times investors will look for “traction” before investing. We want to make sure we’re in love. This sometimes frustrates entrepreneurs who just want to “get back to running the business.” But if you understand it you’ll see that it is perfectly rational and it should also influence how you form relationships with investors. And remember, if we get married you’re stuck with us, too.

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Some Thoughts on Innovation

Nic Brisbourne — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:03:57 +0000

I have been in Silicon Valley this week for our annual DFJ partners get together. There are eighteen funds in the DFJ Network and once a year we all congregate in Half Moon Bay for a conference, to which our CEOs and LPs are also invited. As always there were good speakers and chances to meet with folk from companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter – you might have seen some of my Tweets earlier in the week with some data that Amazon shared.

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Pacing Yourself

Fred Wilson — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:01:45 +0000

I've been pretty clear as of late that I think the market for investing in web startups is getting overheated. When I talk to some people about this, they say "you should shut down and ride out the bubble on the beach." To which I say "we don't think we can time markets."

If you had a crystal ball, then doubling down when the market is ice cold and folding your hand when the market is white hot would be a great investment strategy. But nobody has a crystal ball and timing markets is a lot harder than it seems.

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Cutting-Edge Media Industry Opportunities

Tony Perkins — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 21:00:47 +0000

Unlock the potential. Be a part of the emerging technologies that are creating the next paradigm shift in growth-oriented investment and cutting-edge media industry opportunities. Join the inner circle. Meet the companies that are at the forefront of the next digital media wave at OnMedia 2011, where the world's most innovative and influential players in media and technology will gather to debate and shape the future of marketing, advertising, branding and PR.

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CEO Showcase: Mango Materials

admin — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:46:19 +0000

Mango Materials produces bio-based, biodegradable plastics that are cheap and green. This new startup company is staffed by a first-class team of engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and innovators. The Mango Materials process converts a "waste" material that is routinely released into the atmosphere into valuable PHA pellets. These pellets are used in a variety of high-margin or high-volume, eco-friendly plastic products, such as children's toys, electronic casings, water bottles, and food-packaging containers.

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Silicon Valley's IPO Anxiety, Part 2

Bill Gurley — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 19:03:14 +0000

The Majority of Recent IPOs Are Outside of Silicon Valley

U.S. High Technology / VC Backed IPOs Since the Beginning of 2008 (XLS)

read more

Guess? Beats Expectations

Michael Moe — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 17:20:18 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 4.5% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 0.7%, and the S&P 500 declined 0.9%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 25%, NASDAQ is up 11.7%, and the S&P 500 is up 7.5%.

Many of you have been asking if there is a way to invest with us. We are delighted to announce the launch of NeXt Asset Management—an investment management firm that leverages neXtup's ideas, insights and philosophy. You can learn more at www.nextassetmanagement.com.

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How to Connect with High Volume People

Mark Suster — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:23:48 +0000

I’m a high-volume person. That doesn’t make me important. It doesn’t mean I’m not accessible. It means simply what I’m stating – high volume.

What that means is that in a typical week I might see 10-15 new company pitches. Sometimes more. I speak at conferences where I might meet 75-100 people and have conversations. I do dinners too often as my waistline can attest. I have long one-on-one conversations with people for hours.

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Six Years, Our Third Fund, and Looking Ahead

Josh Kopelman — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:25:10 +0000

Six years ago this month, First Round Capital was started.

It started with a simple thought – that while the world had changed tremendously over the last 30 years, the venture capital industry had not . So we asked ourselves a simple question - what would a venture fund look like if the model was invented in 2005 rather than 1975? And over the last six years, we’ve learned several things:

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Anatomy of the 2011 Startup

Tony Perkins — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:24:30 +0000

Who will be the next big winners in the race for breakthroughs in technology? Those who spot new trends and disrupt old standards—the entrepreneurs, investors, and influencers converging at Venture Summit Silicon Valley on Dec. 13-15.

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CEO Showcase: Conderos

admin — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:15:35 +0000

Conderos is developing new processes and technologies to break down cellulose and hemicellulose, so that the sugars contained within them can be used instead of petroleum or food crops. There are hundreds of millions of tons of biomass in the U.S. available for conversion to sugars. Using biomass that has already served its primary purpose is even better for the environment because it does not add any new carbon to the cycle and it displaces carbon from fossil fuels that would otherwise be added to the carbon cycle.

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Employee Equity: Vesting

Fred Wilson — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:22:05 +0000

We had a bunch of questions about vesting in the comments to last week’s MBA Mondays post. So this post is going to be about vesting.

Vesting is the technique used to allow employees to earn their equity over time. You could grant stock or options on a regular basis and accomplish something similar, but that has all sorts of complications and is not ideal. So instead companies grant stock or options upfront when the employee is hired and vest the stock over a set period of time. Companies also grant stock and options to employees after they have been employed for a number of years. These are called retention grants and they also use vesting.

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50 Questions: VC or No VC?

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:21:02 +0000

All too often entrepreneurs with very young companies start thinking about raising money almost before anything else, and then they write a business plan designed to please investors, and before they know it the cart has got in front of the horse and they have a strategy which has been dictated by their perception of what the investor community is looking for. Anyone who has found themselves building a financial model which justifies more money than they think they need because 'investors won't be interested in anything smaller' has fallen foul of this problem.

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Which Seed Deals Won't Raise the Next Round?

Brad Feld — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:03:40 +0000

There have been a number of thoughtful "early warning sign" posts in the past few days including one from Fred Wilson (Storm Clouds), one from Mark Suster (What Angel Investing & Florida Condos Have in Common), and Roger Ehrenberg (Investing in a frenzied market).

The seed investing phenomenon of 2010 has been awesome to watch and participate in. The velocity of activity from individual angels, angel groups, seed VCs (the correct phrase for most of the "super angels" which have now raised actual funds), and even traditional VCs has been on a steep climb throughout the year. ?When the numbers are tallied up at the end of the year (I'm sure someone will do it - and it won't be me) I expect there will be all kinds of new records set.

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What Angel Investing and Florida Condos Have in Common

Mark Suster — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:02:18 +0000

It’s really hard to zig when the whole world seems to be zagging. One of my favorite quotes I learned in high school was:

“Nonconformity is the Highest Form of Social Attainment”

It was written as the yearbook quote of the smartest seniors as I was finishing my freshman year. It has always stood with me. I have had a low bullshit meter. I remember it even way back in kindergarden when my Saturday school teacher tried to tell me about Noah and Adam & Eve. Those stories didn’t sound that plausible to me. Much to her chagrin, the other slogan I have always lived by is

“Question Authority.”

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50 Questions: What is VC?

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 01:29:49 +0000

In this first post I’m going to answer the introductory question “What is venture capital?”, which sets the scene for the rest of the Series. Nicholas Lovell will publish his first post in the series today as well answering a similarly introductory question “What exactly is an ‘investor’?”. After that we will each publish in alternate weeks, with me taking the first post next Wednesday.

What is venture capital?

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Dear Entrepreneur, Are You Happy?

Tony Tjan — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:14:47 +0000

For the past year, I've been interviewing entrepreneurs and business-builders as part of a book project. Their successes have inspired me, but so have their failures. In the course of interviewing them, I'm constantly reminded of the need for humility.

Through this quest to learn more about the elements and principles that drive business-building success, we have met people who have reached the highest echelons of their peer groups and have made the various lists that seem to matter (Fortune, Forbes, etc.). The media, and by extension media consumers, are quick to measure business success by objective financial metrics — revenue growth, profitability levels, money from an exit sale or IPO, market cap size, or annual salary.

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Will Google Get Groupon?

Michael Moe — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:46:58 +0000

The AlwaysOn X portfolio advanced 0.2% last week, with NASDAQ and the S&P 500 both being flat. For the year, the AO X portfolio is up 19.7%, NASDAQ is up 11% and the S&P 500 is up 7.6%.

We made a few trades during the week and sold Longtop Financial due to deteriorating fundamentals and decelerating growth. We also sold JinkoSolar, as the stock dropped below our -20% limit. In addition, we bought Indian online travel leader MakeMyTrip with a 3% position.

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Who Will Be the Next Mark Zuckerberg?

Tony Perkins — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:32:30 +0000

Technology entrepreneurs are talking, and Madison Avenue is listening. And what's emerging will change the face of advertising, branding and content publishing. Meet the companies that are at the forefront of the next digital media wave at OnMedia 2011, where the world's most innovative and influential players in media and technology will gather to debate and shape the future of marketing, advertising, branding and PR.

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CEO Showcase: Ether2

admin — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:21:51 +0000

Ether2 is in the business of designing, manufacturing, selling, and licensing technology for ubiquitous network communications. This remarkable (layer 2) switching technology eliminates the need for complicated routers, switches, and middle hardware, whose job it is to create an asynchronous network on top of a synchronous network.

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50 Questions You Should Ask Before Raising Venture Capital

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:13:36 +0000

Back in June I was on a venture capital panel at the Develop Games Conference in Brighton. I sit on these panels in large part to explain and demystify venture capital and as is often the case the other panelists and I were happy to devote much of the panel to discussing the basics of VC. One of the challenges on these panels is assessing the average level of knowledge the audience and adjusting what you say accordingly. On the Develop panel I got it a bit wrong, assuming a greater level of knowledge than was actually the case, which prompted me to write a post Explaining venture capital.

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CEO Showcase: Design Hosting Software

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:16:59 +0000

Design Hosting Software (DHS) is a leader in interactive digital interfaces for small screens. Drawing from its vast experience developing automotive interface products for customers such as Toyota, BMW, ALPS, Fiat, and Ferrari, DHS has developed SnapGlance to integrate electric vehicles with home energy management and corporate energy management systems into one adaptive personal energy management system.

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Storm Clouds

Fred Wilson — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:44:05 +0000

We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. In this sector of startupland, company creation is up, investment is up, there are plenty of success stories, and not all of them are based on quick flips and takeouts. There is real revenue flowing through web companies and many web startups formed in the last five or six years are operating profitably. It has been good to be a web entrepreneur and a web VC, and I think it will continue to be for quite some time.

However, there are a few storm coulds out there that we need to be watching. In particular, I think the competition for "hot" deals is making people crazy and I am seeing many more unnatural acts from investors happening. If it were just valuations rising quickly, I'd be a bit less concerned. But we are also seeing large deals ($5mm to $15mm) getting done in a few days with little or no due diligence. Investors are showing up at the first meeting with term sheets. I have never seen phases like this end nicely.

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Understanding the Innovator's Dilemma

Mark Suster — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:42:41 +0000

One of the most influential books of my career is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen. I cannot recommend it enough for people in the technology or media sectors.

Many people bandy about the definitions of “disruptive technology” or “the innovator’s dilemma” without ever having read the book and almost universally misunderstand the concepts.

Let me start with Professor Christensen’s definition:

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Get Hunted by Corporate Buyers

Tony Perkins — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:29:42 +0000

Who will be the next big winners in the race for breakthroughs in technology? Those who spot new trends and disrupt old standards—the entrepreneurs, investors, and influencers converging at Venture Summit Silicon Valley on Dec. 13-15.

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CEO Showcase: Automsoft

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:18:44 +0000

Automsoft is one of the world's premier providers of advanced data historian and process optimization solutions that provide international customers with powerful and secure high-speed data retrieval, vast storage capacity, complex analysis, and sophisticated visualization. Founded in 1997, Automsoft has a global customer base of thousands of installations across a range of industry sectors including power and utilities, renewable energy, maritime, manufacturing, life sciences, and oil and gas.

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Pressure in the Middle

Amish_Jani — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:40:11 +0000

One big theme that we continue to see unfold is the pressure on the distribution part of the value chain. The whole value proposition of the Internet is that it allows you to connect with all of the customers you care about instantly, assuming you know where to find them or they know where to find you. That assumption, of course, does not hold for many and leads to many successful intermediaries. But we are seeing a ton of examples of people in the middle getting squeezed across industries:

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U.K. Government Supports Startups

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:38:17 +0000

If you live in the UK you probably saw the announcement from the Prime Minister last week that the government here wants to build a tech cluster in East London that will stretch from Shoreditch to the Olympic Park. You might even have seen some of the subsequent debate and coverage.

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Ping! Apple and Twitter Team Up

Michael Moe — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:25:53 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 2% last week, with the NASDAQ being down 2.4%, and the S&P 500 declining 2.2%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 19.5%, the NASDAQ is up 11%, and the S&P 500 is up 7.5%.

K12 online education leader K12 announced slightly disappointing Q3 results, missing estimates by 21 cents due to higher acquisition expenses. Nevertheless, sales growth was 27%, and the company raised its fiscal 2011 sales outlook to exceed $500 million. Enrollment growth was a strong 41.5% YoY (including its recent acquisition). K12's new initiatives include a business model pilot in San Francisco, a partnership with Blackboard, and the launch of the George Washington University High School. For the week, LRN dropped 13.3%.

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Give Your Teams Swiss Army Knives

Mark Suster — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:43:32 +0000

There is a transition in every company from a “seat of the pants” kind of entrepreneurial company to a “process driven” mechanized one. Many people who are successful in the former fare less well in the latter.

Frankly, I’m much more of the former kind of guy and I tire of the routine process & politics required to succeed in a big company. The reality is that you need to standardize many things in a company if you’re to scale quickly, which is why many founders depart at the time of the transition.

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Competing To Win Deals

Fred Wilson — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:43:36 +0000

The venture capital business is highly competitive. There is more money out there chasing good deals than most people imagine. It is also true that there are good deals and good entrepreneurs that can't find anyone to invest in them. That is a failure of the system. But this post is not about that. It is about how a VC can compete and win a deal that many others want.

Here are my rules:

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What's the Future of Media?

Tony Perkins — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:12:23 +0000

If you're wondering what the future of media is and how you fit into it, OnMedia 2011 is where leaders in media and technology will gather to debate and shape the future of marketing, advertising, branding, and PR. If you want to be part of the media revolution, join us for two-and-a-half days of insightful discussion, inspiring keynotes, and relationship building at what promises to be the year's most pivotal media industry event. OnMedia showcases the top entrepreneurial CEOs who are revolutionizing the way media is being created, distributed, consumed, and analyzed.

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CEO Showcase: Sierra Energy

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 20:50:28 +0000

Where competing solutions max out at 500 tons of waste per day, Sierra Energy's internationally patented FASTOX process can handle more than 30,000 tons of waste per day, converting everything it is fed into energy or other marketable products. This scale translates into economic efficiency, as Sierra can produce energy on a cost-per-kilowatt basis that is competitive with conventional energy production.

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50 Questions You Should Ask Before Raising Venture Capital

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:58:08 +0000

Back in June I was on a venture capital panel at the Develop Games Conference in Brighton. I sit on these panels in large part to explain and demystify venture capital and as is often the case the other panelists and I were happy to devote much of the panel to discussing the basics of VC. One of the challenges on these panels is assessing the average level of knowledge the audience and adjusting what you say accordingly. On the Develop panel I got it a bit wrong, assuming a greater level of knowledge than was actually the case, which prompted me to write a post Explaining venture capital.

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How P2P Car Sharing Could Impact the Zipcar IPO

Dallas Kachan — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:52:17 +0000

Its CEO received an accolade last week. Yet, with 7,000 vehicles and more than 400,000 members, car sharing service Zipcar has struggled to reach profitability.

A slump in average revenue per member over the last year and mounting fleet costs spelled a net loss for Zipcar of $4.67 million in 2009. And according to recent company filings, it's now losing $4M-$5M a quarter with no guarantee of achieving profitability in 2010 or even 2011 … a familiar story from another large recent clean transportation IPO: Tesla.

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Scaling Sales: Arming and Aiming – Objection Handling

Mark Suster — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:51:24 +0000

I previously covered how early phase sales teams should be “evangelical” and consultative in nature. As a tech startup grows it needs to develop more process & management if it is to scale. I call this “arming & aiming” your salesforce. The first post on scaling sales dealt with “aiming” your sales teams – making sure they were focused on the right opportunities. This one deals with “arming” your teams – preparing them for battle by giving them the right tools to increase their win rates.

One of the biggest areas I’ve noticed many sales teams don’t spend time on to train their staff is “objection handling.” When I talk to people about sales I often describe the sales process as a series of hurdles (objections) that are put up to avoid making a purchase and your responsibility is to work through these common objections with your customer.

