DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans

I’ve written a few times about what seems to be an exploding tech scene in NYC. This is sometimes interpreted as arguing that NYC is a better place to start a company than the Valley. Most recently, Matt Mireles seems to be addressing people like me with his critique of the NYC startup scene (he [...]

In an earlier blog post, I talked about how sites that generate purchasing intent (mainly "content" sites) are being under-allocated advertising dollars versus sites that harvest purchasing intent (search engines, coupon sites, comparison shopping sites, etc). As a result, most content sites are left haggling over CPM-based brand advertising instead of sponsored links for the [...]

When founding a tech startup, there are certain areas where you should spend time trying to be creative/innovative. Generally these should be: product, recruiting, marketing etc. One slightly disturbing trend I’ve noticed is founders trying to creative about stuff like legal terms that really are better left in their "default" form. Here’s my advice: hire a [...]

Significant new technologies often emerge as "stacks." You can look at stacks through a technological (e.g. OSI stack) or business lens. Here I am using a business lens, thus dividing layers by function and including things that aren’t technologies but have economic value, e.g. relationships with customers and users. Normally stacks are constructed from the bottom [...]

VC returns over the last decade have been poor. The cause is widely agreed to be an excess of venture capital dollars to worthy startups. Observers seem to universally assume that the solution is for the VC industry to downsize. For example, Fred Wilson says about VC: You cannot invest $25bn per year and generate the kinds of [...]

For some reason when you are selling information technology, big companies are referred to as "enterprises." I’m guessing the word was invented by a software vendor who was trying to justify a million-dollar price tag. As a rule of thumb, think of enterprise sales as products/services that cost $100K/year or more. I am by no means [...]

Venture capital term sheets are not legally binding (except certain subclauses like confidentiality and no-shop provisions). That said, there is a well-established norm that VC’s don’t back out of signed term sheets unless they discover something really, really bad - fraud, criminal backgrounds of founders etc. The best VC in the world, Sequoia Capital, [...]