The Democratization of Entrepreneurship
One of the great trends we’ve been witnessing over the past decade, and in particular the past 5 years, has been what you might call the “democratization” of entrepreneurship”. It’s a powerful trend and one that I think will have a huge impact not just on the US economy and workforce, but perhaps even more intensely on other areas of the world – particularly developing economies. There are several underlying factors that I think underpin this sift that are worth noting: …
February 20, 2013· 4 min read
Marc Barros on the shift from Product to Marketing/Sales
Marc Barros, the founder of Contour cameras wrote a great follow-up to my post on your company’s shift from a product focus to building out a sales and marketing organization that’s definitely worth reading. A few excerpts here: 1. Make A Clear Definition of Success Early on, often before you raise venture capital, you want to create a clear picture of what the future looks like. That picture can include a range of things such as how you define your culture, values, employee morale, size, revenue growth, market domination, etc. Equally how you define success could range from world domination (e.g., Square) to building a small company focused on great products (e.g., 37 Signals). …
February 5, 2013· 5 min read
The #hash economy
Back in the late 90’s I started noticing URLs at the end of many TV advertisements. They started as general company URLs (and were relatively infrequent) and eventually because almost ubiquitous leading not just to company home pages but eventually to product pages or other ares of a company’s site were one could get more information about whatever was being hocked on TV (or in a magazine, etc.). Fast forward a few years and we saw the same phenomenon with brands and their Facebook pages. And then Twitter. These were/are great ways for brands to get more information to people interested in their products. And to some extent through Twitter and Facebook “engage” with people so inclined to interact in that way with the producers of products they like and use. …
January 31, 2013· 3 min read
Shifting from a product company to a sales/marketing company
At the risk of overgeneralizing (although to be fair as a VC that’s pretty much my job description) and understanding that there’s plenty of grey area here, I’ve really been noticing recently just how challenging it can be for organizations to move from being product focused to sales and marketing focused. It seems worthy of a post (and hopefully getting some feedback on). Early on in their lives most companies are built around a focus on product. They tend to be engineering heavy, key deliverables center around feature releases and sticking to a dev schedule and success is measured by the progress a business makes on building and releasing product vs. revenue generated from that product. …
January 24, 2013· 3 min read
That new era of Venture Capital is here
A couple of years ago I posted about what I thought would be the “new era of Venture Capital.” Specifically I was predicting that we’d see a strong barbell effect in VC fundraising. From that post: I believe what we’re going to see in the venture industry is a bifurcation of fundraising– basically a barbell on the graph of fund sizes. Large, well known, multi-sector and multi-stage “mega-funds” will be able to raise $750MM or greater at one end of the scale, and smaller, more focused funds will raise $250MM or less on the other end – with a relatively small number of funds in the middle. [note: not sure what the problem is with the graphic from the original post, but I do know that it’s not rendering correctly) …
January 7, 2013· 2 min read
Welcome Costanoa
While the world may not need more venture capitalists, it definitely needs more good ones. Enter Costanoa Venture Capital – launched today by long time investor and entrepreneur (and friend) Greg Sands. As an entrepreneur, Greg is probably most famous for having named Netscape – literally, he was the guy who came up with that name. And of course, working there for quite a while in the seminal days of the internet. As a VC, Greg has been a long time partner at Sutter Hill Ventures. …
December 12, 2012· 1 min read
Some thoughts on your ABBA round
I’ve noticed an ongoing trend over the past year or so that’s worth highlighting and commenting on. As valuations have risen (become “frothy” in VC speak, which is our nice way of saying “too high”) companies have started raising much larger Series A rounds. This is anecdotal – I’ll try to validate it when the numbers are released – but where companies used to raise $3-$5M for their Series A, one response to higher valuations has been a much larger number of companies raising larger and larger Series A rounds (say $6M-$10M). I think this is driven both by entrepreneurs who want to take risk out of their business with more cash on the balance sheet, as well as by investors who, despite higher frothy valuations, are looking to hit certain ownership thresholds. The obvious result of this is much higher post money valuations of Series A companies which puts more pressure on the exit dynamic (ownership thresholds may still be achieved, but the threshold for the proverbial 10x has gone way up). …
November 14, 2012· 2 min read
With isocket, programmatic is taking a bite out of the big side of the pie
For about the past 18 months I’ve been talking about the coming of programmatic technologies (machine to machine buying and selling) to the premiums side of the display ecosystem. It was one of my “2012 AdTech Predictions” published last year in AdExchanger and I expanded on that prediction in a piece earlier this year, also in AdExchanger. The basic idea is simple. Programmatic technology has made a huge difference in online advertising – bringing down transaction costs, allowing for better audience and content targeting, enabling publishers to better manage their inventory while at the same time allowing advertisers to make better buying decisions (not to mention spot ad buys). It’s been a great addition to the ad stack and for Foundry a solid area for investment (our two companies that play directly into this trend are AdMeld, which was purchased by Google late last year, and Triggit, the leading onramp to the Facebook exchange and growing extremely rapidly). Both AdMeld and Triggit – as well as almost all of the other companies that play in programmatic – are focused on non direct sold or remnant inventory. This was a logical place for programmatic technologies to be first applied. Publishers were more focused on the direct sold side of their business since that was where the large dollars were. And the marginal cost for a single impression (and therefore the cost of getting something wrong) was relatively low. At the same time, there was a huge volume of remnant impressions that were available to this ecosystem and because of the way these impressions had traditionally been grouped together for buys by the ad networks, there were significant targeting efficiencies to be gained by adding a software layer to this buying process (allowing more impression and user level information to pass through the system as well as opening up those impressions to multiple bidders through real time bidding). …
October 31, 2012· 4 min read
Introducing Colorado Entrepreneurial By Nature
logo_black_text_transparent_background_LARGEWhen it comes to the question of nature vs. nurture for entrepreneurs it’s clear that both are important. While great entrepreneurs are born with at least the seed of that entrepreneurial spirit, it takes some encouraging – as well as plenty of guidance, help and support – to see that seed blossom. I’ve had the great fortune to experience the evolution and transformation of Colorado into a community that I believe is one of the most supportive of entrepreneurs anywhere in the country. In fact, Colorado has always had an entrepreneurial spirit – from before its founding as a state as a frontier territory supporting prospectors and pioneers, through its history of ranching, the oil and gas boom, as a hub for telecommunications start-ups, to its leadership in LOHAS businesses and the burgeoning green-tech field, to Internet and related technologies. Surrounding these business trends has been a Rocky Mountain lifestyle that has attracted entrepreneurs to our state since the 1800’s. These factors, combined with a support structure and philosophy of paying it forward, has turned Colorado into one of the best places in the country to start a business. …
October 22, 2012· 2 min read
Accomplishment vs. Success
I had a great conversation with an entrepreneur the other day talking about the difference between accomplishment and success. Accomplishment is what happens on the road to success, but declaring something a “success” vs. recognizing that it’s simply one of a handful of requirements to get to success. And of course viewing something this way changes the lens through which you consider that accomplishment and can significantly change decisions you make because of it. Think of it like drawing a line through a single point (or even a couple of relatively closely grouped points) – it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you’re on one path before you actually have the data to prove it. And for a start-up, this can mean spending precious resources inefficiently, before you realize what line you’re really on. I’ve lived through this so many times (as has the entrepreneur I was talking with), plowing full speed ahead without recognizing that we had blinders and only later realizing (after wasting a bunch of money) that we misinterpreted some early accomplishment as successfully having figured something out (which we hadn’t).
October 15, 2012· 1 min read