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CEO Showcase: Achates Power

admin — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:36:30 +0000

Achates Power is developing a radically different, flexible-fuel compression-ignition engine that is fuel-efficient, clean, and cost-effective. Achates Power engines optimize fuel economy through increased thermal efficiency and reduced friction. The innovative design reduces cost and weight by minimizing or eliminating many traditional engine components, such as the cylinder heads. Advanced combustion technology results in a clean and efficient engine. Achates Power engines are a critical ingredient to the clean transportation revolution.

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Top Startup Sectors for 2011

Tony Perkins — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:59:43 +0000

Want to get a glimpse of the new Silicon Valley? Contrary to the recession attitude that continues in other parts of the country, the startup scene here is exploding. We're giving you a chance to meet the influential leaders, who are changing the face of venture capital and shaking up technology to create new revenue opportunities at Venture Summit Silicon Valley.

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Dell Delves Into Data Integration Market With Boomi Acquisition

Jeff Kaplan — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:58:29 +0000

Dell's acquisition of Boomi today is the latest example of the tech industry's herd mentality.

In the same way that Dell followed HP's example when it purchased Perot Systems after HP acquired EDS, Dell is now copying IBM's acquisition of Cast Iron Systems with its own move into the integration business.

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How To Create a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community

Brad Feld — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:17:19 +0000

I’ve lived in Boulder for 15 years after living in Boston for a dozen. While I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — both as an angel and venture capital investor — I’ve never lived there. While the firm I’m a partner in — Foundry Group — invests all over the United States, I regularly hear statements like, “The only place to start a tech company is in Silicon Valley.”

When David Cohen (CEO of TechStars) and I co-founded TechStars in Boulder, Colo., in 2006, we had two goals in mind. The first was to energize the early stage software/Internet entrepreneurial community in Boulder. The second was to get new first-time entrepreneurs involved more deeply in the Boulder entrepreneurial community. Four years later, we feel like we really understand how entrepreneurial communities grow and evolve.

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CEO Showcase: LiveFuels

admin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:50:10 +0000

LiveFuels is developing an integrated approach to growing, harvesting, and processing algal biomass into fuels and other valuable co-products. The company's solution uses the productivity of natural aquatic life to fundamentally resolve challenges of cost, risk, and scalability. Using natural systems to keep costs low. While many algae-to-biofuels companies grow monocultures of algae-sometimes genetically modified strains-within expensive enclosures, LiveFuels grows a robust mix of native algae species in low-cost, open-water systems.

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Scaling Sales: Arming and Aiming – As, Bs, and Cs

Mark Suster — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:18:32 +0000

This is part of my ongoing Sales & Marketing Series. In the first part of this post I talked about how sales in a startup is often evangelical, requires as consultative sale and needs constant adjustments based on customer feedback.

The next few posts are going to talk about scaling your sales operations as you move out of the evangelical phase.

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CEO Showcase: Re3 Group

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:55:22 +0000

Re3 is a revolutionary waste technology company that's working hard to create a cleaner sustainable world. The company's autoclave treatment system transforms household and commercial waste into valuable biomass fibre-a clean, green alternative to fossil fuels. It also recovers valuable recyclables such as metals and plastics. This technology is both eco-friendly and exceeds North American and European carbon-reduction targets and directives.

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The Fallacy Of Bimodal Returns

Fred Wilson — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:01:33 +0000

There are a lot of "falsims" being bandied about in startup land these days. And one that really bothers me is the idea that returns on startup investing are "bimodal". For those who don't talk in geek speak, bimodal means there are one of two possible outcomes. And in this case, those two outcomes are a total bust or a huge Google style win. If you buy into that logic, then you want to be in every deal because if you are going to take a massive number of hits, you need to absolutely be in that Google style win or you are toast.

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Buying and Selling

Michael Moe — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 23:14:51 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 2.5% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 2.9%, and the S&P 500 was up 3.6%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 21.9%, the NASDAQ is up 13.7%, and the S&P 500 is up 9.9%.

OpenTable posted stronger than expected results with EPS growth of 188% and sales growth of 44%. Seated diners were up 52% in the U.S. and up 134% internationally. OpenTable's mobile apps generated $250 million in revenue for restaurants. The stock was up 10.1% for the week.

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AIM: Unsuitable for the Unready

Nic Brisbourne — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 23:02:16 +0000

There isn't as much talk as there used to be about AIM (London's junior stock market), which is a shame. Entrepreneurs and their employees and investors need liquidity and a secondary stock market can and should be a good vehicle for servicing their requirements when they have small to mid-size companies.

Not for companies that are too small though—and therein lies the point of this post, which I started writing after reading an article in the FT whose headline I took as my title—AIM can prove an unsuitable catalyst for the unready. Being a blogger rather than a journalist I changed it though, to be a little stronger, because in my experience for every runaway success on AIM like Abcam there are tens of companies that get stuck. (For those that don't know, Abcam has been a runaway success since it's $15m listing in November 2005 and recently topped $1bn in value.)

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New York City: Home of the Next Media Revolution

Tony Perkins — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 21:28:04 +0000

AlwaysOn is busily adding speakers and panels to its fifth annual OnMedia NYC conference, the summit for executives in advertising, branding, and content publishing. OnMedia is where the Madison Avenue elite meet the global Silicon Valley digerati, where private investors meet promising companies, and where big brands meet innovative geeks. OnMedia showcases the top entrepreneurial CEOs who are revolutionizing the way media is being created, distributed, consumed, and analyzed.

Some of the notable speakers who have joined us in the past include:

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CEO Showcase: Mendel Biotechnology

admin — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 21:16:07 +0000

Mendel Biotechnology operates as a plant biotechnology company. The company focuses on developing genetic and chemical solutions for a range of agricultural markets. It offers biofuel feedstocks, yield enhancement, flowering, drought tolerance, freezing tolerance, disease resistance, nutrient use efficiency, and cold germination products. The company has strategic partnerships with Monsanto Corporation, BP, and Bayer CropScience.

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Announcing the 2010 Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100

Tony Perkins — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:48:17 +0000

It's with great excitement that we introduce the first annual Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic Top 100 private companies. The VSMA100 represents the top emerging companies from the mid-Atlantic region that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, consumer services, and greentech.

The AlwaysOn editorial team compiled the first annual VSMA100 list with assistance from KPMG's VC Practice, SAP, and the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, as well as top VC insiders.

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CEO Showcase: Wavebob

admin — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:43:32 +0000

Wavebob is contributing to climate change mitigation through developing and marketing world-leading technology for the commercial exploitation of ocean wave energy resources. Working with major partners, Wavebob's wave energy converters will be manufactured and marketed worldwide. The company supports the efficient operation of its technology through advanced control strategies and operation and maintenance procedures.

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CEO Showcase: Genomatica

admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:05:05 +0000

Genomatica is the emerging leader in sustainable chemicals: "greener" intermediate and basic chemicals made from renewable feedstocks rather than oil and gas. The company aims to transform the chemical industry through cost-advantaged, smaller-footprint products as direct replacements in a trillion-dollar global market. Genomatica is in pilot production for its first commercial product, a "green" Bio-BDO. BDO, with a $3 billion market worldwide, is used to make spandex, automotive plastics, running shoes, and more.

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What Tech Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Chamillionaire

Mark Suster — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:03:41 +0000

Last night I co-hosted a dinner at Soho House in Los Angeles with some of the most senior people in the media industry with executives from Disney, Fox, Warner, media agencies and many promising tech and media startup CEOs. The topic was "the future of television and the digital living room." With all of the knowledge in the room the person who stole the night wasn't even on a panel. I had called on Chamillionaire from the audience and asked him to provide some views on how artists view social media, why they use it and where it's heading. He was riveting.

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CEO Showcase: SolarPrint

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:04:08 +0000

SolarPrint is a leader in the development of the next generation of light conversion technologies. SolarPrint's technology is changing the way in which solar PV is being used. The ability to harvest light—not only outdoor light, but indoor light—offers customers a really unique proposition. SolarPrint's devices are designed and engineered to provide greater functionally to wireless technologies.

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A Strong Third Quarter

Michael Moe — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:39:27 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 1.9% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 1.1%, and the S&P 500 was flat. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 18.9%, the NASDAQ is up 10.5%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.1%.

Water meter maker Itron reported strong Q3 results with EPS growth of 136% and revenue growth of 41%, marking its fifth consecutive quarter with accelerating revenue growth. EBIT margin improved from 2.2% to 10.6% in the last 12 months. During the last quarter, Itron won three major contracts—one with CenterPoint, one in Indonesia, and one with Cleveland Water. For the week, ITRI was up 0.1%

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Dear Entrepreneur: Think Cash, Not Ideas

Tony Tjan — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 20:02:54 +0000

Last week NBA legend-turned-entrepreneur Magic Johnson sold his Starbucks franchises back to the corporation for a reported $75 million. Rumor has it, he's freeing up some cash to invest in a professional sports team (he also sold his stake in the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team).

About 12 years ago, Magic Johnson formed a joint venture franchise program with Starbucks (Urban Coffee Opportunities) to open coffee shops in developing urban areas such as Harlem. The goal was to reinvigorate under served neighborhoods with jobs.

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John Doerr Puts On A Hoodie

Tony Perkins — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:36:42 +0000

After John Doerr made a big media splash last week by announcing the newly formed sFund, one of his rivals was clearly annoyed by Doerr's glitzy push back into social media investing-especially after hyping the greentech space over last several years. "What's up with a 60-year-old guy putting on a hoodie all of sudden," he quipped.

Hoodie? Allow me to digress. The black American hip-hop culture, now part of the mainstream and a dominant force in the youth economy, is the origin of the hoodie. Technically, a hoodie is a sweatshirt with a hood.

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CEO Showcase: CoolPlanetBiofuels

admin — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:00:59 +0000

Imagine driving high performance cars and large family safe SUV's while actually reversing global warming, and without using foreign oil. That is the vision of CoolPlanetBioFuels. CoolPlanetBioFuels is developing a revolutionary thermal/mechanical processor that directly inputs raw biomass, such as woodchips, crop residue, non-food fuel crops, algae, and so on, and produces multiple distinct gas streams for catalytic upgrading to conventional hydrocarbon fuels (gasoline).

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LivingSocial Makes Group Buying Fun

admin — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:19:27 +0000

LivingSocial is a group buying site that brings people together in a social environment to participate in discount buying programs. The group buying and online coupon space has exploded during the past few years, thanks, no doubt, in large part to the economic downturn. The premise is simple: Users sign up to receive daily deals in their location. If they choose to use a coupon, they purchase the product online and receive a voucher the next business day. The hook is that if the buyer can get three additional people to buy the deal, the original buyer gets the deal for free.

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Super Angels or VC Titans?

Tony Perkins — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:13:02 +0000

As market recoveries continue to move ahead, the changing face of venture capital is shaking up technology and creating new revenue opportunities. What is the future of technology innovation and what will it mean for you? Venture Summit Silicon Valley is where trends are set and markets are redefined. It is the technology think tank for entrepreneurs, thought leaders, market shifters, game changers, and some of the most innovative people you will find assembled in one place. Two-and-half-days of intense discussions, stimulating presentations, and you-saw-it-here-first revelations.

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A Modest Set of Proposals

Ed_Lambert — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:28:48 +0000

In attending this year's GoingGreen Silicon Valley, I was struck by a number of very encouraging signs:

The number of companies that are generating revenue or are about to go live

The contingent of companies from overseas—in this case, a major presence from Ireland—that came to present, all of whom were either generating revenue or were deep in conversations with the VCs present

The number of quality VCs and other investors who came—Venrock, Khosla Ventures, DFJ, VantagePoint, SAP, and Kleiner Perkins being just three that come to mind—and stayed after their panels or presentations to meet companies that attended or actually sponsored the conference

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Agile Ideology in Startups

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:14:34 +0000

I am not a fan of ideologies. Inflexibility of thinking or the ability to take reality into account rarely leads to great outcomes. Just look at history. Methodologies, on the other hand, I like. The difference between the two is in the level of critical thinking. A good methodology isn’t just a set template. It is an evolving, data- and introspection-driven process that’s very much reality-based.

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Founders and Heat Seeking Missiles

Josh Kopelman — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:15:42 +0000

As a seed-stage investor, First Round Capital typically funds powerpoints. Not only are the majority of our investments pre-revenue, but most of the time we are investing in pre-launch companies. While these companies might have an alpha/beta version of their site, it's usually early enough that we can’t base our investment decision off of any market traction. Instead, we typically make our investment decisions based on three key areas: the size of the market, the strength of the team, and the product vision.

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Amazon and Verizon Scatter Clouds

Jeff Kaplan — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:13:27 +0000

Two announcements on the same day this week vividly illustrated the scalability and ubiquity of today’s Cloud Computing phenomenon. They also showed the diversity of users seeking to take advantage of Cloud Computing services.

The first was Amazon’s announcement that it is offering a free usage tier of its Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer services for new users for a full year.

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Local Storage: Investing Opportunities Abound

Nat Goldhaber — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:16:06 +0000

Earlier this year, Silicon Valley startup Bloom Energy Corp. introduced a fuel cell device called the Bloom Box. The company said it can generate electricity at a lower price, with subsidies, than utility-supplied power in many areas, and it can power an entire home. Some call the invention—a small, square-shape device about the size of a brick—a "power plant in a box."

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Great Expectations

Michael Moe — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:23:51 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 1.9% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 0.4%, and the S&P 500 was up 0.6%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 16.7%, the NASDAQ is up 9.3%, and the S&P 500 is up 6.1%.

Apple had yet another very strong quarter with EPS growth of 68% and sales growth of 67%. iPhone sales grew 91%, Mac sales were up 27%, iPads were slightly below estimates due to supply limitations, and iPod sales declined by 11%. AAPL's gross margin was slightly below estimates due to iPad pricing and costs. Nevertheless, we believe iPad sales growth will accelerate during the foreseeable future as this is a disruptive, high-quality product, in our view. For the week, AAPL was down 2.3%.

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Requiem For A Roommate

Steve Blank — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:16:55 +0000

And, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of Heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
-William Shakespeare

Last week I had my “public servant” hat on in my official capacity as a California Coastal Commissioner. Walking out after a 13-hour hearing, one of my fellow commissioners asked, “Why on earth do we do this?” As I got back to the hotel, I found myself wondering the same thing. What ever got me interested in public service and non-profits? As I tried to unwind, I turned on the hotel TV and caught part of an old movie, The Big Chill.

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Play the Bull Market

Tony Perkins — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:50:40 +0000

What are the innovative changes and subtle trends influencing global growth investors? What do investors and technology entrepreneurs need to do to set the pace and lead the pack?

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What You Can Learn From The Father & Son That Sent A Camera To Space

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:28:41 +0000

This father and son team sent a camera into space. Yeah, I'm going to type that again: A 7-year-old and his dad sent something into space.

Materials they used to do it:

weather balloon

small parachute

iPhone

HD camera

tape

batteries

LED light

styrofoam

packing foam

hand-warmers (the secret ingredient)

lollipops (for the kids)

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Google's Vint Cerf to Keynote Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic

Tony Perkins — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:37:18 +0000

Seats are selling out fast, and we aren't surprised. With the influential group of entrepreneurs and investors we have lined up for Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic and the exciting and lucrative technology opportunities that are emerging, it's no wonder. The AlwaysOn team is currently hard at work putting the finishing touches on the 2010 program, and we wanted to reach out to you with our latest updates.

We are pleased to announce that Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and known as one of the fathers of the Internet, is the latest, newly confirmed Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic insider to join us as a keynote speaker.

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CEO Showcase: Yowie

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:22:25 +0000

Yowie is a live video tool that helps users create new entertainment experiences by blending video chats, performances, and pre-recorded content with the unique interaction of the Yowie audience. The company's goal is to provide a way for people to connect with their friends and favorite people in a brand new way. In addition to providing the tools to create Yowie shows, the site makes it easy to start group video chats with friends or celebrities. Currently in beta, the site is currently posting new shows as well as showcasing recent highlights.

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Nexage to Mediate & Optimize Monetization of Top Apps

admin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:15:56 +0000

Nexage offers mobile publishers and developers a premium ad mediation solution that increases fill rates and eCPM while offering brand protection tools, integrated reporting dashboard, consolidated payments, and access to an experienced client services team.

