Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2013

I’m very excited to be finally be able to announce that this week we’ve added Sam Rosen to our ranks at GRP Partners in the role of entrepreneurs-in-residence – EIR. It’s the first EIR that we’ve had in the years that I’ve been with the firm and I hope will be the start of our investment in this program. And it’s the latest in a series of investments we’ve made in building out our practice as the LA technology market continues to grow robustly and

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Gust

JANUARY 13, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard via ShinyShiny.tv. Many believe that entrepreneurs are born, not made. While I agree that successful company builders usually have a natural inclination to be entrepreneurs, a good education helps polish that apple. There are people who are natural musicians, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to teach them music.

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Berkonomics

JANUARY 17, 2013

My brother, Barry, passed away recently. A world famous architect, he is credited with the design of over 600,000 homes worldwide. He had been named one of the world’s top 100 architects by Architectural Digest, and one of the ten most significant figures of the 20th century by Residential Architect. He was quite a role model as a big brother, five years my senior.

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 14, 2013

I wrote this in my newsletter this morning. Honestly, I’m feeling kind of conflicted on what to write this week… It doesn’t feel right for me to comment on Aaron Swartz—I didn’t know him and I don’t know enough about the details of his case to go around placing blame. So instead, I’ll just say this… Life can be extremely trying sometimes.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2013

It’s January. Happy New Year! My last post was December 17 – nearly a month ago. I miss blogging because it serves as a great repository for me of my current thinking, as a way of organizing my thoughts and clarifying what I think and as a conversation started with so many of you (as Hunter Walk elegantly said, “Blog not to show how smart you are, but in the hope of soliciting feedback from smart people.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 16, 2013

Products aren’t sold in isolation - they exist within ecosystems. Great product market fit and sales pitches hinge on understanding and serving all the members of an ecosystem. Should a product fail to meet the needs of any one member, company success and sales velocity will falter. One tool I use with portfolio companies is the Value Proposition Diagram (VPD) which shows why a product is compelling to every customer - and most products are sold to more than one customer at the same time.

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For Entrepreneurs

JANUARY 16, 2013

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin This article is a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business. It is a completely updated rewrite of an older post. For this version, I have co-opted two real experts in the [.].

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 16, 2013

I have this vision. Someone gets all of the most powerful and connected women in NYC--Barbara Corcoran, Beth Comstock, and maybe even folks like Lady Gaga--and puts together a Founder Collective--like venture fund. Everyone could toss in 100k and you could definitely find 1:1 matching from various instructions to bring it up to $10mm. Let's bring in both Clinton women, too, while we're at it.

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Gust

JANUARY 15, 2013

Is the bloom off of the startups rose? Two days ago the New York Times published this story about investors getting pickier. I think the NYTimes’ headline is slightly off from the story’s content. It’s not that much about a rocky recent past; it’s more about money being too easy in the recent past, and now, as a natural result, things get tighter because “easy” money doesn’t always mean enough of the due diligence and thought to make good deals.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2013

Many of the SaaS companies I work with are buzzing about a new concept: product qualified leads (PQL). It’s typical to see outbound sales teams create new leads by cold-calling - think Glengarry. And marketing also qualifies leads (MQL) using online advertising, branding, content, email and other channels. But the PQL concept is novel. PQLs are potential customers who have used a product and reached pre-defined triggers that signify a strong likelihood to become a paying customer.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 14, 2013

The tech community has become more politically active over the past 5 years and this is a good thing. We live in a representative democracy and organizing, having a voice and expressing views is critical to our functioning democracy. One of the most visible, active and admirable leaders of this movement is Ron Conway and he describes this in this post on TechCrunch.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 13, 2013

Photo: flickr/nemabix. I don’t remember much of junior year chemistry class except the lab experiment in which we made fireworks. My lab partner and I doubled and tripled the amounts of strontium, potassium, calcium and other explosives specified in the instructions. Our firecracker dwarfed our classmates' in size and when we lit them after two unbearable weeks of baking, there was no question we misunderstood chemistry.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JANUARY 15, 2013

If you’re like me, you switch task managers every six months at the point that you have added a bunch of items in your list that you’ll never get around to and can’t bear to be reminded of them again. At which point, you conclude that the app has failed you. It must have because you haven’t completed any of these tasks! Task management tools fail users because they operate without context.

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