September, 2013

article thumbnail

Is @AngelList Syndicates Really Such a Big Deal?

Both Sides of the Table

'If you track the venture capital industry it would be hard to miss the conversation going on this week over AngelList “Syndicates.” From the hyperbolic Jason Calacanis weighing in that “The petty VC’s did everything to deride [Naval, the co-founder of AngelList]” as though the industry was collectively s g its pants that AngelList was going to put us out of business.

VC 356
article thumbnail

Your Startup Already Started

This is going to be BIG.

'Last Thursday marked the one year anniversary of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures being a real fund with money in it and everything--so it was fitting that I had my first annual investor meeting. We don''t do anything too fancy. I borrowed a conference room from a friend''s company and we huddled around some great sandwiches and pasta from Catercow. I brought three founders in for the first time and they rocked it.

startup 290
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

2013 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey

For Entrepreneurs

'We worked together with Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a specific focus on SaaS, to survey 155 SaaS companies on a variety of topics such as growth rates, CAC (cost to acquire a customer), gross margins, churn rates, etc. The goal of the survey is to provide useful operational and financial benchmarking data. […].

SaaS 168
article thumbnail

Failure is the greatest of teachers.

Berkonomics

'Not all companies are successful. The end game can be a failure of the business. In fact, many angel investors or venture capitalists look for and respect the lessons learned by entrepreneurs that have survived a failed business. The key question is how did the entrepreneur fail? And then: What lessons were learned from the failure? One VC calls this entrepreneur one who “has seen the movie before” and spends time questioning the entrepreneur on lessons learned, often praising the person for

article thumbnail

The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

article thumbnail

Not Sharing the Opportunity to Learn is a Cardinal Sin

Tomasz Tunguz

I have never worked for a company that was dogmatic about project postmortems but I have always wished I had. After all, project postmortems teach us so much. Learning from the mistakes and experiences of others constitutes the better part of our business education. It’s why we ask successful entrepreneurs to coffee and hang on every word when they speak at conferences.

More Trending

article thumbnail

Why We Think B2B Crowdsourced Logistics Will Be a Big Hit

Both Sides of the Table

'Six months ago Upfront Ventures announced its first Partner hire since 2007 – Greg Bettinelli. I wrote about him here. More importantly, he has just announced his first investment – he led a $7 million investment in Deliv – please read about it on Greg’s spiffy new blog. It’s been a really exciting time for me personally to be able to see a partner come in with the energy, enthusiasm and new ideas that remind me of myself 6 years ago.

article thumbnail

How Open Should a Startup CEO be with Staff?

Both Sides of the Table

'CEO transparency. It almost sounds uncontroversial. A CEO should tell her staff everything! Right? Right?!? Of course not. It’s a hard topic to write about because it’s almost an accepted norm that total transparency is good. It is not. For starters let me use “CEO” as a proxy to include her “inner circle” which might mean co-founders or might just mean senior execs of the business.

article thumbnail

Why The Media Has Been Wrong About YouTube Networks

Both Sides of the Table

'For much of 2013 I watched the press write articles about how the YouTube “MCNs” (multi-channel networks) were doomed and tried to square that with the data I was watching at the one I invested in, Maker Studios, who has had one hell of a year. Maker announced it has raised $62 million this year, acquired an amazing off-YouTube distribution network and grown its business in monetary terms by almost 300% year-over-year off of an already large base.

article thumbnail

If you Can’t Make Time, MakeSpace

Both Sides of the Table

'If you Can’t Make Time, MakeSpace. A few months ago I wrote about an entrepreneur, Sam Rosen, whom we brought on as an EIR at Upfront Ventures. I would have liked to have been even more Upfront with you back then about our intentions with Sam but out of respect to him we held back on our broader thesis until now. Today we announced our launch. Here’s the deal.

advice 340
article thumbnail

PE Mastery: CAPTARGET's Playbook for Quality Lead Flow

CAPTARGET presents a masterclass in M&A deal sourcing. Learn to cast a wide net, embracing seller self-identification. Consistency is the linchpin: keep the origination process steady for a reliable flow of opportunities. Diversify your tactics, employing various tools and vendors. Tech matters! Understand DNS settings, domain authority, and brand presence for optimal outreach.