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Spiceworks Puts A Face On IT

admin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:04:26 +0000

Some of the top new features available in Spiceworks 5.0 include the ability to monitor and manage applications, devices and cloud services based on the people who use them within the organization; advanced network configuration management capabilities; and a centralized help desk for Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

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Android Marketplace vs iPhone App Store

Bijan Sabet — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 23:18:37 +0000

Earlier today, Fred wrote about his thoughts on Android. I agree with much of the post and I’m bullish on Android as well. Right now I carry two phones - an iPhone and a HTC Incredible. I mostly carry the HTC when I need reliable coverage (it’s on Verizon) and I also want to keep on top of the Android platform. I like Android a lot - I just don’t like the hardware on any android phones to date.

But I still find that best apps are coming out for iPhone first and Android second. Although, there are some exceptions. I personally like the Twitter Android app better than the iphone version.

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Big Door's MiniBar

Andrew Bellay — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 23:15:11 +0000

Okay so after an insightful article from Mark Suster bashing on gaming mechanics (just a little bit!), I'm going to talk about BigDoor's new MiniBar - a tool that let's you add gaming mechanics to any website.

Why would you want to apply gaming mechanics to your site? Well, let's say you're Brad Feld of the Foundry Group (BigDoor's investor) and you want to incentivize your thousands of blog readers to go to the amazon page for your new book Do More Faster where they might buy a copy. You can use gaming mechanics, like points and badges, to give people a little virtual gift (like experience points) for clicking on your links, reading your blog daily, or for sharing your content.

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Do More Faster

Brad Feld — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:18:30 +0000

Writing a book is hard. Really hard. Much harder than I thought. So I’m extra satisfied that “Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup” is finished.

Ive been helping create software and Internet companies for over 25 years, starting with my first company, Feld Technologies, in 1985 when I was in college. By 1987 I had a partner, a mentor (my father) and a company that was capitalized with $10. (Yes, 10 dollars.) We bootstrapped the business because we had to and by 1993, when we sold the company to a large public company, we’d built a nice, consistently profitable business.

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Skate Where The Puck Is Going

Mark Suster — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:17:18 +0000

Anyone who works in the venture business or frankly just lives in Silicon Valley will be used to hearing a buzz word rise up out of nowhere to capture the technology zeitgeist and find its way into every entrepreneur’s product development plan or every aspiring entrepreneur’s pitch deck.

I call this “the puck at your feet” because it’s not where the industry is heading but rather where the industry is today. By the time you launch your buzz word feature we’ll be on to the next fad and everybody will be offering your buzz product so it won’t be differentiated. As an entrepreneur you need to think about where the puck is going.

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CEO Showcase: MyCypher

admin — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:02:48 +0000

MyCypher is a dynamic mobile social platform that lets artists worldwide create new music in real-time by turning every mobile phone into a microphone. Using VoIP mobile technology and a custom platform, MyCypher.com provides artists with a "virtual cipher" where they can showcase their songs in near real-time from anywhere in the world. MyCypher's Global Open Mic (think "audio Twitter" for music) can be accessed via any online computer, standard cell phone, or smartphone (iPhone and Android).

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The New SNR Denton

Andrew Bellay — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 03:15:36 +0000

Don't miss the intro to this two part interview.

Andrew: Tell me about your group – the Venture Technology Group.

Victor: Within the firm, we’re a special business unit and that gives us massive flexibility to almost be like a small, one-office shop that crosses all geographies. We’re seen by the outside world as a boutique and we think that by being a boutique, with young partners, not a lot of leverage, we’re able to deliver aggressively on pricing and we’re giving the clients what they want.

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Make Luck Work in Your Favor

Tony Tjan — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:48:29 +0000

Do a quick Google search of any prominent entrepreneur, and you will see at least one story about the role of luck in his or her success or failure. Uncertainty is at the heart of entrepreneurship and business building. Without it, there would not be the premium returns for which entrepreneurial ventures aspire and the successful ones realize.

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Employee Equity

Fred Wilson — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:32:55 +0000

One of the topics I get asked about most on MBA Mondays is "options." But options are only one form of employee equity. I am going to do a series of posts on this topic over the next month of MBA Mondays. I will start by laying out the logic for employee equity, going over some target ownership levels, and describing the various securities you can use to issue employee equity.

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Announcing the 2010 GoingGreen Silicon Valley 100

Weston McBride — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:01:41 +0000

Global economic depression. Dropping energy prices. Increased international competition. The past year has challenging for the greentech sector, but smart money, clever business innovations, and government support have pushed the industry along and identified winning strategies.

As the industry grows and matures, narrowing down the top 100 greentech companies becomes an increasing challenge. Industries that were seldom looked at in Silicon Valley are now getting a green facelift, reinvesting in cleaner and more efficient systems.

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Why Entrepreneurs Should Know About The New SNR Denton

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:10:36 +0000

About two weeks ago, on September 30, 2010, two powerhouse law firms officially merged. The US-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP and UK-based Denton Wilde Sapte LLP formed a single international legal practice with 50 offices in 32 countries across four continents. The new firm is called SNR Denton.

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CEO Showcase: Dyyno

admin — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:06:36 +0000

Dyyno lets businesses monetize video content by distributing it via live feeds, video on-demand, and linear TV, across three screens: computers, smart phones, and HDTVs. The Dyyno platform, built on breakthrough technology licensed from Stanford University, offers low-cost, high-quality, virally scalable video distribution. Founded in 2007 and based in Palo Alto, CA, Dyyno is backed by Artiman Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures and has a world-class technical team with video and networking expertise.

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Google Beats Expectations

Michael Moe — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:04:17 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 1.9% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 2.8%, and the S&P 500 was up 0.9%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 14.5%, the NASDAQ is up 8.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 5.5%.

Google reported strong Q3 earnings, beating expectations by $0.96 with EPS growth 29.7% and revenue growth of 25%. Paid clicks on ads were up 16%, compared to a year ago. Google also indicated that its display ads, which include those from YouTube, are on pace to bring in $2.5 billion per year. For the week, GOOG was up 12.1%.

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The Real Green in Green

Tony Perkins — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:23:17 +0000

With only three weeks to go, we're gearing up for an in-depth look at the mid-Atlantic regions rising technology companies. Get an insider's glimpse at the innovators who are creating exciting opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors at Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic, taking place Nov 3rd-5th at George Mason University. VSMA is where the Mid-Atlantic region's most promising emerging technology companies come face to face with an exclusive audience of investors, innovators, and thought leaders in an environment where deals are made and opportunities are created.

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CEO Showcase: Yap.tv

admin — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:14:25 +0000

yap.TV for the iPad is a fan's best friend. yap.TV is a TV fan's ultimate companion to the TV-watching experience. The app lets users get with friends and show fans and communicate, while watching the TV shows they love. Additionally, yap.TV provides a comprehensive, picture-based TV program guide that's personalized by geographical area and by fan favorites. The app also includes a Twitter client, so fans can see what friends are saying about their favorite show and join in the conversation.

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45 Million iPads

Michael Moe — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:20:05 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was down 1.4% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 1.3%, and the S&P 500 was up 1.6%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 12.3%, the NASDAQ is up 5.9%, and the S&P 500 is up 4.5%.

Netflix reached yet another deal with Sony to rent movies 28 days after their release. This deal represents a continuation of the company's expansion efforts. For the week, NFLX was down 3.2%.

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The Carbon Neutral Pipedream: Part II

Andrew Bellay — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 05:08:53 +0000

Start with part I if you didn't just come from there.

CoolPlanet BioFuels’s Carbon-Negative Fuel

How does CoolPlanet make carbon negative fuel? Simple. If the biomass source has 100 units of carbon in it, the process makes 50 units of biofuel (gasoline or diesel in this case) and 50 units of what’s called biochar. The biofuel is combusted in your car or generator and releases those 50 units of carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. The biochar is like charcoal and can be mixed in with topsoil on farmland to improve the soil quality without releasing the 50 units of carbon back into the atmosphere. There’s a good word to describe CoolPlanet’s solution: Elegant.

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The Carbon Neutral Pipedream

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:59:45 +0000

CoolPlanet BioFuels is a Camarillo, California third generation bio fuels company. Mike Cheiky – president, CEO, and CTO – is a successful serial entrepreneur who’s at it again. He decided to start CoolPlanet in December 2008 and the company has been growing quickly since then. So what do they do? They make carbon negative fuel. So the more you drive, the more CO2 they pull out of the atmosphere.

What follows is a two part article about why I’m excited about CoolPlanet BioFuels. The transcript from my interview with Mike Rocke, VP of Business Development for CoolPlanet follows as well.

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CEO Showcase: OPEN Sports

admin — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:07:33 +0000

Founded by Mike Levy, founder and former CEO of SportsLine.com (CBS SportsLine), OPEN Sports has developed innovative fantasy sports products to be unveiled this NFL season on FOXSports.com and OPENSports.com. FOX Sports, a 20% shareholder, will promote the products actively on NFL broadcasts as well as online and through its regional sports channels. This cross platform strategy will reach 100% of our target market, which includes a rabid base of 30,000,000 fantasy players.

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Schwartz at Venture Summit East

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:03:12 +0000

We just got some new video from this year's Venture Summit East. Participants share why they attended VSE, what their thoughts were on the economic outlook, and how VCs are starting to work with start-ups in new ways. Special thanks to Schwartz Communication for this well- produced video. We're looking forward to Venture Summit Silicon VAlley VSSV in december:

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Betting on Cloud and SaaS

Tony Perkins — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:05:08 +0000

Game changers. Forward thinkers. Market leaders. The best and the brightest. You name it, Venture Summit defines it. Dozens of the most innovative tech start-ups and influential venture investors will converge on Silicon Valley, December 13-15, to communicate, innovate, inspire, and negotiate to set the course for the next wave of ground-breaking technology.

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The Carbon Neutral Pipedream: Transcript

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 05:11:13 +0000

I typically let the conversation end right there, because I would never push someone to do a startup that is hesitant. A good entrepreneur has an undeniable drive, a hunger to bust through brick walls and make their startup successful. It’s not possible to try to convince someone with logic to adopt that often-irrational entrepreneurial frame of mind.

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How I Think About Seed Investing

Brad Feld — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:00:03 +0000

Last week saw an explosion of discussion around seed investing, including plenty of negative comments around VCs as seed investors. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. This prompted me to write a post titled AngelList Boulder and Some Thoughts on Seed Investing where I promised to write up some of my thoughts on how and why VCs could be good seed investors.

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Bullish on SaaS

Michael Moe — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:48:32 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 1.2% for the week, while the NASDAQ was down 0.7%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.1%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 4.5%, the NASDAQ is down 1.2%, and the S&P 500 is down 1.2%.

Acme Packet's Q2 results were better than expected, with EPS growth of 157% and sales growth of 62%. The company also raised its guidance for the year, however the stock dropped, as investors were unsatisfied with the "moderate" increase in guidance. We remain bullish on the stock, as it continues to show growth momentum, and we believe there is tremendous potential in the video conferencing and online communication space—where Acme is among the leaders. For the week, APKT dropped 12.7%.

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Announcing the 2010 AlwaysOn Global 250

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:00:00 +0000

It's with great excitement that we introduce the eighth annual AlwaysOn Global 250 top private companies. The AlwaysOn Global 250 represent the top emerging companies in the Global Silicon Valley that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and greentech.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at Manatt, Morgan Stanley, the Blackstone Group, KPMG, Silicon Valley Bank, Sonnenschein, and Bridge Bank, as well as industry experts across the globe, scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 250 private companies that are taking old notions of doing things and forging solutions that will lead to industry shake-up and huge value-creation opportunities.

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The Future of Books

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:39:43 +0000

Even though books have been around for well over 500 years, we're still dealing with a working definition for the word book. Tina Seeling (Executive Director of STVP, author, and Stanford professor) threw out the following definition: "A committment to a deep-dive on a topic using the written word." The panel took a deep dive (with the spoken word) on what a book is and what the future of the written word is, but only after Tina showed off some of her favorite students and their exploration of the future of the book publishing industry. Apple's iPad, the Nook, Amazon's Kindle, and the entire concept of ebooks have forever changed an industry that fell asleep at the wheel.

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The State of IPO, M&A, and Secondary Markets

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:57:46 +0000

"IPOs are extremely important, they're just not relevant," says panelist Sam Schwerin. Are IPOs dead forever? Currently, with an average of 10.4 years from founding to IPO (for the few companies that make it), IPOs don't work for anyone - Angels, VCs, LPs, or Entrepreneurs. Secondary sales (done by panelist Barry Silbert and his company SecondMarket) are giving stakeholders stuck in no man's land a way out. This talk really gets into the nitty gritty of how things might shape up for the future of exit markets - both new and old.

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Keynote: The Future of the Mobile Cloud

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:20:58 +0000

Communication is about the experiences we create, the devices we use, and the services are enabled. As the shift occurs from a few big players in the 70s to literally hundreds of choices, we are discovering that it’s really all about how you match service to devices to create the communication experience. Hard on the heels of HP’s acquisition of Palm, Phil talks about how the three fundamental building blocks of communication can all come together in the mobile cloud.

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Established Players Competing In Cloud 2.0?

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:20:13 +0000

Key players have proven there's value in the cloud. But Cloud 2.0 is more about moving the fringe benefits of the cloud to the core of enterprise (and even consumer) applications. The discussions that potential cloud users are having is shifting from technical feasibility to business and economic discussions.

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The 2010 Top 25 Women in Tech to Watch

Tony Perkins — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:19:46 +0000

AlwaysOn is proud to announce its inaugural Top 25 Women in Tech to Watch list, presented by Accenture. These pioneers have been involved in creating innovative technology companies and securing venture capital deals, creating jobs and strengthening the Global Silicon Valley marketplace.

As the tech and VC industries recover from the recent credit crunch, these women are continuing to score big wins in terms of revenue, reach, innovation, and return on their stakeholders' investments. The AlwaysOn Top 25 Women in Tech to Watch is a collection of the most prominent and influential women in the global technology industries.

This is the inaugural year for the list, which was hand-selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team. The team looked at data from across the entrepreneur universe, examining contributions from hundreds of talented women who are changing the technology landscape. The AO team used five criteria for choosing this year's list: overall innovation, the ability to identify new market opportunities, commercialization of new products and services, creation of stakeholder value, and media buzz and awareness in the tech community.

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Hot Private SaaS Cloud Companies Shifting to Cloud 2.0

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:09:53 +0000

What's going on with the infamous cloud? Is it actually catching on or it held up for security reasons? We start this great panel off with a debate about how secure the cloud is and get to the other key issues that have slowed the projected adoption of the cloud. Are the barriers psychological or technical? Is Amazon's AWS dead?

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How To Source Deals from Silicon Valley's Gay Mafia

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:45:31 +0000

I have a confession.

I'm in Silicon Valley's gay mafia.

No, I'm not gay. I just love sourcing deals where other VCs can't go, won't go, and don't even know about.

The gay mafia here has its fingers in EVERYTHING. Yes, some of them are mad that I'm the only straight guy, but I add value into the societies that I infiltrate.

For the record, I love gay entrepreneurs.

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Mobile Content Creation, Distribution and Consumption

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:44:42 +0000

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Mobile Monetization - Billions for the Taking

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:02:59 +0000

After watching the carriers rake in the cash, venture-backed companies are finally navigating this complex world, bringing value to consumers and positive returns on investments. These four panelists represent a wide range of perspectives in the mobile world, from monetizing apps through advertising to keeping the carriers in the game to smoothing the network path amongst myriad competitors to social networking on the small screen.

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Qualcomm's Matt Grob On Augmented Reality

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:51:47 +0000

Two great videos here. One is a taste of Qualcomm's new game (with Mattel), a 3D augmented reality "rockem sockem robots" that we saw live during Matt Grob's talk, the second link below in red. Qualcomm is leading the way to bring pretty sophisticated augmented reality to your cell phone. They've developed a way to scan, compare, position, and render images 30 times a second to produce the "rockem sockem robots" game in the video below. Enjoy! Matt Grob is the Senior VP of Engineering and the Head of Corporate Research and Development at Qualcomm.

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Here Come the Super Angels!

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:20:22 +0000

Everyone has an opinion about them. Many love them. Some hate them. Regardless of your opinion, Super Angels have really become a force recently. Most focus on consumer internet because the start-up costs are low (compared to green energy, semiconductors, and healthcare), but when you want to scale a company, when you need millions of users, then you need big capital...Except when sometimes you don't.

So how do the early stage VCs feel? Well there's one key thing to keep in mind: Big funds need big exits. Small funds don't. Enjoy the video, and online discussion!

