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Personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype (acquired by eBay), Postini (acquired by Google), Flarion (acquired by Qualcomm), Gracenote (acquired by S...
Quicklinks
Recent Posts
- Who should learn to program?
- Maximizing capacity utilization as a startup premise
- Building products from improvised user behaviors
- The TripAdvisor IPO
- Later-stage rounds and "setting the bar too high"
- Three types of acquisitions
- Horizontal specialization as a catalyst for startups
- Making industries "garage ready" for startups
- Why is enterprise tech so far behind consumer tech? Because it can be.
- Getting broadband in Manhattan
- Business development: the Goldilocks principle
- Some lessons learned
- Summary of new patent bill (America Invents Act)
- Owning equity in your company should be as common as owning equity in your home
- The downside of accelerated investment decisions
- Thomas Jefferson on Patents
- The next big thing is sitting right in front of you
- Founder/market fit
- Options
- Taste graph infographic
Archives
- January 2012 (3)
- December 2011 (7)
- November 2011 (1)
- September 2011 (3)
- July 2011 (3)
- June 2011 (1)
- May 2011 (2)
- April 2011 (3)
- March 2011 (2)
- February 2011 (1)
- 2010 (35)
- 2009 (37)
By Category
- External (98)
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Posted: Tuesday 31 January 2012
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There has recently been a lot of talk in the tech world and beyond about getting more people to learn computer programming. I think this is a worthy goal*, but the question should be considered from various angles. 1. Jobs & the economy. Businesses all over the world need more programmers. Every company I know [...]
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Posted: Thursday 5 January 2012
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In stark contrast to other major airlines, Southwest has been profitable for 40 years. If Southwest had one core "startup premise" it was this: for every second the planes sat on the ground, their airplanes and people were costing them money but not generating revenue. So Southwest designed an airline from the ground up that maximized capacity [...]
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Posted: Monday 2 January 2012
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For a long time, there were niche communities of "lo-fi" camera enthusiasts: people who enjoyed photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared those pictures using other apps. Then came [...]
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Posted: Wednesday 21 December 2011
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- Great startup story. Raised a total of $4.2m in venture capital, sold to IAC/Expedia for $210M, and had some interesting adventures and pivots along the way. They started out by trying to aggregate reviews from other websites and white label their product to Expedia and other large travel websites. TripAdvisor.com was just a showcase [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 13 December 2011
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I recently had a number of conversations with CEOs of later-stage startups (generating significant revenue) that went something like this. They want to raise more money, and VCs are offering them money at a high valuation. The CEO is worried that taking money at that valuation will "set the bar too high" and make it [...]
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Posted: Saturday 10 December 2011
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There are three types of technology acquisitions: - Talent. When the acquirer just wants the team (generally just engineers and sometimes designers). As a rule of thumb, these acquisitions are priced at approximately $1M/engineer. - Tech: When the acquirer wants the technology along with the team. Generally the prices for these acquisitions are significantly higher [...]
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Posted: Monday 5 December 2011
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One of the most important events in the history of modern computing was the advent of "fabless" semiconductor companies. The story of fabless semi companies is similar to the recent history of internet startups: various forces led to a massive lowering of startup costs, which then led to a boom in innovation. Before the 1980s, [...]
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Posted: Monday 5 December 2011
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One of the most important events in the history of modern computing was the advent of "fabless" ("fabrication-less") semiconductor companies. The story of fabless semis is similar to the recent history of internet startups: various forces led to an order-of-magnitude reduction of startup costs, which then led to a surge of innovation. Before the 1980s, if you [...]
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Posted: Sunday 4 December 2011
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Brian Manning put it nicely in a comment to my post yesterday about enterprise software: In my opinion, enterprise technology is WAY behind consumer technology for one reason: because it can be. In a [B2B] transaction, one good salesperson (the "seller") only has to sell one person (the "buyer") on the value of the technology. Once [...]
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Posted: Friday 2 December 2011
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I live in a central part of Manhattan and work in more or less the center of the emerging internet district (21st & 6th). Amazingly, one of our biggest challenges being a NYC startup has been getting reliable internet access. At home I have one option - Time Warner cable - and the service is [...]
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Posted: Monday 28 November 2011
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Background: At Hunch, we switched our focus ("pivoted") about 14 months ago from B2C to B2B. Over that time, we pitched over 500 potential partners, trying to get them to use and eventually pay for our recommendation services. This process had its ups and downs, but eventually ended well when - after 8 months of [...]
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Posted: Wednesday 28 September 2011
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Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the [...]
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Posted: Friday 16 September 2011
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From my friend Charles Cella at the excellent patent firm GTC Law Group. (email from them published with permission) REVISIONS TO UNITED STATES PATENT LAW As you may be aware, the Senate passed the America Invents Act (AIA) on September 8, 2011. This act will create sweeping changes in US patent law once signed by [...]
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Posted: Monday 12 September 2011
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What belongs in common to the most people is accorded the least care: they take thought for their own things above all, and less about things common, or only so much as falls to each individually. - Aristotle * A major policy goal of capitalist countries in the 20th century was to encourage home ownership. It [...]
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Posted: Friday 29 July 2011
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There has been a lot of talk about how early-stage valuations have risen dramatically over the past few years. Financially, this is probably good for founders and bad for investors. But a side effect of this frothy market is that financings are occurring much faster. It is very common for investors to get introduced to [...]
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Posted: Saturday 16 July 2011
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If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, [...]
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Posted: Saturday 2 July 2011
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When I started grad school in 2001, every student was given an online "classcard". Classcards were kind of a hybrid of modern-day LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. They were mostly static: no feed or status updates or any other advanced features that we are all accustomed to now. But they were wildly popular. Students spent countless [...]
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Posted: Sunday 19 June 2011
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An extremely useful concept that has grown popular among startup founders is what eminent entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen calls "product/market fit", which he defines as "being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market". Andreessen argues persuasively that product/market fit is "the only thing that matters for a new startup" and that "the [...]
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Posted: Friday 13 May 2011
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The financial term "derivative" refers to a security whose value is a function of another security such as a stock or bond. The most common types of derivatives are futures - the obligation to buy a security at a future date at pre-agreed upon price - and options - the right to buy something at a future [...]
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Posted: Monday 9 May 2011
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Cool infographic about our core technology at Hunch, what we call the "taste graph." My favorite stat is that we have >25,000 API clients making >400,000 calls per day (many clients seem to be devs building not-yet-release apps). Upcoming infographic will focus just on API usage and growth. And yes, crazy as it seems, we [...]
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