article thumbnail

Upfront Ventures Adds Hamet Watt as New Investment Partner

Both Sides of the Table

'Today is a day I’ve waited patiently for for 5 years but more earnestly for more than 1 year. I am thrilled to announce that we have added Hamet Watt as a Partner at Upfront Ventures. Now that he’s become a VC he’s promising me he’ll provide way more public information and discourse so please welcome him by following him on Twitter and better yet welcoming him with a Tweet of your own linking to his Twitter handle or this post.

ventures 340
article thumbnail

Why Titles Matter a Lot if You’re a Blogger

Both Sides of the Table

'Gabe Rivera wrote a post on why TechMeme is now using its editors to curate titles that appear on its site. Gabe’s post appears first on TechMeme’s website, which must mean Gabe has paid off some TechMeme editors to get his story to rise to the top. I never saw it go out with a “tip @techmeme” on Twitter. Did you? Well. His article is well worth reading anyways.

media 326
article thumbnail

Derisking

This is going to be BIG.

'Risk is really another word for uncertainty. Investing in utilities is fairly low risk, because we''re pretty sure that people aren''t going to suddenly start using twice as much electricity out of the blue (or half as much, unfortunately). Investing in startups is fairly high risk, because not only could they go out of business, but they could be huge home runs.

article thumbnail

How to Present and Answer Questions in a Team Presentation or VC Pitch

Both Sides of the Table

'I sit through a lot of presentations. These range from companies pitching me to portfolio companies presenting at board meetings. Each of these scenarios has a team presenting. Almost always the CEO plus members of his or her management team including tech, marketing, sales and/or product. Some CEO’s are masters at communicating when team members are present.

pitching 377
article thumbnail

How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

article thumbnail

Stop

This is going to be BIG.

'Stop looking at your paycheck as a measure of success. Stop counting followers as a measure of how loved you are. Stop using likes as a measure of the love you give. Stop using investor dollars as the metric of success for your business. Stop using square footage to feel good about where you live. Stop using pounds to measure your health. Stop using sexual partners as the measure for interpersonal relations.

health 300
article thumbnail

Google F1 and The Cascade of Innovation New Databases Create

Tomasz Tunguz

The NoSQL movement launched officially in 1999 but rose to prominence much later perhaps closer to 2008 when Hadoop and other key value pair technologies became en vogue. Today, it’s hard to argue with the success of the movement. Large banks, insurance companies, biotech companies and dotcoms rely on NoSQL to power their services and inform their most important decisions.

article thumbnail

Six Key Benchmarks for Your SaaS Startup

Tomasz Tunguz

One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask me is how does their business compare to others? Benchmarking is a great tool, if you can get access to representative data. Pacific Crest and David Skok have released a fantastic survey benchmarking SaaS metrics for early and growth stage companies. The entire report is well worth reading. Below is my list of the six most important benchmarks and observations from that report.

SaaS 44
article thumbnail

Using The Friend Paradox to Maximize Your Effectiveness at Startup Networking Events

Tomasz Tunguz

I’ll never forget the first large tech conference I attended after joining Redpoint. Held in the movie theater in downtown Redwood City, the TechCrunch conference attracted several hundred entrepreneurs, investors and journalists. Not one of whom I knew. After a handful of conferences and a few awkward quick-name-badge-glance-then-say-hello conversations, I started to recognize faces and became friendly with the conference regulars.

article thumbnail

Statement of Cash Flows vs. Cash Flow Statement

Speaker: Wayne Spivak - President and Chief Financial Officer of SBA * Consulting LTD, Industry Writer, and Public Speaker