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Co-Innovation In The Cloud

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:42:45 +0000

We kicked off day 2 of the STVP/AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford with a keynote from Doug Merritt, EVP at SAP. The message from Doug about cloud computing was clear: Change will be constant, the OnDemand model will continue to perform, this is just the beginning, and SAP will be there for the longhaul. This talk starts off with Tony Perkins' intro for the day and rolls right into Doug's talk.

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Obama Slide

Tony Perkins — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:42:53 +0000

The Anatomy of a Successful Startup in 2010

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:04:55 +0000

The Anatomy of a Successful Startup in 2010. This awesome panel, moderated by Guy Kawasaki, was all about the AlwaysOn Global 250 for 2010. We kicked things off by talking about how 2008-09 treated these start-ups. Generally, these CEOs saw only the upside and opportunities of the past 18 months. The panel moved on to discuss some of the details of how they got to be the best start-ups in their respective industries.

The Anatomy of a Successful Startup in 2010

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HP Unveils Fashionable Clutch Mini Netbook

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:01:05 +0000

Tuesday's Stanford Technology Ventures Program & AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford 2010: Satjiv Chahil and Vivienne Tam unveil HP's newest sexy netbook. Satjiv, Global Marketing Whiz at HP, was Tony Perkins' first surprise. Vivienne Tam was Satjiv's surprise guest. If you want mobility, power, and fashion you'll find it here.

HP and Vivienne came together to make this hot mini netbook. Check out the video, slide deck, and live group discussion here.

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How to Outmanuever Another VC

RemmingtonOxleyV — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:27:26 +0000

Wow. I guess I didn't need to buy Digg to get onto the home page. Yes my first post got Dugg, was fBook liked, and was StumbledUpon. Anyway.

This new post is meant only for VCs ONLY. I'm a newish partner but I get the same deal flow as legendary VCs. I won't name drop, but I have some pretty big names with some pretty big exits under my watch. I got them because of two patented techniques...

Here is my second Digg home page submission, "How to Outmanuever Another VC."

(1) I talk to and woo retards.

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Positive Results, Strong Growth

Michael Moe — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:03:46 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 5.3% for the week, while the NASDAQ was up 4.1%, and the S&P 500 was up 3.1%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 5.7%, the NASDAQ is flat and the S&P 500 is down 1.1%.

All our companies reporting last week posted positive results supported by strong growth. New Oriental Education beat expectations by 2 cents, posting 114% EPS growth and 45.8% sales growth. Apple beat expectations by 40 cents, posting 160% EPS growth and 61.3% sales growth. VmWare beat expectations by 2 cents, with Q2 EPS up 70% and sales up 48%. Management guides up for Q3. Baidu.com beat expectations by 4 cents, with EPS down 78%, while sales were up 74.4%. Management raised its Q3 guidance. F5 Networks posted 5 cents better-than-expected EPS results, up 65% YoY, and sales up 45.7%. FFIV raised its Q3 outlook.

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451 Group Analysis: AO250 M&A Bounces Back

The 451 Group — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:43:25 +0000

After weathering one of the most dismal years in recent history, tech M&A came roaring back this year for the AlwaysOn Global 250. This year, acquirers spent $5.7 billion to acquire 37 AO250 companies, more than six times the spending and three times the number of deals as in the prior—year period—and the highest number of deals we've seen since AlwaysOn began naming companies to its top 100 and top 250 lists. Last year, amid the turmoil of the credit crisis and its aftermath, acquirers spent just under $900 million to buy only 13 AO companies.

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Internet Sector Matured

Nic Brisbourne — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:46:42 +0000

A couple of weeks back I blogged that the increasing importance to startups of partnerships with companies like Facebook are making the internet more and more like traditional areas of tech like software and semiconductors and is a sign of the maturing of the internet sector. This morning I have been struck by a similar thought this morning reading two articles in the FT.

The first was a report on Domino’s Pizza UK’s first half results – Domino’s is a traditional offline business that was in existence long before the web rose to prominence and they now take fully 33% of their orders over the internet. Moreover they cite an increase in internet orders as one of two reasons their first half results came in ahead of expectations (the other reason was a boost from the World Cup).

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Terms, Term Sheets, and Terminal Value

Fred Wilson — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:44:07 +0000

Mark Suster has a great post on calculating valuation and the things that VCs can throw at you to make the deal better for them (I guess I should say us) than it actually looks. Go read it. It's complicated stuff but you should try to wrap your head around it. I've written a bunch about this as has Brad Feld and other VC bloggers have too. The VC world is changing. We are talking about this stuff, explaining it, and discussing it. That's progress.

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How To Raise Venture Money

Andrew Bellay — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:50:05 +0000

NOT ready yet...

For those interested, the presentation that I delivered to the members of the VANJ is embedded below.

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Private Equity, The Craps Tables, & The '86 Mets

Chris Douvos — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:45:57 +0000

So I've been working on a blog post called the Epistemology of Investing for about the past year. Now, epistemology is a ten-dollar word that those -- like me -- with five dollar brains rarely sling around, but sometimes I think investing could be called applied epistemology.

As investors -- specifically, investors in opaque, illiquid markets -- we spend our days asking the epistemological questions: what do we know about our investments, companies, markets, people? How do we come to know what we know? What are the sources and limits of our knowledge? How are our beliefs different from The Truth? Said another way: what investing hypotheses do we form? How do we form them? And how do we seek out, analyze, and integrate the data we use to test those hypotheses?

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CEO Showcase: uTest

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:44:45 +0000

uTest is the world's largest marketplace for software testing services. The company provides real-world testing services through its community of more than 25,000 professional testers from 163 countries around the world. More than 1,000 companies-from startups to global software enterprises-have joined the uTest marketplace to get their Web, desktop, and mobile applications tested. uTest lets customers launch higher-quality products, get their applications to market faster, and control the cost of testing.

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Gaming: Why It's The Future, Pt 1

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:36:27 +0000

Tim brings a combination of operational, technical and international business experience to Norwest Venture Partners. He focuses on investments in mobile, gaming, digital media, and also leads NVP's investment practice in China and Asia-Pacific. Tim led NVP's investments in ngmoco, Lumos Labs, Brite Semiconductor and 3jam, Playdom, and PCH International. He's also a board observer for Borqs, deCarta, Double Fusion and Veveo.

Prior to joining NVP in 2006, Tim was a principal at Gabriel Venture Partners where he was actively involved in over a dozen wireless-related deals and led Gabriel's investments in Iridigm Display Corporation (acquired by Qualcomm), Sequoia Communications, Sandbridge, and Kajeet. He also contributed to the boards of Placeware (acquired by Microsoft) and Arula Systems (acquired by Raritan), TestQuest, NextG Networks, and IPWireless. Tim built Gabriel's wireless sector practice and helped establish business development capabilities through strong, strategic relationships across the wireless value chain, particularly in Asia-Pacific.

Few know the gaming sector better than Tim and that's why we grabbed an interview with him before this year's Summit at Stanford.

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Venture Capitalists Expect Industry To Shrink

Nic Brisbourne — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:10:17 +0000

You might have seen this graphic on Techcrunch last week [by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association]. It shows that VCs in the developed world expect their industry to shrink over the next five years.

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Where Are The Carriers?

Chip Davis — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:10:14 +0000

Step #1 - Become a Large Consumer of Oil

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Business Of Tech: Breaking In Early

Beth Ferreira — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:10:11 +0000

As a reformed corporate type, I often get asked by people with business backgrounds how to “break into” an early stage tech company. There is definitely no set path and it is highly dependent on the players already in the company. Occasionally, these jobs might be listed on LinkedIn, startup.ly or indeed. Keep in mind, however, that the earlier stage you want to go the more likely you will get your job through a networked search.

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VC Practices To Admire

Rob Go — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:06:05 +0000

It’s a little in vogue these days for seed stage investors to bash on larger VC’s. It’s kind of fun, and in many cases, the criticisms have merit. But most folks agree that having home run potential almost always means raising VC money to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Large VC’s fill this capital need, and also can add a lot of value through the lifecycle of the company. Also, some of these partners and firms have been in the investing game for a long time and have had success in different economic cycles, so there is a lot to learn from them.

Here are a couple practices I admire. Full disclosure, I’ve worked at one VC firm (Spark Capital) and haven’t seen the inner workers of any of the others, so these thoughts come from my own external observations.

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The Hummus Manifesto - Part 2

Michael Eisenberg — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:03:06 +0000

Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments and retweets on Part 1 of the Hummus Manifesto. I received notes from representatives of our government as well as a note from someone who said they showed it to the Governor of Oregon! Most importantly, entrepreneurs read it and they are the ones who make a difference and together we can all make a difference.

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CEO Showcase: PowerHouse Dynamics

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:46:08 +0000

PowerHouse Dynamics provides a total home energy management solution designed to manage all uses-and sources-of energy, integrating energy efficiency and renewable energy. The eMonitor uniquely monitors at the circuit level, delivering the level of granularity required for effective energy management, and combines that with thermostat and device control and ongoing analysis and proactive alerts.

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Narrative: Presentation Connective Tissue

Mark Peter Davis — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:10:49 +0000

The slide deck that you show to VCs in your meetings should do more than address the requisite topics. Your presentation should tell a story that helps investors understand why this is an attractive opportunity.

There are a few reasons why creating a narrative through your slides is important.

First, people (investors included) like stories – they’re more engaging than a string of seemingly unrelated facts. When done well, stories incorporate elements of suspense, insight and even a climax. These rhetorical tools can be incorporated into the presentation to make the materials more exciting and engaging. This is very important as conjuring an emotional response (even if a subtle one) in your audience can help them become more engaged with your venture.

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Thoughts On The Seed Fund Phenomenon

Fred Wilson — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:09:09 +0000

There have been quite a few posts written about this meme in the past few weeks. I think that Paul Kedrosky got the discussion started with this post. Chris Dixon wrote an interesting response. And yesterday John Boyd wrote a thoughtful post on the topic. John makes a point in his post that I want to second and add to. He says:

While many businesses require a lot less capital to start, they don't require less capital to grow.

John's comment made me think about a blog post I wrote three and a half years ago called "Web 2.0 Is A Gift, Not A Threat, To VCs." If you haven't read that post, I would urge you to go read it. I blog because it helps me think through a lot of issues we face in our business and that post was really useful to us over the past several years of investing.

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VC Rules Worth Breaking

Rob Go — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:07:07 +0000

Quick post today that came to me on the subway. During my time in Venture Capital, I was surprised to see how many “rules” there are that have become gospel in the industry. At the same time, I was surprised how little convincing evidence there was behind these rules aside from common industry wisdom.

But markets and businesses all change, and venture capital is no different. Rules change, and players that fail to adapt become obsolete. I remember when guys like Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital starting breaking some typical VC rules, I heard folks at other firms voice a bunch of criticisms that seem pretty silly in retrospect.

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The Hummus Manifesto - Part 1

Michael Eisenberg — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:05:00 +0000

This is the first in a multi-part series on the challenges facing the Israeli High Tech Industry and How We Can emerge stronger from both the global economic downtourn and the challenges facing our tech economy.

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CEO Showcase: Goozzy

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:42:46 +0000

Goozzy is an Internet Web application based in Russia. The company's product is in invite-only beta, but you can hear CEO talk about his vision of the meta-Internet, which he believes is the next big thing in the virtual Silicon Valley.

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The Fund Holds Steady

Michael Moe — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:38:12 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 1% for the week, while the NASDAQ was down 0.8%, and the S&P 500 was down 1.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 0.4%, the NASDAQ is down 4%, and the S&P 500 is down 4.5%.

Google missed its EPS estimates for Q2 by 7 cents, reporting 20% EPS growth and 24% sales growth. The weakening euro hurt earnings as a third of Google's sales come from Europe. Additionally, expense growth is accelerating with 2,000 new employees in the second half of the year, while sales growth is decelerating. The average price-per-ad click grew only 4%. Competition from Facebook is also pulling Web traffic and advertising dollars away from GOOG. For the week, GOOG dropped 1.7%.

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Majority Of Both Drivers & VCs Are Above Average

David Beisel — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:21:22 +0000

Whenever I am navigating through the notorious Boston traffic, I am often reminded of the cognitive bias of illusory superiority. That is, the “above average effect,” which “causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others.” The Wikipedia article on the subject cites the classic study where a full 93% of U.S. drivers put themselves in the top half of the driving population.

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Four Lessons on Culture and Customer Service

Tony Tjan — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:46:22 +0000

When I caught up with CEO Tony Hsieh in California a few months ago, we spoke about how his company's culture came to be, and about selling the company to Amazon for $850 million last summer (a deal now worth more than $1 billion with the appreciation of Amazon's stock). Here were the four lessons I took away from one of the great serial entrepreneurs of our time:

1. Company culture stems from intrinsic factors and needs to be established early rather than reverse-engineered.

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CEO Showcase: salesELEMENT

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 06:41:41 +0000

salesELEMENT was founded in 2003 with a single-minded focus: to improve the painful proposal process. Today, the company's clients include large multi-national and publicly traded companies as well as small- to medium-sized businesses. salesELEMENT's SaaS product, seProposals, saves sales staff countless hours and lets anyone create great looking proposals in 65% less time than traditional methods-winning more sales and saving companies thousands.

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Google: Growth, Pricing Power & Valuation Multiples

Bill Gurley — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:01:23 +0000

Last night, Google reported financial results for the second quarter of 2010. While revenue growth was up 24% year over year, revenue was fairly flat compared with Q1 of 2010. Moreover, earnings fell short of average street estimates sending Google down $20 per share (4%) in the aftermarket. Based on current estimates (which might change tomorrow), Google currently trades at 18 times the street average for 2010 earnings, and 15.5 times the same number for 2011. These represent price/revenue multiples of 7.5 and 6.5 for 2010 and 2011 respectively. For a long-term tech investor, these valuation multiples seem surprisingly low for a proven market leader. What gives?

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Venture Capital Math Is Changing

Nic Brisbourne — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:59:36 +0000

If you have been reading this blog over the past couple of weeks you might have picked up that I’m a big admirer of Steve Blank and his thinking about how to build startups. Yesterday he wrote a blog post entitled Welcome to the Lost Decade (for Entrepreneurs, IPO’s and VC’s) which sets out the changes to the environment in which we are all working and explains how tough life is going to be for the startup ecosystem as a result. As I said I’m a big fan of Blank, but I think he over states his case this time. In the rest of this post I will pick out the salient points from Blank’s piece and then finish by saying why I think the situation isn’t as bad as he makes out.

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The Lack Of Women In Tech

Brad Feld — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:36:13 +0000

The meme of the lack of women in tech (or software, or entrepreneurship) appeared in several places today. Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology for a number of years and deeply involved in this issue. It’s very satisfying for me to see a meme like this pick up speed and appear in a bunch of thoughtful articles and discussions. If you are interested in this issue, I have three articles from the last 24 hours that I encourage you to read.

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Has Apple Jumped The Shark?

Jeff Bussgang — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:36:10 +0000

There's a famous moment in 1970s television sitcom lore when the super-popular "Happy Days" lost its mojo. That moment is when the main character and hero, Arthur Fonzarelli ("The Fonze"), performs the improbable water-ski trick of jumping over a shark. Now, I'm an avid water-skiier, and I've been known to jump a Loon or two, but jumping over a shark is so absurd its laughable. The video clip, which I embed below, underscores how ridiculous the feat is with Fonzie still in his (dry) leather jacket.

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Watching Foursquare Cross The Chasm

Emily Hickey — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:36:06 +0000

Foursquare has clearly picked up a lot of traction in the past year, but there’s been some mounting evidence recently that they are really about to hit a big tipping point. Aside from all the high profile deals and user growth of late, here are some recent touch points just in my day-to-day life:

I noticed Luke’s Lobster has a Foursquare mayor offer on the counter

The new Tweetdeck features 4SQ on the welcome screen

I casually mentioned 4SQ in passing to a ‘non-tech’ friend and they’d just downloaded it the day before

These little touch points are important harbingers. When they get populous enough, they tend to be in the process of merging together into a mainstream brand that will display incredible inherent velocity.

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CEO Showcase: AuthorsGlobe

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:42:43 +0000

AuthorsGlobe, an award-winning MIT venture, connects thought-leading authors with a global community by hosting live virtual master classes in partnership with professional organizations (trade, industry, and alumni), subscription-based magazines, and Web communities and bloggers. AuthorsGlobe is playing in the high-growth online education market at the forefront of publishing, online education, e-commerce, and digital media with a very unique metric-driven and customer centric model.

