DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans
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Recent Posts
- The Enterprise Flash Market is Taking Off
- More on data enabled underwriting
- How to Build the Next Huge Mobile App
- How will Tablets and Kindles change reading?
- What is the right age to found a company?
- How Big Data is changing the lending industry
- Why so many hot apparel ecommerce startups are vertically integrated
- WSJ compares Petfood ecommerce, likes Petflow
- Commerce in the Time of Social
- Democratization of Entrepreneurship
- How to deal with bad PR
- Internet/Media: 5 things that will define 2011
- 2011 Consumer Internet Predictions
- Data exhaust moves beyond targeted marketing and into financial services...
- Congrats to Playdom and Disney!
- How to estimate Lifetime Value; Sample cohort analysis
- How can you improve LTV and CAC?
- Lessons from the leaders - Engagement in social games
- Why Lightspeed invested in ShoeDazzle
- Interview with CEO of Zoosk
Archives
- May 2012 (1)
- April 2012 (2)
- March 2012 (1)
- February 2012 (4)
- September 2011 (1)
- July 2011 (1)
- 2011 (1)
- 2010 (15)
- 2009 (49)
By Category
- External (75)
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Posted: Thursday 10 May 2012
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Congratulations to Lightspeed portfolio company XtremIO and founders Ehud, Shuki, and Yaron for their acquisition which was announced today. This is another reminder of just how fast flash has gone from promising consumer technology to mainstream enterprise building block - primarily fueled by the proliferation of virtualization, BI, and Big Data coupled with the rapid decline in [...]
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Posted: Monday 30 April 2012
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Check out my guest post on data enabled underwriting at American Banker.
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Posted: Thursday 19 April 2012
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The advent and growth of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and, now, Pinterest has heralded a new era in the Internet where people are connected to one another to share, discover, curate, and collaborate. The mobile applications are fast becoming the primary vehicle to access what I call "connected services" to discover people, [...]
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Posted: Monday 26 March 2012
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The first attempts to capitalize on a new medium are always simple ports from an old medium. The first TV shows were newscasts - basically the same as radio, a guy reading the news. The first e-commerce sites were cataloges ported to the internet, with the same copy and a single picture. But over time, [...]
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Posted: Wednesday 29 February 2012
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I read a story in this weeks economist that surprised me. It claimed that founding new businesses is not just a young persons game, but rather that the average age of a founder of a tech startup was 39. Research suggests that age may in fact be an advantage for entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa of Singularity University [...]
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Posted: Monday 27 February 2012
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I have a post on PandoDaily today about how big data +machine learning is reshaping lending and underwriting. I talk about some of the leading players in the space, including Wonga, Zestcash*, Klarna, and others, and why there is so much opportunity to create hugely disruptive companies in this space. Check it out! * Zestcash [...]
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Posted: Friday 3 February 2012
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The WSJ has a story on what goes into the price of a shirt that shows why so many of the current batch of hot apparel ecommerce companies (e.g. Shoedazzle*, Bonobos*, J Hilburn, Warby Parker, IndoChino etc) are vertically integrated. The retail value chain has a significant markup built into both the wholesale and retail channel [...]
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Posted: Friday 3 February 2012
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Last year we invested in Petflow, an online petfood retailer. We believed that Alex and Joe, the two cofounders, would be able to repeat the success they had in founding Azoogle (now part of Epic Media Group) and that the repeat purchase behavior inherent in petfood would generate loyal repeat customers and high lifetime value, [...]
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Posted: Thursday 29 September 2011
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The fabric that underlies the social Internet is essentially a new web where people are the nodes, connected through a social graph. This ubiquitous people to people connection with real identities has significant implications for commerce and how we transact in the real world. The reduction in information asymmetry in the marketplace and the ability [...]
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Posted: Sunday 24 July 2011
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The first decade of the new century witnessed a fundamental change in the nature of the technology entrepreneurship. The dramatic reduction in the cost of starting a technology business combined with readily available risk capital has created a near perfect market for anyone with an idea and some risk tolerance to become an entrepreneur. This [...]
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Posted: Sunday 6 March 2011
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The Economist has published a couple of interesting articles about how to deal with bad PR recently. The first suggests that it is better to ignore bad PR than to fight it: …rebuttals are unwise, argue Derek Rucker and David Dubois, of the Kellogg School of Management, and Zakary Tormala, of Stanford business school, three [...]
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Posted: Thursday 9 December 2010
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Some observations from Bipul Sinha about the internet and media industry in 2011. 1. Year of Social Utilities With over half a billion users and open graph integration, Facebook is the Internet with social graph at its core. This is as much of a game-changer (due to a new distribution model based on the social [...]
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Posted: Friday 3 December 2010
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Once again Lightspeed is going on the record with some prognostications for what the future holds. Before I try gazing into my crystal ball to see what 2011 will bring for the consumer internet industry, let me first see how I did on last years predictions: 1. Social games overflow out of Facebook Grade: C+. [...]
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Posted: Sunday 28 November 2010
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Fascinating article in the WSJ a couple of weeks ago about how the big insurance companies are testing using data profiles to identify risky clients. Using the data is potentially an alternative to the costly physical exams currently used to underwrite health insurance policies: In one of the biggest tests, the U.S. arm of [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 27 July 2010
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As reported today, Lightspeed Portfolio company Playdom is being bought by Disney for up to $763M. Congrats to both parties, as well as to John, Dan, Ling, Chris, Rick and the rest of the Playdom team!
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Posted: Monday 19 July 2010
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In many businesses, repeat purchase behavior is a key driver of value. Many companies track % of repeat purchases as a key business metric. This is useful in steady state, but can sometimes be quite misleading if the company is showing substantial growth. By definition, growth implies many first time customers, and the mix of [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 15 June 2010
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A lot of the startups that have quickly reached millions in monthly revenue rely on the arbitrage of being able to acquire customers through paid marketing for less than the lifetime value of that customer. CAC < LTV As a reminder, lifetime value, or lifetime contribution as it should perhaps more accurately be named, is [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 11 May 2010
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On Friday I moderated a panel at the social gaming summit featuring speakers from Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and Crowdstar on the topic of engagement best practices in social games. Socialtimes has a brief writeup of the session: Social gaming giants tend to focus on hits. An under performing game can be a cause for concern [...]
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Posted: Wednesday 28 April 2010
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Lightspeed led a $13m investment in Shoedazzle, announced yesterday. We are very excited to help Shoedazzle grow. Shoedazzle is one of the companies that I was thinking of when I wrote about startups that can quickly get to millions in monthly revenue: … are all taking advantage of one of Lightspeeds consumer internet predictions for 2010, [...]
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Posted: Thursday 8 April 2010
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Atul Bagga, the gaming analyst at the investment bank ThinkEquity, published an interesting research report today where he interviewed the CEO of Zoosk. I am republishing it here with his permission:
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THINK SUMMARY:
We had a chance to speak with Shayan Zadeh, the co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, a multi-channel dating service with presence on social [...]
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