The old adages that "cash is king" and "you can’t spend profits" still hold true today. But however well-known these sayings might be, it requires a change in mindset to properly implement a cash flow management system that predicts your business's runaway as accurately as possible. Key to this new mindset is understanding the difference between the Statement of Cash Flows, a historical look at the source and uses of cash, and the Cash Flow Statement, which uses transaction history and forward-l

article thumbnail

How Wordpress Used VideoConferencing and IRC to Change the World

Tomasz Tunguz

I’ve been reading Scott Berkun’s book The Year Without Pants which details his working life at Wordpress. The book reveals a thought-provoking collection of lore behind Wordpress and in particular, the day-to-day operations of a distributed volunteer team who built a technology that powers about 20% of the internet. Scott embeds insightful gems about daily startup work life into his stories.

article thumbnail

The VC Firm of the Future

Tomasz Tunguz

The venture capital fund of the future will perform the same tasks as the venture funds of today: help portfolio companies, evaluate new investment opportunities and build networks of other investors, potential hires, and founders. But to succeed over the next 25 years, venture capital firms must increase the scale and sophistication of each of these duties by order of magnitude through technology.

VC 40
article thumbnail

The Best Content Marketing Campaign in the Last Year: Do VC Blogs Actually Lead to Investments?

Tomasz Tunguz

In a very kind gesture, Ivan Kirigin submitted this blog (and Intercom.io’s blog) to answer the question posed by Disqus, What is the best content marketing campaign you have seen and why? I’m honored by his comment. In response, David Fleck, head of revenue at Disqus asked whether the blog has ever led to an investment and whether that’s the right KPI for it.

article thumbnail

You’re Not Finished Selling Until You Change Your Customers Habits

Tomasz Tunguz

It is easy to think the sales process ends once a customer has signed a contract or downloaded an app or created an account. But it’s a huge mistake. Great products have a point of view on the way things ought to work. GMail chose labels over folders for email categorization. Pandora chose recommendations over libraries for music libraries. Looker chose spreadsheets over an SQL prompts for data exploration.

article thumbnail

How to Avoid the Pain and Cost of PCI Compliance While Optimizing Payments

Speaker: P. Andrew Sjogren, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Very Good Security, Matt Doka, Co-Founder and CTO of Fivestars, and Steve Andrews, President & CEO of the Western Bankers Association 

PCI compliance can feel challenging and sometimes the result feels like you are optimizing more for security and compliance than you are for business outcomes. The key is to take the right strategy to PCI compliance that gets you both. In this webinar, we have a great set of panelists who will take you through how Zero Data strategies can be used as part of a well-rounded compliance and security approach, and get you to market much sooner by also allowing for payment optimization.

article thumbnail

A million things can kill the deal.

Berkonomics

'So you’ve found the buyer, received a letter of interest, signed it, and tied your company up for a period to complete the deal. Everyone on the board is anxious to close this. You’ve committed time to do whatever is needed. You’ve informed your top management of the pending deal and they know they will be impacted and are a bit skittish. You wonder if you should make a public announcement to your troops, worrying over loss of focus, people thinking of jumping ship, competitors finding mors

advice 85
article thumbnail

Envision the end game. Advance toward the goal.

Berkonomics

'When we start a business, we are optimistic that we will succeed and dream of riches to follow when the company is sold or even participating in an IPO. Some of us build our businesses to be lifestyle creations, destined to provide for our families but not necessarily as creators of great equity upon an eventual sale. But most of us dream of selling the business someday for lots of money and building our wealth upon that event.

76
article thumbnail

Provide for succession well in advance of need.

Berkonomics

'When we are young and early in our business lives, we feel infallible to the degree that we do not think of what might happen if we die while in office or decide to leave the company for any reason. Such thoughts just do not occur to most of us until the business is substantially far enough along in its growth to have multiple layers of management and enough employees and stakeholders that there is a board of directors and calls for key man insurance and succession planning.

board 73
article thumbnail

The 3 Competitive Defenses of Enduring SaaS Companies

Tomasz Tunguz

A technology advantage isn’t enough to build an enduring enterprise SaaS company because at the core, all SaaS software share the same architecture. A relational database stores data and a web site presents the data. This is true for CRM (Salesforce), marketing automation (Marketo), email (Exchange), content management systems (Sharepoint) and so on.

SaaS 40
article thumbnail

Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in