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Medical Entrepreneurship: A New Movement to Accelerate Cures

Tony Tjan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:18:13 +0000

There is a new social entrepreneurial movement afoot, which seeks to find cures to some of the world's most challenging diseases. Medical entrepreneurship is, in my view, the very best hope we have for accelerating the pace of finding medical cures. A good example and arguably the pioneer of this movement is Michael Milken's Prostate Cancer Foundation. Milken has taken on a decidedly entrepreneurial approach to providing capital and human resources to accelerate the pace of research into cures for cancer, particularly that of the prostate.

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Virtual Goods & The “Rental” Model

Bill Gurley — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:18:19 +0000

American journalists and corporate executives have been slow to appreciate the beauty, brilliance, and consumer allure of the virtual goods business model. It’s not that they did not have data points – China is chock full of multi-US$billion market capitalization companies that are based on this business model. That said, many luddites predicted it was an “Eastern” fascination that would never spread to the West. They never fully understood it.

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Fat Startups, BMI & The Lorax

Chris Douvos — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:13:12 +0000

So, there I was hanging out in Denver airport again, reading the back-and-forth between Ben Horowitz and Fred Wilson on fat versus thin startups. They’re both cats that I respect and I think they both make carefully reasoned, nuanced arguments t

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The Problem With Talking to VCs

David Beisel — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:36:04 +0000

I had coffee with an entrepreneur friend the other day who is in the early stages of putting a company together, and he recounted how his informal conversations with a venture capitalist had quickly escalated into a full partner pitch in just a few weeks. That situation sounds very positive in theory, but the problem is that this founder wasn’t ready for this interest and is trying to play catch up in other capital raising discussions (with both angels and VCs).

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VC Industry Shrinks As Emerging Markets Grow

Tony Perkins — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:46:58 +0000

Venture capitalists in the United States widely expect their industry to contract while those in emerging markets, including China, India and Brazil, expect to see their ecosystem expand over the next five years, according to the 2010 Global Venture Capital Survey by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association. According to the survey results, more than 90 percent of U.S. survey respondents expect the number of venture firms to decrease between now and 2015, while a majority of venture capitalists in China, India and Brazil anticipate adding more venture firms in their country during the same time frame. Venture capitalists in Europe and Canada also expect an industry contraction in their respective countries though to a lesser extent than in the U.S.

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CEO Showcase: NearVerse

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:41:38 +0000

NearVerse is a venture-backed, wireless IP networking company, improving the quality of mobile Internet experiences by unifying short-range wireless and carrier networks into an optimized system. NearVerse's technology platform accelerates mobile Internet speeds, demonstrating data transfer and content delivery rates that are five to ten times faster than those of 3G networks.

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Microcap Bubble? One Data Point.

Sarah Tavel — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:51:35 +0000

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha lately around “super seed” funds and speculation of whether we are experiencing a seed bubble. At least to me, it certainly has felt like there has been a ton of early stage activity, although whether this qualifies as a seed bubble or not, I think it’s too early to tell. But what is apparent is that there is a ton of new microcap firms that have emerged or closed a new fund in the past 6-12 months alone, and it feels like the pace of new microcap firms being funded is only accelerating.

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How The SEC Is Violating My First Amendment Rights

Brad Feld — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:48:53 +0000

Over the past 24 months, a deplorable activity in the money management business came to light. It got the name “pay to play” but was just another form of bribery. The common description of pay to play is “the practice of making campaign contributions and related payments to elected officials in order to influence the awarding of lucrative contracts for the management of public pension plan assets and similar government investment accounts.” Yup – sounds like bribery to me.

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Products Are Tactics

Kent Goldman — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:46:23 +0000

I care less about product everyday. I care more about people and markets everyday.

With seed stage companies, most everything is mutable. The founders are forever The Founders but the team will grow. The product will morph. And the name will probably change too. That this all happens is a good thing. It should be encouraged amongst both founders and company advisors. The best seed stage companies are creatures of learning. I’ve written about this before in a post on pivoting.

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CEO Showcase: CardStar

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:40:31 +0000

CardStar's goal is to mobilize customer loyalty by connecting consumers and merchants through mobile rewards and memberships. CardStar is the ideal platform for mobile loyalty programs-the convenience for consumers increases membership use and rewards cards, and merchants strengthen customer loyalty with benefits like targeted offers and information. CardStar's SyncScan technology produces 1D barcodes that unlock the mobile coupon world by providing consumers with the right offer, at the right time, on the right device.

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What Is Yahoo! Up To?!

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:17:08 +0000

I remain baffled by Yahoo!! Behind closed doors, I'm hoping that they've been working on their own secret Manhatten Project that they're going to blow us all away with one day. My gut says that's not going to happen. Kara Swisher from All Things Digital did some flip camera interviews at Yahoo! recently to get the inside scoop. Seems to me that Yahoo! is doing more of the same: trying to hang on to small verticals in the content space while surrendering more ground in novel spaces like social media and mobile. Check out these two videos to see what's "new" at Yahoo. As always, comment below if you agree or if you know what Yahoo's got up their sleeve.

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Gurley On Google's ITA Acquisition

Bill Gurley — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:11:40 +0000

On July 1^st, Google announced its intention to acquire ITA Software. ITA owns a primarily B2B airfare search and pricing system called QPX. Several of the leading online travel sites, like Orbitz, Kayak, and Bing Travel, use information from QPX to power their airfare search.

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Do Micro VCs Invest In The Same Companies As VCs?

Rob Go — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:08:03 +0000

This is a build off my last post which was a primer on the Micro VC market. Often, I hear investors talk about companies that are “venture scale”. These are usually the kinds of companies that have the potential to drive meaningful returns for a top VC fund. Because of the high risk of early stage companies, the performance of large funds are driven by discontinuous returns (ie: the home runs).

As a result, I think that most early stage VC’s tend to look at a similar profile of investment - big market, proven teams, potential for an outcome in the hundreds of millions or more, but realistically low probability that that outcome will be achieved.

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VC Fundraising Activity Remains Slow

Tony Perkins — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:51:24 +0000

Thirty eight US venture capital funds raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter of 2010, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).   This level marks a 49% decline, by dollar commitments, compared to the first quarter of 2010, which saw 38 funds raise $3.7 billion during the period. This quarter represents the lowest by dollar commitments since the third quarter of 2003.

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Viacom vs. YouTube: What Was Won and Lost

Steve Rosenbaum — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:05:48 +0000

When Viacom filed suit against YouTube back in 2007 the web was a very different place. Video, which is likely to be 90% of web traffic by 2014, was a tiny blip on the radar screen. And YouTube, while backed by the highly regarded Sequoia Capital and growing quickly, was still very much a fragile entity that could have been crushed by a significant defeat.

You have to wonder if Viacom, in hindsight, now realizes that their billion dollar lawsuit drove the video startup into the arms of Google where it now has grown to become a powerful force in web video and likely challenger to the cable dynasty that is Viacom.

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CEO Showcase: FitnessKeeper

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:39:05 +0000

FitnessKeeper, the company behind RunKeeper, provides a mobile fitness platform that leverages the location technology in smartphones to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts better track, measure, and improve their fitness. FitnessKeeper's flagship iPhone application has been downloaded millions of times and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the top 10 iPhone applications of 2009. The company recently launched on Android and has several additional smartphone and non-smartphone devices planned.

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Start-Up Metrics 4 Pirates

Andrew Bellay — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:00:10 +0000

If you're the type that's easily offended, you shold probably go watch Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley. At least close the door and have ESPN.com open in another window that you can quickly switch to it if someone walks in on you. I'm just kidding, it's not that bad. But I can easily say that this is the only deck I've ever quietly read to myself where I felt like someone was yelling the words at me.

But that's the point. Young entrepreneurs need to hear the Dave's message: "You suck, your product sucks, and you will fail hard." But there's hope. This ugly deck walks through how to make decisions based on measured user behavior (facts), why killing features should be your favorite past-time, and how Dave views different investment phases. Check it out below or here...

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The Market Advances

Michael Moe — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:05:35 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 6.2% for the week, while the NASDAQ was up 5%, and the S&P 500 was up 5.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 1.4%, the NASDAQ is down 3.2%, and the S&P 500 is down 3.3%.

Google announced that the Chinese government renewed its license to operate in the world's most populous country, but did not disclose which services it will offer. A few months ago, Google started redirecting users in China to an uncensored Hong Kong search site. For the week, GOOG advanced 7.1%.

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CEO Showcase: OPEN Sports

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:37:38 +0000

OPEN Sports was founded in 2007 by veterans of leading sports, Internet, and new media companies. It aims to deliver a social-powered sports experience unmatched in the industry, with a combination of user-empowered content, betting-enabled fantasy sports games and contests, and the sports industry's first game platform with open APIs. OPEN Sports has developed innovative fantasy sports products to be unveiled this NFL season on FOXSports.com and OPENSports.com.

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I'd Rather Be Lucky Than Smart Any Day

Greg Gretsch — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:24:31 +0000

As I mentioned in my response to his comment, I am a huge fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books - The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. In Fooled by Randomness, NNT expounds at great length on how often times people confuse the fact that they have been lucky with a belief that they are really just smarter than everyone else. As he says, randomness plays a much bigger role in how successful you can be at some professions than others. For example, the degree of success of a nurse or a doctor has much less to do with randomness than say that of a venture capitalist (his example). It's difficult to argue with luck playing a part in the magnitude of any win. Anyone who was a part of the startup scene during the bubble knows well that there were many >$1B exits that in any other market may not have been able to make any money at all.

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One View Of The Future Of VC Allocations

Chris Douvos — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:13:00 +0000

So I'm working on a blog post with some fundraising tips for PE and VC pros that are making the rounds. The thesis is: you've got to come to meetings armed with better rhetoric, as many institutions have become wildly cynical about private equity strategies after feeling the acute sting of illiquidity during the downturn. Said another way, people realized that the cost of illiquidity was much higher than they had estimated and many asset allocators are now (re)asking the questions: "are we getting adequately compensated for the risk and illiquidity of privates?" and, m

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Augmented Reality Minus The Camera

Nic Brisbourne — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:29:04 +0000

I blogged about Dutch virtual reality business Layar last week and I spent 20 minutes last night playing with the app whilst I was waiting for a friend to come meet me for a drink in north London. As I mentioned in last weeks post they have an active developer community and what these developers do is write Layars which run within the Layar augmented reality browser. All Layars share the same underlying structure – when the Layar is opened the iPhone/Android phone opens up the camera and the screen shows the camera view augmented with content relevant to that Layar which is tied to a specific location and within a distance set by the user.

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Be Different Or Go Home

Rob Go — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:23:24 +0000

I’ve both given and received the feedback that a product or pitch isn’t “different enough”. It’s challenging feedback to receive because it’s completely open ended. You doesn’t necessarily know what it would mean to be different, but you know it when you see it.

It can be very very subtle elements that make a product different. When someone first hears about Tumblr or Posterous, the response is probably something like “how is that really any different from Wordpress or Blogger?” But the minute you use the product, something clicks and you realize that you are dealing with something different.

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Case Study: Universities & Entrepreneurs

Gideon Gartner — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:12:40 +0000

Last year, MIT Sloan School of Management published a study performed by Professor and head of MIT’s Entrepreneurship program Ed Roberts, and Professor Charles Eesley of MIT’s entrepreneurial impact, which may be typical of several of the country’s major universities.

The study was limited to entrepreneurs who founded companies, not including entrepreneurially motivated professionals who answer to their corporate responsibilities rather than to start their own business! But the points presented in the study implicitly suggest (if not helping to define) the rapid growth in entrepreneurship. While this study provides little data about E trends in the office, we certainly recognize the many corporations which have been including E factors in their organization charts, their promotion criteria, their reliance on outside entrepreneurs for assistance, and so forth.

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CEO Showcase: PeerIndex

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:07:57 +0000

PeerIndex helps people maximize the professional and social capital they have built online and helps companies identify and reach these opinion formers. The PeerIndex platform provides topic-based authority rankings based on people's activities online. Launching its database in the summer of 2010, PeerIndex identifies and ranks experts in business and finance based on their digital footprints.

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Tim Draper And How He Scaled VC

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:35:25 +0000

If you missed part I of our interview with Tim Draper, check it out before reading part 2.

AlwaysOn: What investments are you most excited about at DFJ right now?

Tim: I’m very excited about Tesla. I’m very excited about Glam. I always have an affinity for anything that has any sort of viral marketing element in it. Glam figured out a really interesting business model where it could sell ads for bloggers and split the revenue with them. Bloggers attached themselves to Glam, and it became a bigger and bigger business. That model has certainly taken off.

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Tim Draper On Big Problems, Big Opportunities & Big Vision

Andrew Bellay — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:01:19 +0000

AlwaysOn recently made another trip down Sandhill Road to visit Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the most prestigious venture capital firms there is. After checking out Steve Jurvetson's awesome space collection, I sat down with Tim Draper to pick his brain on the most important issues in venture capital and entrepreneurship today. Check out our interview below after a brief bio. Special thanks to Tim for being so generous with his time.

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley

Tony Perkins — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:29:12 +0000

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in high technology companies and management. He is a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Graduate School of Engineering STVP Program. Steve has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. His last company, E.piphany, started in his living room. His other startups include two semiconductor companies (Zilog and MIPS Computers), a workstation company (Convergent Technologies), a supercomputer firm (Ardent), a computer peripheral supplier (SuperMac), a military intelligence systems supplier (ESL) and a video game company (Rocket Science Games). Steve is on the board of CafePress.com, an on-line marketplace, and IMVU, a 3D IM social network.

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Private Company Stock Market Update

Tony Perkins — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:05:12 +0000

Forget About Being A Lean Start-up, Focus On Building A Lean Company

Greg Gretsch — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:26:24 +0000

Much has been written about building lean start-ups. It's certainly possible today for many start-ups to get to a minimum viable product and early customer validation with a lot less than was possible 10 or even 5 years ago. But ultimately if you want to build a significant company versus having a flash-in-the-pan that you sell quickly, it takes time, work, and more than a few people. All of these resources take money.

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Some Good Signs For Android

Nic Brisbourne — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:15:52 +0000

The mobile press in the last week or so has been lavishing huge praise on Apple for the iPhone 4, which by all accounts is an awesome device, and I am particularly interested to see what apps developers will build using the new gyroscope, as well as excited by the new screen and the increased speed that comes from a faster processor and increased memory. In other words Apple who already had the best device in the market just took another big step forward and put more distance between them and the competition. There are of course a number of decent Android devices out there (and also on other platforms) and they are rapidly getting better, but I think it is hard to argue that Apple isn’t the clear market leader when it comes to device popularity/features/function/quality.

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Innovation: Harvard Style

Ed_Lambert — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:11:22 +0000

The first impression you get when attending Venture Summit East at Harvard Business School is a sense of Harvard's history, the beauty of its campus, and the accomplishments of its students, past, present, and future. While this was the third annual Venture Summit East, it was the first held at Harvard Business School. I surely hope there will be more to come, as I believe the kind of interactions Tony Perkins and his team encourage needs such an august venue. There is a great question to be addressed, and Harvard Business School and the Route 128 area have the resources to resolve it.

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Bijan Sabet: The Future Of Super Angels, MicroVCs & Venture Capital

Bijan Sabet — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:08:33 +0000

I’ve been struggling with writing this post for some time. I hope I can do it justice, something tells me that I won’t but I’m going to give it a shot nonetheless. There has been a lot of discussion about the future of venture capital especially in light of all the enthusiasm and support of super angels. Many have suggested there is a math problem with the VC business - specifically too much money in the industry given the exits in this climate and near term climate.

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CEO Showcase: XOS Digital

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:57:31 +0000

XOS Digital provides digital technology and media management solutions to collegiate and professional sports organizations in the U.S. As such, it provides its clientele with advanced digital technology solutions to enhance organization performance and image to improve the management and monetization of their digital media assets. XOS Digital is the leading digital asset management provider for sports organizations and fans. The company continuously redefines the way people interact with and consume digital sports content.

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A Call For More VC Bloggers

Jeff Bussgang — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:10:03 +0000

A cry for more VC bloggers is crazy, right? There are already 150 or so who are actively blogging - which I estimate means 15% of all active VCs serve as bloggers. Yet, we need more. We need the life science and cleantech VCs to start blogging.

