Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2017

It was only a year ago that many in the Venture Capital industry were predicting that “winter was coming” and to be fair the author of this post was chief amongst them. Yet as we enter February 2017 the VC funding markets are booming, Snap, Inc has filed for its IPO, AppDynamics was just purchased for $3.7 billion by Cisco and the only winter that can be found is at the ski resorts following California’s epic snowy and rainy January.

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venture capital capital ventures VC 229

Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 9, 2017

When do you sell your company? Obviously we all want to sell at the top. And there is the problem. How do you know when you are at or near that right point to sell for maximum value? Those of us in the business of calculating (guessing) this mythical peak in value often make the same mistake as our entrepreneurs. We hang on just a little bit longer, expecting continued or accelerating growth and value as in previous periods of the same.

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sustainability board accelerator entrepreneurs 102

propel(x)

FEBRUARY 6, 2017

Each and every one of us has been touched by our national lab system in more ways than we realize. That’s especially the case with the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), whose innovations and cutting edge technologies continue to impact us in surprising ways. They help us parallel park and make our cars safer via crash simulation. They fund satellite imagery of the world around us (does Google Earth ring a bell?).

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Tomasz Tunguz

FEBRUARY 6, 2017

Advances in machine learning are transforming the software world. Two of the most exciting applications of machine learning are speech recognition and natural language processing. After researching the space for more than a year, we are thrilled to announce our investment in and partnership with Chorus , a pioneer in speech analysis for sales. Chorus has a unique technology that enables it to listen to inside sales phone calls and provide real-time feedback to salespeople while they are speaking

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investing investment enablement innovation 44

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Lack of digitalization decreases business competitiveness. To thrive, embracing modern solutions becomes essential. The approach to digitalization often aligns with a company's business model. This shift not only boosts productivity but also automates processes and improves security. The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.

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For Entrepreneurs

FEBRUARY 8, 2017

This presentation is from my talk at the 2017 SaaStr Annual conference in San Francisco. It offers an overview of a simple model to understand a SaaS business and the key levers a CEO can pull to get the most impact. The presentation covers: Optimizing the SaaS Funnel: Get inside your customer’s head Break down.

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SaaS startup 160

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2017

Mark Cuban opened the Upfront Summit in an epic interview by Jason Hirschhorn , founder of Media REDEF. Machine Learning / AI They discussed many topics ranging from protection of the press to what Mark looks for in an entrepreneur to investing outside of Silicon Valley and of course Trump and sports. But perhaps to most insightful was their discussion about Machine Learning / AI.

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Tomasz Tunguz

FEBRUARY 4, 2017

Win probability charts like the one above have become the icons of popular predictive data analysis. I love data, but let me whisper a heresy to you. I detest these charts. I Instead of provoking thought, insight and questions, they close minds. They support the ideas of inevitability, of odds too great to overcome. Congratulations to the Patriots who faced a 99% probability of losing the game, but passed the ball down the field into the endzone twice, and rendered this fallacious prediction wor

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data analysis SaaS networking startup founder 40

Tomasz Tunguz

FEBRUARY 9, 2017

One of the hardest thing to do in sales, especially for early stage SaaS companies, is to disqualify customers. When a startup disqualifies a customer, they turn away a revenue opportunity, a chance to add $1k of MRR or $3k of MRR, and meaningfully grow the top line. But if the customer isn’t the right customer, that incremental revenue bears a hidden cost.

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SaaS development opportunity support 40

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2017

Glenn Beck holds court at the Upfront Summit with legendary VC Vinod Khosla and UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla (not related) If you asked me a year ago when we were hosting the 2016 Upfront Summit the odds of Glenn Beck speaking at the next Summit I would have emphatically said ZERO. The first sign that there might be more to Glenn Beck than the impressions I had had from occasionally watching a clip from his show was when he wrote a very thoughtful piece about the Facebook algorithm and I was s

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media leadership VC entrepreneurs 280

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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.

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