March 29, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, nextNY had a great round table discussion about the explosion of new models and companies in eCommerce—from group buying to flash sales to local discounts. A lot of ideas came out of it—many were ones that we’ve been thinking about at First Round for a while, given our investments in One King’s Lane, Homerun, Bigdeal, Modcloth, Monetate and Packlate, among others. ...
March 27, 2010
Looking at the World Through Plan-colored Glasses
I just spent some time this morning with an entrepreneur whose business was operationally demanding and depended a lot on 3rd party companies. In the very near term, the best laid plans always seemed to go awry when the next customer fire needed to be put out. Writing out a roadmap seemed like an exercise in futility. On top of that, he wasn’t sure how much board communication was ...
March 24, 2010
How to make the best out of an investor meeting (and how to see my free times with Tungle.me)
Over the last couple of months, I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting with a ton of early stage startups. Most times, the entrepreneurs are great, the ideas are sometimes hit and miss, but the biggest variance is their ability to effectively run a meeting. I’m not talking about having a great pitch—because sometimes a pitch isn’t what a particular style of meeting really calls for. ...
March 22, 2010
Rentalic and appbackr Win $150,000 PayPal Challenge
Paypal's Osama Bedier announced that Rentalic and appbackr are the PayPal X Developer Challenge winners today at DEMO Spring 2010. Over 650 submissions were reviewed by the community, with the final winners selected by Pierre Omidyar, Scott Cook, Scott Thompson, Mark Andreessen and Roelof Botha. First-place finisher Rentalic faciiltates peer-to-peer renting. Neighbors and family rent to each ...
March 18, 2010
Don’t Build a Content Ghost Town
When a reader lands on my blog, they’re going to run into a lot of people. First off, there’s me. I am front and center when it comes to being in close proximity to what I write. Not only is my e-mail address on my blog, but I even have a live Plugoo widget that you can type into and send me a message on AIM. Sometimes I’m not there or I’m busy, but I’m generally pretty ...
March 17, 2010
Five applications that should be platforms—Dropbox, Eventbrite, Backupify, Tweetdeck, and Squa
If you think you’re going to satisfy every last one of your potential customers, it’s simply not going to happen. For every application, the list of features that your userbase will ask you to implement is a mile long. Often, a feature will only work for a very small number of people—and so perhaps you wouldn’t think twice about dismissing it. However, occasionally, and maybe more ...
March 17, 2010
MVPP: Minimum Viable Product Purchase and the lesson of the first trash talk T’s
When I was at AND 1 my job was to understand the customer and build product that he would love (and buy). In my role at First Round, I get to meet tons of smart people who are doing the same thing. I was making t-shirts, shorts and shoes and they are building technology, but at the end of the day, understanding what the consumer will love (and buy) is the essence of the work. The task at every ...
March 17, 2010
MVPP: Minimum Viable Product Purchase and the lesson of the first trash talk T’s
When I was at AND 1 my job was to understand the customer and build product that he would love (and buy). In my role at First Round, I get to meet tons of smart people who are doing the same thing. I was making t-shirts, shorts and shoes and they are building technology, but at the end of the day, understanding what the consumer will love (and buy) is the essence of the work. The task at every ...
March 13, 2010
Everything I didn’t learn about startups as a VC (…or why VCs don’t make good ent
There are a lot of great venture capitalists who started out as entrepreneurs like Vinod Khosla or Josh Kopelman. Going the other way, however, seems to be a bit tougher. In fact, I don’t really know anyone who has successfully gone the other way. Many entrepreneurs turned VCs wind up going back, but to start out on the investment side and then successfully launch a company seems to happen ...
March 12, 2010
Articles I enjoyed this past week and why. In brief. Seed Magazine Findings Log: Fascinating briefs on general science topics. My favorites including an overview on how Earth’s magnetic field was crucial to enabling life; in great news for doctors, patients and gamers, brain-computer-interfaces (BCI) become easier to implement; weed killer and hermaphroditic frogs Pinpointing Disease with [...]