I was leafing through the NVCA's 2010 Yearbook last week while on vacation (go ahead, call me a geek) and was really struck by the amount of dollars that go towards the life sciences and cleantech portion of our industry as compared to IT. Of the $17.7 billion of venture capital invested in 2009, only $8.3 billion - less than half - went into IT-related companies. $6.1 billion (35%) was invested in life sciences companies and $3.3 billion in other companies. Industrial/energy investments represent 13% of VC dollars.

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Focus, Focus, Focus!

Greg Gretsch — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:54:22 +0000

One of the biggest advantages startups have over larger, more established companies, is that their inherent lack of resources forces them to do fewer things - to focus. Focus is important for all companies, but while a lack of focus in an established company can slow growth and lower returns, inability to focus in a small company will kill it. I've seen more companies die from indigestion than starvation.

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Foundry Funds Triggit, RTB Future Bright

Seth Levine — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:14:30 +0000

Clearly a hot topic in online ad-tech right now is the rise of exchange-based buying and the advent of real-time bidding platforms (RTB) that allow advertisers and publishers to transact on an impression by impression basis. Given all the focus on RTB I sometimes have to remind myself that true real-time trading is less than a year into its existence. And given its nascence, the landscape of companies (buy side platforms, sell side platforms, data providers, agencies, brands, publishers, etc.) that are playing a part in these exchanges is changing rapidly.

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Gideon Gartner's 10 Start-Up Innovations

Gideon Gartner — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:07:53 +0000

During my 1960s at IBM and 1970s on Wall Street, I was a subscriber or reader of research from several firms which were predecessors to the current Advisory Industry. The firms included IDC, Computer Intelligence, Dataquest, Yankee and Input. When on Wall Street, I joined the IBM user groups “Share” and “Guide”, The CCIA (Computer and Communications Industry Association), and SIM (Society for Information Management), presumably in order to be exposed to IT users’ perspectives.

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CEO Showcase: Phybridge

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:02:57 +0000

Phybridge provides risk-free IP phone deployment infrastructure designed to run IP telephony without costly LAN upgrades. Phybridge's flagship product, the UniPhyer, is a VoIP enabler that is looking to set a new standard in IP phone infrastructure. Phybridge brings to market practical innovations that provides organizations with an easier way to deploy and manage VoIP solutions.

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Google Poised to Enter Travel

Michael Moe — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:18:03 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Funed portfolio dropped 7.2% for the week, while the NASDAQ declined 5.9%, and the S&P 500 was down 5%. Year-to-date, AO X is down 4.5%, the NASDAQ is down 7.8%, and the S&P 500 is down 8.3%.

Google purchased airline data company ITA for $700 million. In the last months, ITA had been the subject of interest among Microsoft, Kayak, and Expedia. With this purchse, it's obvious that Google will enter the online travel space very soon. For the week, GOOG dropped 7.6%.

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CEO Showcase: Aprigo

admin — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:30:01 +0000

Aprigo lets mid-market IT pros to tame their organizations' data deluge with a unique, low-cost SaaS offering that provides complete visibility and control of the security and costs of unstructured business data. Aprigo's NINJA is a SaaS solution that provides a unified data dashboard for unstructured data both on-premise and in the cloud. Only Aprigo lets businesses prevent data breaches, pass compliance audits, benchmark their data environments, and save on storage costs within five minutes.

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Fall Of The Super Angel?

Paul Kedrosky — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:20:24 +0000

Unnoticed by almost no-one, the startup financing landscape has been transformed: a combination of ease of entry, lower capital requirements, failing incumbent venture capital (VC) firms, and general fervor has driven the emergence of a host of new "super-seed" firms. These small-ish outfits -- usually running less than $20m -- specialize in seeding a bazillion companies, following on in very few, and generally trying to be fast-moving and networked.

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Paul Jacobs on Chips

Tony Perkins — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:54:40 +0000

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Don't Drop The G-Bomb

Greg Gretsch — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:50:58 +0000

One of the classic venture pitch mistakes is overselling. Overselling your idea can take many forms, but one of the more humorous occurs when the entrepreneur shows you a set of projections that are wildly optimistic and then drops the G-Bomb as a way to claim that the projections are actually quite realistic bordering on being conservative.

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"One of the Best Since 2007" for Private Equity and Venture Capital

Tony Perkins — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:51:38 +0000

Private equity and venture capital funds continued to show strength during the quarter ending December 31, 2009, with each asset class earning positive returns for the third consecutive quarter, one of the best since 2007. Overall, fourth quarter returns on private equity investments outpaced those in venture capital funds, though both continued to outperform the public markets over the long term, according to Cambridge Associates LLC, a provider of independent research and investment advice to institutional investors and private clients.

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Start-Ups Need Better Protection

Bijan Sabet — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:30:28 +0000

The Viacom vs. YouTube decision has been in my mind since last week. As many of you know by now, Viacom had sued YouTube for copyright infringement. YouTube believed they were protected under safe harbor under DMCA.

The judge in this case stated DMCA works well:

The present case shows that the D.M.C.A. notification regime works efficiently: when Viacom over a period of months accumulated some 100,000 videos and then sent a mass take-down notice on February 2, 2007, by the next business day YouTube had removed virtually all of them,” Judge Stanton wrote.

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Amazing, Smart, or Crazy?

Adam Fisher — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:31:50 +0000

My fondness for early stage investments often prompts me to develop a new method with which to filter, evaluate and pursue deals. One of my current methods is to group interesting early stage companies into the following buckets: “amazing,” “smart” and “crazy.” Many companies don’t quite meet the criteria I set to receive these labels, and occasionally, special companies will fall into more than one category. This is an imperfect framework, but nonetheless useful for me as I evaluate the worthiness of a given early stage project.

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Super Angels - A Primer

Rob Go — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:13:48 +0000

For better or worse, Micro-VC’s and Super Angels seem to be the new intriguing sub-segment within Venture Capital. Funds like First Round Capital, Floodgate, Lowercase, Founder Collective, IA Venture Partners, Harrison Metal, and Felicis and individuals like Ron Conway, Keith Rabois and others show up multiple times a day on TechCrunch and seem to be behind every high profile investment in the internet world. How did this happen? Are these groups just a new fad or is a fundamental and long lasting change happening in the early-stage financing eco-system?

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Chopping Up The Twitterverse

Mark Peter Davis — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:34:07 +0000

I have written about the rise of sliver businesses in the past. Sliver businesses are companies that replicate an existing model but differentiate themselves by targeting a narrower population or use case. Every time a new online category is created the sliver businesses are quick to follow. From auctions to social networking to group buying - once the category was created lots of players entered the fray by carving out a niche segment or new manner in which they provide the service.

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CEO Showcase: CoolPlanetBioFuels

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:09:41 +0000

Imagine driving high performance cars and large family safe SUV's while actually reversing global warming, and without using foreign oil. That is the vision of CoolPlanetBioFuels. CoolPlanetBioFuels is developing a revolutionary thermal/mechanical processor that directly inputs raw biomass, such as woodchips, crop residue, non-food fuel crops, algae, and so on, and produces multiple distinct gas streams for catalytic upgrading to conventional hydrocarbon fuels (gasoline).

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Mobclix: Cursed Or Blessed?

Andrew Bellay — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:36:09 +0000

There isn’t a single market that’s changing faster than advertising right now. Throw the rapid adoption of web enabled, mobile devices on top of the huge macro changes in the publishing industries and it’s no surprise that mobile advertising is red-hot right now.

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Curation Is King

Steve_Rosenbaum — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:39:20 +0000

"Content is King"—no longer. Today, the world has changed. "Curation Is King."

OK, I hear all the content-makers sharpening their knives to take me on. I'm ready.

First, why content is dead: Content used to be the high quality media that came out of the very pointed end of the funnel. Articles in the New York Times. Movies from Miramax. Thursday night comedy from NBC. Books published by Simon and Schuster. Creative folks wrote pitches, treatments, sample chapters, pilots, but only the best of the best got published.

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Three Roles of Great Entrepreneurs

Tony Tjan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Every start-up entrepreneur has an overwhelming amount to get done—the "to dos" are constantly outrunning the "dones." It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and endless hours, and you often forget that running really hard does not necessarily equate with running in the right direction. To paraphrase one of my partners, the good news is that you're making good time, and the bad news is that you're lost.

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VCs Have Mixed Feelings About Next 18 Months

Andrew Bellay — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:09:38 +0000

Ed Sullivan (Partner, KPMG) and Jeffrey McCormick (Managing General Partner, Saturn Partners) announced the results of 100 VC responses last week at Venture Summit East. Check out the video and results below.

Ninety-three percent of those surveyed noted that last year's credit crisis hurt the ability of venture capitalists to raise new capital. More than half feel that trend will last another year or longer.

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Yuan Depegs, China Advances

Michael Moe — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:24:47 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 3.4% for the week, while the NASDAQ declined 3.7%, and the S&P 500 was down 3.6%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 3%, the NASDAQ is down 2%, and the S&P 500 is down 3.4%.

Financial IT provider Longtop Financial secured a new contract with a rural commercial bank in east China—the first in that region—to provide CRM solutions. LFT is the Chinese market leader in that space, with a market share of 18/4% in 2008, according to IDC Research. For the week, LFT was nearly flat, down 0.1%.

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iPhones, Startups, and Angel Economics

Simeon Simeonov — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:00:34 +0000

Tomi Ahonen has collected a lot of good data about the iPhone app ecosystem and applies solid analysis to reach the conclusion that, from an economic standpoint, on average, it is a waste of developers' time to build iPhone apps. The data is good but the conclusion is dubious.

This is a case study for the classic "How to Lie with Statistics," in this case by accident. It's like asserting that because, from an economic standpoint, on average, startups can't raise money and startups fail it follows that entrepreneurs should pack up their bags and stop starting new companies and stop trying to raise money.

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CEO Showcase: Corent Technology

Tony Perkins — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:04:03 +0000

Corent Technology, Inc. is the provider of SaaS-Suite™ - the most advanced software development platform for rapid transformation of Software to SaaS. SaaS-Suite™ transforms stand-alone single-tenant software applications to turnkey, multi-tenant, cloud-compatible SaaS solutions - rapidly and cost-effectively. Applications leveraging Corent’s technology are easily portable across any public, private or hybrid clouds. In addition to being CEO of Corent, Feyzi is also Chairman of the Orange County Chapter of the Technology Council of Southern California. He was formerly Executive at HP, Jamcracker and other software/SaaS companies.

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New Apple Developer TOS

Andrew Bellay — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:11:52 +0000

In early June, Apple changed it's developers Terms of Service. Here's the important jargon:

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application.

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Mastering the VC Game With Jeff Bussgang

Andrew Bellay — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:29:08 +0000

Make sure you don't miss part I of this interview with Jeff on trends and markets.

AlwaysOn: What about the fund raising market for venture capitalists right now? What’s it like out there?

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AO Guest Blogger Profile: Jeff Kaplan

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:55:38 +0000

Founded in 2001, THINKstrategies is a strategic consulting company that helps its clients capitalize on the migration of the technology industry from a product-centric to a services-driven business model. THINKstrategies is dedicated to helping enterprises make better sourcing decisions, IT solution providers make better marketing decisions, and venture investors make better investment decisions to capitalize on the business benefits of today's on-demand services, including SaaS, cloud computing, and managed services.

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Seeing Both Sides With Jeff Bussgang

Andrew Bellay — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:29:03 +0000

Jeff Bussgang, who was a successful serial entrepreneur for 8 years, has been a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners for the last 7. Before becoming a venture capitalist, Jeff was the co-founder of Upromise, the largest private source of college funding contributions in the United States. He serves as an entrepreneur in residence at Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA with highest distinction. Flybridge is an early-stage venture capital firm in Boston, MA with $560 million under management.

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When The Cloud Goes Down

Jeff Kaplan — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:34:26 +0000

Intuit’s major outage last week served as a harsh, yet valuable reminder for all of us about the serious risks which underlie our growing dependence on third-party, ‘cloud’-based services.The irony about the timing of Intuit’s service failure is that the company has been escalating its marketing efforts to position it as a leading provider of cloud services. For instance, Intuit’s SVP/CTO, Tayloe Stansbury, was a keynote presenter at last month’s SIIA All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco where he boasted about Intuit surpassing $1 billion in cloud-based service revenues.

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Why VCs Rarely Say "No"

Greg Gretsch — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:03:18 +0000

As an entrepreneur, I always got frustrated with the VCs who would take forever getting back to me if they ever did. When I was working on my third company, I used to tell people that I still hadn't heard back from a very famous venture capitalist on my first company after I'd pitched him and his partnership and jumped through tons of hoops for him. I was always happier to get a quick "No" versus a long drawn-out nothing. That's why, when I made the move over to the dark side, I planned to always give entrepreneurs a quick "yes" or "no."

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BigDoor Media Is Knocking

Brad Feld — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:54:29 +0000

We recently invested in a Seattle company called BigDoor Media. The founder/CEO Keith Smith wrote a wonderful love story about the deal which was picked up by the WSJ VC Dispatch in a post titled A Summer Romance Between Founder And Venture Capitalist.

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Introducing the Snappy VC

RemmingtonOxleyV — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:36:55 +0000

Hello Blogosphere,

I'm Remmington Oxley V

It is a pleasure to be blogging here. Of course, this is an alias as my venture firm would die if they knew I blogged.

Heck they'd be impressed if they saw me type on a keyboard. CONFESSION: I don't know how to login to my computer because I don't know the password.

I'm typing this on my blackberry with two thumbs.

Yes, I'm a VC in a venture firm somewhere in the bay area.

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Solving World Problems VC-Style

Tony Perkins — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:43:26 +0000

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Reigniting Innovation in the East

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:52:24 +0000

The northeast has been an American hub for innovation for the past hundred years. The venture capital industry itself was born right here, with George Doriot's founding of American Research Development Corporation (ARDC) in 1946. In the mid-1950s and '60s, George and his colleagues put venture capital on the map alongside a company in which they invested called Digital Equipment Corporation. Their original $70,000 would be worth more than 500 times that investment when Digital went public in 1968. In many ways, Digital was the Google of its day.

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The Next Generation

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:50:23 +0000

Welcome to Venture East Summit at Harvard Business School. It’s an honor to co-host this exciting event with AlwaysOn and Harvard Business School. The AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford has long been one of the preeminent events for the entrepreneur and venture capital communities, and I am thrilled to help facilitate that same type of university partnership with the Boston entrepreneur community here at HBS.

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The Entrepreneurial Spirit Moves East

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:46:34 +0000

Welcome to Venture East Summit at Harvard Business School. We are thrilled to have you join us for our inaugural year as co-hosts of this exciting event. We have worked closely with the AlwaysOn team to assemble a stellar list of speakers who will cover a wide range of topics that highlight the significant economic, political, and technology trends impacting the global climate for entrepreneurship and venture capital. Although you may be familiar with Harvard Business School, you may not know about our deep roots in entrepreneurship, dating back to the 1930s and '40s when HBS graduate-turnedprofessor George Doriot became known as the "father of venture capital." Since that time, HBS faculty and alumni have been involved in some of the most successful and highly visible startups in history. Companies like Staples and Intuit had their origins right here.

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Optimism in the Northeast

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:43:29 +0000

Venture Summit East in Boston is an opportunity for venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, bankers, and analysts to gather and discuss the state of the industry. We once again surveyed some of the key players to gauge their view on the current situation and venture capital's future prospects. We want to thank the respondents for taking a few minutes out of their busy schedules to provide their opinions. After a rough 2009, investors are cautiously optimistic for the prospects of northeast venture capital activity in 2010.

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A123

Tony Perkins — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:43:38 +0000

Attn: Congress, Re: The Economy

Mark Cuban — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:18:48 +0000

1. Carried Interest Taxes

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The AlwaysOn East Top 100 Companies

Tony Perkins — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:11:46 +0000

It's with great excitement that we introduce the third annual AlwaysOn East Top 100 private companies. The AOE100 represent the top emerging companies from the East Coast that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and greentech.

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at the Blackstone Group, KPMG, Silicon Valley Bank, Sonnenschein, and industry experts across the globe, scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are taking old notions of doing things and forging solutions that will lead to industry shake-up and huge value-creation opportunities.

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The 2010 Venture Capital East 50

Tony Perkins — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:11:45 +0000

The first annual AlwaysOn Venture Capital East 50 highlights the 50 individuals based in the eastern U.S. who have backed the most profitable winners during the last four years. To compile the first VC East 50, our editorial team sourced data from our research partners Morgan Stanley, VentureDeal, and the 451 Group on more than 700 active venture capitalists, 1,400 VC investments, and 1,000 technology liquidity events during the last four years, from October 1, 2005, to September 30, 2009.

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Greentech Leads the Run

Michael Moe — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:10:46 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 4.4% for the week, while the NASDAQ was up 3%, and the S&P 500 advanced 2.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 6.7%, the NASDAQ is up 1.8%, and the S&P 500 is up 0.8%. Demand-response smart-metering provider EnerNOC led the AO X Fund portfolio, up 15.1% for the week. On Monday, ENOC secured a 10-year contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority for the deployment of 560MW demand-response resources.

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Golden Age For Technology & Innovation

Jeff Bussgang — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:09:45 +0000

The news headlines are grim. Oil spills, sovereign defaults, choppy stock markets, tepid employment. It's no wonder that the global capital markets seem spooked.

Yet, here's the strange thing, many of us in the technology sector have never been more bullish about what lies ahead.

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You Are Not A Gadget

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:11:46 +0000

It keeps you honest to get shaken in your boots once in awhile. I had just proudly penned a blog post call the “Join The Open Revolution!” when I was confronted with the following passage in a book written by Jaron Lanier, the man who coined the phase “virtual reality” and made this year’s Time Magazine Top 100 most influential people. His new book is called You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, and he expressed his fears and frustrations right up front.

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The AlwaysOn Global 250 Competition

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:19:23 +0000

AlwaysOn and KPMG have officially launched the third annual AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies competition. The AO Global 250 is a competition for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in the global technology industries. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology. To assist us in this competition by nominating a company, please click here.

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GoingGreen Silicon Valley 2010

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:18:23 +0000

The fourth annual GoingGreen Silicon Valley is a two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on the most promising emerging green technologies and new entrepreneurial opportunities. Cutting-edge greentech CEOs will meet the movers and shakers from the biggest industries on earth. Green technology innovators are transforming trillion dollar industries-and the solutions they are delivering not only promise to clean up pollution and restore ecosystems, but also to bring abundance and prosperity to everyone on earth.

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OnHollywood 2010

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:16:23 +0000

AlwaysOn's fifth annual OnHollywood is a two-and-a-half-day executive event features high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities, content strategies and monetization schemes in the video, music, gaming, search, and mobile industries. Innovative technology CEOs from the back streets of Silicon Valley will meet up the Hollywood digital entertainment and media elite.

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Introducing The AlwaysOn East Top 100 Companies

Tony Perkins — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:51:47 +0000
It's with great excitement that we introduce the third annual AlwaysOn East Top 100 private companies. The AOE100 represent the top emerging companies from the East Coast and Europe that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and greentech.
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Elon Musk's Spaceship Takes Flight

Tony Perkins — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:19:42 +0000

Elon Musk is on a roll. In addition to SpaceX's successful launch, he was selected to the Time 100 2010 list of most influential people, and the IPO of his other favorite project, Tesla Motors, where he serves as CEO and Product Architect, has filed for it's IPO. Elon is a South African-American engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist also known for co-founding PayPal and presiding as Chairman of SolarCity. According to Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, Musk is the inspiration for his and Robert Downey Jr.'s interpretation of Tony Stark.

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Cloud Services Raise Expectations

Michael Moe — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:18:42 +0000

Last week, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio was up 1.3%, while the NASDAQ was up 1.1%, and the S&P 500 advanced 2.5%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 2.1%, the NASDAQ is down 1.1% and the S&P 500 is down 2.1%. Yoga and sports clothing maker Lululemon reported continuing strong growth, beating expectations by 6 cents, growing earnings by 200% and sales by 69%. Same-store sales rose a robust 51% vs. a year ago. Goss margin increased from 42.9% last year to 53.8%. LULU also increased its full-year sales and earnings guidance.

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Gretsch On Hot Markets And Trends

Andrew Bellay — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:17:42 +0000

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital may be the flashy VCs presiding on Sand Hill Road, but across town in Menlo Park, Sigma Partners is posting equal, if not better, returns for their investors. Throughout the last 25 years, Sigma Partners has funded over 100 early stage companies and is currently investing their eighth fund of about $500 million, bringing their total capital under management to over $2 billion.

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What Google Can Learn From Facebook

Mark Cuban — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:46:16 +0000

I’ve written multiple times about the value of independence from Google to Newspapers. Of course, each generated responses from many who disagreed with me. I just wanted to point out that Facebook, arguably the largest and most important website in the world has most of its content walled off from Google.

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Steve Jobs on AppleTV

Tony Perkins — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:38:31 +0000

I remember talking to Steve Jobs just after the iPod was introduced and asked him why he wouldn't push to put video on the new device. He responded by explaining how difficult it would be that to develop the iPod, they had to create a whole new operating system, and blah, blah, blah. It was all very fascinating to me, and as a guy who has not developed a single line of code, I was ready to take his word for it.

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The X Fund Holds Strong

Michael Moe — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:47:31 +0000

In a volatile week, the AlwaysOn X portfolio dropped 0.6%, while the NASDAQ was down 1.7%, and the S&P 500 was down 2.3%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 0.8%, the NASDAQ is down 2.2%, and the S&P 500 is down 4.5%.

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Lean Startups Coming to Harvard

Tony Perkins — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:52:47 +0000

AlwaysOn could not be more pumped up about our third annual Venture Summit East, co-hosted by Harvard Business School and the Blackstone Group. Hot on the agenda is a keynote that will be given by Eric Ries on the timely subject of preserving ownership by running a lean and mean machine. Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned.

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Don't Let a Venture Capitalist Deflower Your Startup

Greg Gretsch — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:17:53 +0000

It was good advice when you were in high school, and it's good advice when you're out raising a seed round for your startup. Here's the scenario: You and a small team have been working on a great idea for a new business. You start talking to a few of your friends who have been successful before to get their feedback and advice.

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Join The Open Revolution!

Tony Perkins — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:09:19 +0000

A few years back, in an All Things Digital live interview, Steve Jobs confirmed that during the 2004 presidential elections, he offered John Kerry free marketing consulting services for his fledgling presidential campaign. Rather than jumping at this incredible offer, the Kerry team apparently never got back to Mr. Jobs and randomly added his name to the campaign’s “Economic Advisers” list and sent him a contribution envelope. More recently, Mr. Jobs is taking an even bigger jab from Barack Obama.

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X Fund's Week Ends in the Black

Michael Moe — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:24:53 +0000

In a volatile week, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 1.9%, while the NASDAQ was up 1.3%, and the S&P 500 was up 0.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 1.3%, the NASDAQ is down 0.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 2.3%.

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Harvard Professors Show Up For Venture Summit

Tony Perkins — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:48:30 +0000

ShakeOut In the "Cloud Rush"

Jeff Kaplan — Fri, 28 May 2010 22:05:30 +0000

The initial success and rapid growth of cloud computing is attracting a "cloud rush" of players, which is confusing IT and business decision-makers in the process. The inevitable shakeout of various startups is causing potential customers to rethink their cloud computing acquisition strategies in ways that will likely favor established tech companies more than emerging players.

Here are the basics as I see them.

How to characterize Cloud 1.0:

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Personality Counts Again With iPad

Jeff Kaplan — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:11:03 +0000

Let me roll this all up in the form of a prediction: the average person that has a device like the iPad, that displays book and magazine pages the way they are designed to look will end up reading more books and longer magazine articles.

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No Customers Leave Cable for Netflix

Mark Cuban — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:57:38 +0000

I’m a big fan of Reed Hastings. Not just of his vision, but his honesty as well. Reed posted his strategy deck on Slideshare.com . While we agree and disagree on a few items here and there, he does a great job identifying the risks created by Cable/satellite/telco (CST) . The key quote on this slide ( page 26) – ”almost no customers leave cable for netflix” Reed is one of the smartest guys in the space.

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Personality Counts Again With iPad

Tony Perkins — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:06:42 +0000

It’s ironic, because Steve Jobs was once cynical about the future of books, noting that the average kid’s attention span had dwindled so much that the new generation had all but abandoned the Great American Novel. Now, a few years later, his iPad may very well lead the renaissance of long-form reading. Analysts expect total worldwide iPad sales, including U.S. numbers, to reach anywhere between 5 and 8 million units by the end of 2010. The iPad’s Global Debut is doing very well.

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Meet the New AlwaysOn!

Tony Perkins — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:20:59 +0000

It is with great excitement (and relief!) that I proudly introduce you to the new AlwaysOn network! As any web publisher knows, re-launching a new website is an arduous task that never happens on time, never on budget, and is never exactly the way you want it to be on day one. But, hey, we’re up! And for those of you who joined our community and attended one or more of our events on the AO World Tour since we founded the company in 2003—thanks!

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Venture Summit East at Harvard

Tony Perkins — Mon, 24 May 2010 01:30:11 +0000

Venture Summit East is a two-day gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and technology trends impacting the global growth investor. Now more than ever, staying abreast of market conditions and innovations is crucial to financial success. Venture Summit East features the most influential institutional investors, venture capitalists, corporate buyers, investment bankers and research analysts in the Eastern U.S. in keynote presentations and panel debates.

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AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 01:06:17 +0000

The 8th AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries. The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases.

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The AlwaysOn East Top 100 Competition

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:45:00 +0000

We're looking for the top emerging companies from the East Coast and Europe that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

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The 2010 OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:15:00 +0000

It's with great excitement that we introduce the inaugural OnDemand 100. This batch of emerging Internet companies is disrupting the established enterprise and pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.

The overall winner of the “OnDemand 100” is Appirio, a cloud solution provider that offers both products and professional services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of the cloud.

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Android or iPhone? Wrong Question

Bill Gurley — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:15:00 +0000

In a recent New York Times article, Kathryn Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst was quoted suggesting that Apple’s iPhone is the key catalyst for an important new technology trend. “Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend – one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years.” This argument rings true in that the “after iPhone” smartphone market is dramatically more interesting than the “pre-iPhone” smartphone market. Later, Ms. Huberty made an even bolder statement, “The iPhone is something different.

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Let's End the Mainframe Fantasy

Greg Ness — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:15:00 +0000

If you drew a triangle and placed Cisco, Microsoft and VMware, respectively, at each corner you would have a good idea of where the center of power is regarding the future direction of the IT industry and the emergence of cloud computing. And plenty of well-heeled tech companies would love to keep this status quo in tact for as long as possible, simply because they've run out of steam and are counting on complexity and lock-in to postpone the revolution.

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The GoingGreen East Top 50 Companies

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:10:00 +0000

AlwaysOn is excited to announce the 2010 GoingGreen East Top 50 Private Companies. The GGE50 is comprised of companies developing game-changing approaches and disrupting technologies. As we enter a year of uncertain recovery, it is with great anticipation that we present the the second annual GoingGreen East 50. Along with our traditional criteria for selecting our winners-market size, disruptive potential, solid management team, product feasibility, and so on-this year, we asked one crucial question: Will this company experience success no matter what?

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The OnMedia Top 100 Companies

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:05:00 +0000

It’s with great excitement that we introduce the 2010 OnMedia 100. This fresh batch of the hottest emerging companies in digital advertising joins illustrious alumni and gives us a great deal of insight into the coming trends in monetization. Last year was digital media’s trial by fire. Some online business models were forged in the flames; many more were burnt to a crisp. As we look out on 2010, we see a more hospitable landscape. Advertisers are increasingly selecting online surgical strikes over offline dynamite fishing.

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Introducing the 2009 Venture Capital 100

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Much of 2008 and 2009 were highly uncertain times for both the venture capital industry and the companies they funded, but history shows that funding entrepreneurs takes patience and endurance. The first annual AlwaysOn Venture Capital 100 highlights the one hundred individuals who have backed the most profitable winners in the last four years.

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How to Get to No

Tony Tjan — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:50:00 +0000

In the early 1980s Roger Fisher and William Ury authored what would become one of the best-selling business books of all time on negotiations, Getting to Yes. The book's theme was how to gain mutual agreement between parties in an objective non-adversarial manner. The core assumption behind the book (and most articles on the topic of selling or negotiations) is that both parties want a "yes." This post focuses on the importance of the "no."

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More Up than Down In Silicon Valley

Tony Perkins — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:21:00 +0000

For the first quarter in 2010 Fenwick and West analyzed the terms of venture financings for 104 companies headquartered in Silicon Valley that reported raising money in the first quarter of 2010. For the third straight quarter, VC rounds that saw an increase in stock price exceeded down rounds by 49 percent to 32 percent. In fourth quarter 2009 up rounds exceeded down rounds 47 percent to 30 percent, with 23 percent flat. This was the third quarter in a row in which up rounds exceeded down rounds.

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How Much Is Hollywood in Trouble?

Bill Gurley — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:21:00 +0000

More often than not, we here in Silicon Valley are prone to idealism. We see a scenario the way we want to see it, and make predictions that fit our view of how we think the world should work, or perhaps even how we would like the world to be. This is especially true when it comes to technology. Outsider “luddites” who do not immediately grok the remarkable disruptive power of our latest and greatest technologies are doomed to the business trash heap – driven there by obsolescence and an obstinate refusal to accept their fate.

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The Future of Google TV Is...

Mark Cuban — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:21:00 +0000

Google TV is going to be very interesting. It is far from a certainty that it will be more than Apple TV in terms of consumer sales.   From a first glance the Marketplace is the most important and interesting element of the announcement. As a development platform, Android creates the potential for untold unique and interesting applications that could capture users imagination. Early on, I don’t think TV oriented apps will have the most impact.

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Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?

Brad Feld — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:20:00 +0000

One of my blog readers – Boaz Fletcher – sent me an awesome video this morning from RSA Animate. It’s 11 minutes long and is a fascinating lecture by Dan Pink about The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I love the RSA Animate format – an artist animates the talk on a giant whiteboard in real time.

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Steve Jobs is Back!

Tony Perkins — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:20:00 +0000

Steve Jobs was happy to tell us that Pixar Animation Studios is "the only ?true digital studio in the world." Pixar gains this distinction, of course, by being the first digital effects house to actually produce a full-feature film entirely on a computer. Standing in front of a packed house at the San Francisco premiere of Pixar's new blockbuster, Toy Story, Mr. Jobs was at his best. He told a story of how his four-year-old son watches the Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs over and over again.

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Don't Mess with VCs or Angels

Jeff Bussgang — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:20:00 +0000

Barney Frank was crystal clear in his briefing with a group of CEOs that I participated in this afternoon: he is going to make sure that the final Financial Reform bill that gets worked out with the Senate won't mess with the angel or VC communities. I came to Washington DC today with the Progressive Business Leaders Network (PBLN) group that I co-chair. It was our group's annual trek to DC where 80 CEOs and business leaders from Massachusetts had the opportunity to dialog with the leadership from the congressional and executive branch.

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Location in the Cloud

Josh Kopelman — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:20:00 +0000

I just read the news about Google's upgrades to Google Latitude—and boy is it a bold move with major implications. If done right, I think it could ultimately be as transformative as when Facebook opened up the social graph. Before Facebook opened up their social graph, if a web site wanted to know your relationships/friends it had to ask you. Each and every time. Then came Facebook Connect.

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The X Fund Is Poised for Growth

Michael Moe — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:15:00 +0000

For the week, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 3.5%, while the NASDAQ was down 5%, and the S&P 500 was down 4.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is down 0.5%, the NASDAQ is down 1.8%, and the S&P 500 is down 2.5%.

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A CEO Memo to the Board

Tony Tjan — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:00:00 +0000

It is hard to believe but yes, 2009 is winding down. Thanksgiving is around the corner, the holiday rush is almost palpable, and before you know it we'll be watching our TV screens for the ball to drop in Times Square. It is about this time of year that many businesses begin to feel the pressure of making Q4 work, budget planning for 2010 gets underway, and if there is any time left, to reflect on what this past year has meant.

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The Future of Google TV is...

Mark Cuban — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:18:55 +0000

Google TV is going to be very interesting. It is far from a certainty that it will be more than Apple TV in terms of consumer sales.   From a first glance the Marketplace is the most important and interesting element of the announcement. As a development platform, Android creates the potential for untold unique and interesting applications that could capture users imagination. Early on, I don’t think TV oriented apps will have the most impact. If I understood the announcement, in the beginning of 2011, there will be an Android Marketplace.

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Venture Summit East at Harvard

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 00:46:41 +0000

Venture Summit East is a two-day gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and technology trends impacting the global growth investor. Now more than ever, staying abreast of market conditions and innovations is crucial to financial success. Venture Summit East features the most influential institutional investors, venture capitalists, corporate buyers, investment bankers and research analysts in the Eastern U.S. in keynote presentations and panel debates.

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The AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:26:48 +0000

The 8th AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries. The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases. The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford's goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global tech industry.

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The AO X Fund: Week 63

Michael Moe — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:49:16 +0000

For the week, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio dropped 7%, while the NASDAQ was down 8%, and the S&P 500 declined 6.4%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is down 2.4%, the NASDAQ is down 0.2%, and the S&P 500 is off 0.4%.

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What's the Apple tablet going to be called?

Tony Perkins — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:24:36 +0000

Okay, we're pretty sure Apple's going to announce a tablet tomorrow, and now we're pretty sure it'll be running some version of the iPhone OS. (Thanks, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw!) But the one thing we don't have any inkling about -- even after nearly 10 years of rumors -- is what this thing is going to be called. Sure, there are some trademark applications floating around, and even some crowd favorites, but arguably the single biggest surprise coming tomorrow is what Steve Jobs has decided to officially name his mythical tablet. Honestly, we have no idea -- so we're putting it to you.

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GoingGreen East 2010

Tony Perkins — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:03:20 +0000

GoingGreen East is where cutting-edge greentech CEOs, along with movers and shakers from the biggest industries on earth, meet investors. This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on the most promising emerging green technologies and new entrepreneurial opportunities. At GoingGreen East our editors will honor the East Coast GoingGreen Top Fifty Private Cleantech Company CEOs. Additionally, up to 50 cleantech CEOs willl pitch their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in our “CEO Showcases.”

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Why Blame Jeff Zucker & NBC Over Leno ?

Mark Cuban — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:14:06 +0000

If you want to know why its going to take longer than people hope or expect to get out this great recession, look no further than media and corporate response to Jeff Zuckers move of Jay Leno to primetime. What Zucker and NBC did was the EXACT RIGHT MOVE. Business environments change. When they do, as broadcast network television has, and continues to, there are two basic choices. You can do it the way it’s always been done, or you can challenge yourself to change the game.

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Goodbye TV As We Know It

Tony Perkins — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:53:28 +0000

A very cool discovery that many of you may not yet tuned into is a new company founded by a team of Ask.com folks and backed by Benchmark and Redpoint called Clicker (clicker.com). With Clicker we finally have a video search service that has indexed only full-formatted, high-resolution video content produced by professional publishers. Clicker.com’s CEO Jim Lazone will be part of OnMedia’s opening night show and our “End of TV As We Know It” theme, so I won’t belabor its value proposition here. But let us suffice it to say that with innovation such as Clicker and Boxee, the full transformation of our video experience from broadcast to the Internet is in full motion—and there will be no turning back. The days of wasting hours navigating 500 cable channels and ending up empty handed are finally over—Hallelujah!

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The Real Time Infrastructure Ultimatum

Greg Ness — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:48:49 +0000

For months the infrastructure 2.0 blog has talked about the automation of IT from a network perspective, including the automation of the network itself. While few may question the need for network automation most businesses today still run their networks like they ran their “supply chains” decades ago, before the network.

This great irony is about to change. Here’s why: As virtualization entered the data center it became an accidental standard bearer for network automation. The power of virtualization helped to drive a cultural (including x as a service) shift in expectations, just as Nicholas Carr was declaring war on traditional “old world” IT with the help of Google, Amazon and a host of other cloud (and not so cloud) players.

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Advice on Pitching VC's

Tony Perkins — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:41:20 +0000

Its been almost five years now that I’ve been in venture capital. I finally know what i don’t know. The one thing I do know is how to give better advice on pitching VCs now that I’ve sat through hundreds of pitches and made 8 investments. I gave some advice in an earlier post—this one builds on it at a deeper level (three years later). I’ve mentioned in the past that there are some key things you should include in your presentation when you are pitching a VC. David Cowan’s post on what to include is a great starting point. I thought I would expand on this and add some of the nuances within each section. This may not apply to all types of companies but I think it works for internet-related businesses.

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Obama Bubble Log #1

Tony Perkins — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:19:59 +0000

In the aftermath of Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts, the Obama administration is now busy scrambling to find a way to dodge responsibility for its own reckless fiscal record. That much was on display recently when David Axelrod, a political strategist for the president, penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post. Mr. Axelrod wrote that no one is entitled to his own facts, even as he argued that George W. Bush is responsible for Barack Obama's deficits. He argued that Mr.

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Five Mind-Blowing Web Stats

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:03:47 +0000

These five mind-blowing web stats should excite us all and continue to make life interesting in the world wide web of disruptive change and unpredictable innovation.

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The Ether and the Scrum

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:02:42 +0000

Every day I get emails from entrepreneurs that make me think. In this case, it’s from a friend who is on the fundraising trail. He started off the email with “I felt compelled to share this with you as someone who would appreciate it.” I thought it was dynamite and asked him if I could share it since – in its unedited form – it captured so nicely what I expect many entrepreneurs feel.

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CNN, Latinos and Brand Values

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:02:13 +0000

A few weeks ago CNN broadcast Latino in America, a two-hour documentary that explored “how Latinos are reshaping our communities and culture and forcing a nation of immigrants to rediscover what it means to be an American.” The documentary was reported by Soledad O’brien, a highly regarded CNN anchor and special correspondent who in 2008 reported the similar Black in America documentary.

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Back to the Future

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:01:29 +0000

I just came across a great report by Industry Little Hawk entitled the Venture Capital Rebound (pdf). In the report, the authors reach a similar conclusion to Paul Kedrosky (read Paul's great research for the Kauffman Foundation here) -- that too much capital has gone into venture capital. Paul has argued that we need to shrink the amount of venture funding by 50% -- a statistic that almost every VC agrees with. (Ironically, 100% of VCs would argu

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Living Life While Working Hard

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:00:48 +0000

I had a 19 hour day yesterday – it started when I woke up at my hotel at 26th Street at 5am and ended when I hit the sack at midnight. I had a bunch of meetings, a few scheduled phone calls, was on a panel, and stayed on top of my email throughout the day. I even managed to keep my FishVille fish fed and got my Cafe World food served before it spoiled.

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Top Tech Exits of the Last Year

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:59:23 +0000

Each quarter of 2009 brought more news of reduced fundraising in the global Silicon Valley, and the liquidity drought became so acute that parallel stock exchanges self-organized into official companies. But the traditional exit market didn't run completely dry, and several companies managed to pull off impressive deals.

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Flexibility and Persistence

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:58:39 +0000

The latest in his series of interviews with entrepreneurs, Tony sits down with former LiveOps CEO and chairman Bill Trenchard and discusses what pursuing opportunity really requires.

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VCs Predict exits up, fundraising down in 2010

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:37:13 +0000

A panel of top VCs at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Menlo Park Tuesday morning said both IPO and M&A activity would bounce back in 2010, but that venture firms themselves should not expect an easier fundraising environment, as LPs will hold steady with a pullback from venture capital. DCM’s Dixon Doll suggested 40 to 50 venture-backed companies would IPO in 2010.

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A CEO Memo to the Board

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:36:01 +0000

Creating a CEO memo isn't complicated or overly detailed, but it sets the big picture and creates an incredibly powerful mechanism for alignment between boards and CEOs.

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A Script for Entrepreneurial Success

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:35:26 +0000

Tony interviews David Liu, co-founder and CEO of The Knot, one of the few entrepreneurs who has endured and prospered since the boom of the late 90s.

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Seek Out the Right Deal

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:34:22 +0000

Perhaps the most important success factor for a venture firm is to ensure that it has a strong, high-quality deal flow.

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Debunking theWall Street Myth

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:33:03 +0000

"The greatest economy the world had ever seen has been horribly mismanaged and virtually ruined by the decisions of presidents, Congress and the Federal Reserve. Main Street has been wiped out as Wall Street was bailed out."  —Pat Buchanan (12-13-09)

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'09 Best & Worst Software Stocks

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:31:34 +0000

In 2009 Software Sector was up +49.0% vs. the NASDAQ's +43.9% gain and the S&P 500's +23.5% gain. This is a big improvement from 2008 when the sector was down 40.9%. The average software stock gained +91.1% indicating that small cap companies, particularly microcap companies performed very strongly. In fact, the average gain for software stocks that started the year with less than $100M in market cap (over 1/4 of the total) was 129.6%.

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Empire State of Mind

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:30:44 +0000

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100 Tech IPOs in 2010

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:29:59 +0000

After a brutal 2009, this year looks to be more promising for venture capitalists. About $12.2 billion was invested in startups during the first three months of the year, down from $22 billion from the same period a year ago, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association.

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A Sign of a Change in Times

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:28:57 +0000

I confess to being a Shrek fan. My kids made me (well, sort of) buy the music CD to Shrek 2 and my favorite song on that CD is the Jennifer Saunders song - "Holding Out For A Hero". When they were little we would play it over and over again in the car.

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2010 Has Started Off Fast

bkabili — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:28:07 +0000

I’m at CES all day wandering the floor looking for additional devices to wear on my body to monitor all aspects of my life. In the mean time, there’s a bunch of great stuff in my world that has happened so far this week. Here are links with a little commentary.

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Advice on Pitching VC's

Tony Perkins — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:25:48 +0000

Its been almost five years now that I’ve been in venture capital. I finally know what i don’t know.

The one thing I do know is how to give better advice on pitching VCs now that I’ve sat through hundreds of pitches and made 8 investments. I gave some advice in an earlier post—this one builds on it at a deeper level (three years later)

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'Social TV' is Here

Andy Plesser — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:26:03 +0000

Facebook integration around video got its first high profile exposure with CNN and the Inauguration of President Obama, but the first was last year's collaboration with Joost. A spokesperson for Facebook has told Beet.TV: "Joost users who have connected their Facebook accounts continue to rank as most active group on the site. These users watch more videos, are more likely to participate in Joost.com's community, and are more likely to contribute comments about the site's video content."

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The AO X Fund: Week 45

Michael Moe — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:16:35 +0000

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 4.2% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 3.3%, and the S&P 500 was down 2.2%. Since inception, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 52.1%, the NASDAQ is up 40%, and the S&P 500 is up 20.9%.

Thin-film maker First Solar announced it will work with French EDF Energies Nouvelles to build a new manufacturing plant in Blanquefort, Frace. New plant construction is expected to begin in the second half of 2010, with annual capacity of 100MW (expected in 2012). Additionally, FSLR announced that it started commercial operations in Blythe, CA, for a 21MW solar power plant. For the week, FSLR dropped 1.4%.

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Top Tech Exits of the Last Year

Tony Perkins — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:07:06 +0000

Each quarter of 2009 brought more news of reduced fundraising in the global Silicon Valley, and the liquidity drought became so acute that parallel stock exchanges self-organized into official companies. But the traditional exit market didn't run completely dry, and several companies managed to pull off impressive deals. A213's rocking IPO revealed pent up demand for quality tech companies in the public markets, and acquisitions like Mint's $170 million windfall just three years after birth showed that high-growth marketplace can still generate companies too tempting for big corporations to resist. Below are the top venture-backed acquisitions and IPOs of the last year, a testament to the resilience of the innovation economy.

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AlwaysOn is Hiring!

Tony Perkins — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:50:42 +0000

AlwaysOn (alwayson.goingon.com) is the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley. AlwaysOn helped ignite the social media revolution in early 2003 when it launched the AlwaysOn network. In 2004, it became the first media brand to socially network its online readers and event attendees. AlwaysOn's preeminent executive event series includes the Summit at Stanford, OnMedia, OnHollywood, OnDC, OnDemand, Venture Summit Silicon Valley, Venture Summit East, GoingGreen, GoingGreen East, and GoingGreen Europe. The AlwaysOn network and live event series continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, and advertisers like no other media brand.

We're expanding and looking for talented, self-motivated, enthusiastic people to join our team. We offer competitive compensation, freedom and flexibility, and a chance to work with a top-notch group of more than two dozen media professionals.

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Great Entrepreneurs' Secret

Tony Tjan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:09:41 +0000

As venture capitalists, my partners and I meet dozens upon dozens of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas and dreams. We love them—especially when their passion comes with capabilities and a good idea. I have been fascinated in understanding the "DNA" of great entrepreneurs in an effort to identify traits and markers that can serve as early clues for future success. I have come to conclude that great entrepreneurs share and need SGL: Smarts, Guts, and Luck.

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OnMedia NYC 2010

Tony Perkins — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:36:08 +0000

OnMedia NYC is where cutting-edge technology CEOs from the back streets of Silicon Valley meet the global advertising and media establishment. This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.

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Virtualization Will Cross the Chasm

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:38:36 +0000

It seems counterintuitive to suggest that the virtualization market hasn’t already crossed the chasm. After all, over the last three years we’ve seen a stellar VMware IPO, Citrix’s heady acquisition of XenSource, and Microsoft’s much celebrated entrance into the virtualization market. VMware's Q3 revenue was $490 million. What’s not to like? After all, virtualization has been a bright beacon of hope in an otherwise lackluster IT era. It is perhaps the most powerful enabler of true cloud computing, enabling new scales of efficiency and elasticity. Virtualization has been “all that” and more.

And Gartner recently predicted more problems for data centers in 2010. Couldn’t virtualization help to address these problems? If it does then it could become what Dr. Moore calls a de facto standard. We’re certainly not t

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Is DC the New Silicon Valley?

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:22:19 +0000
The president's Innovation Agenda very much mirrors where venture capitalists from Silicon Valley are investing their money. The investment community is looking at a unique opportunity to bring both the agendas together and see if this new partnership can create some jobs. Click here to hear the full interview and hear how this unlikely alliance is changing the way Washington and Silicon Valley are building a bridge toward a healthier, stronger economy.
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Company Math vs. VC Math

Josh Kopelman — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:59:41 +0000

Fred Wilson has a great blog post today entitled The 'We Need to Own' Baloney. In it he discussed the fact that many VC's apply arbitrary ownership thresholds to investments. I couldn't agree with Fred more - but I'd take it even further. This is not just limited to ownership requirements. Rather, VC's often impose "VC math" on companies in three areas: 1) the amount VC's "need" to own, 2) the amount VC's "need" to invest, and 3) the return VC's "need" to generate certain exit returns.

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OnMedia 2010 Top 100 Competition

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:37:50 +0000

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its fourth annual OnMedia Top 100 Private Companies competition. We're looking for the top emerging technology companies that are creating new business opportunities in the worlds of media, advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

    •    Advertising Service Providers
    •    Community Platforms

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The Top 25 Women in Tech

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:12:35 +0000

AlwaysOn is proud to announce its first annual Top 25 Women in Tech list. These trailblazers have taken the technology industry by storm and been involved with some of the most innovative and lucrative companies in the past decade. The last 18 months have been especially challenging and, as you'll see from this list, the companies these women are driving are consistently scoring big successes, not only in terms of revenue, but reach, innovation, and return on stakeholder investments.

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VCs Forecasting Rebound in Tech IPOs

Tony Perkins — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:02:34 +0000

Even with talk that the venture capital industry still needs to shrink further, there was reason for some optimism on Tuesday. Amid an improving economy, the news circulated that at long last, a number of technology companies are working on initial public offerings in what may be the long-awaited return of the engine that drives Silicon Valley. "We are coming out of a very dry period," George Lee, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, said at the Venture Summit Silicon Valley conference. "I think you could see 50 tech IPOs next year."

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Google Redefines Disruption

Bill Gurley — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:50:37 +0000

I like to think of myself as an aficionado of business disruption. After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent. One of the most successful ways to do this is to change the rules of the game in such a way that the incumbent would need to abandon or destroy its core business in order to lay chase to your strategy.

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The AO X Fund: Week 64

Michael Moe — Tue, 23 May 2000 08:45:00 +0000

For the week, the AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 5.6%, while the NASDAQ was up 3.6%, and the S&P 500 was up 2.2%. Year-to-date, the AO X Fund is up 3%, the NASDAQ is up 3.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 1.8%.

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