Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 15, 2012

My Blackberry died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. It seems so long ago that we had to start hiding our Blackberry’s in our pockets to avoid always being chastised. If you were caught sending out an email on your Blackberry you had to quickly whip out your iPhone to show that – wait! – I have one of these, too. It is stunning to think about the blind spots that market leaders can develop.

disruption 386

disruption consulting culture media 386

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 21, 2012

This week, three companies that I met super early and passed on raised significant rounds of funding. Actually, I wouldn't even really call them passes, because in a couple instances, they were just conversations--"Pre Deck" if you will. Devrim Yasar just raised an additional $7.25 million for Koding.com. I met him in April of 2010--almost two years before he got a venture round.

VC 248

VC education entrepreneurs development 248

Gust

DECEMBER 16, 2012

ABC Shark Tank Angels via Elite Daily. Every new startup I know dreams of being funded early by one of the 318,000 active Angel investors in the USA alone. But many entrepreneurs don’t realize that Angels are also extremely discerning in the projects that they will invest in, rejecting approximately 97% of the proposals submitted to them, according to the California Investment Network.

networking 179

networking investing investment pitching 179

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 20, 2012

About three years ago, I started journaling my startup education by blogging. In retrospect, blogging has been one of the most rewarding activities for me as an investor. Blogging helps me some observe changes in the start-up ecosystem, communicate trends primarily through data while strengthening and building relationships. It’s been more gratifying than I could have hoped.

frameworks 40

frameworks disruption education media 40

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 17, 2012

I got a call Sunday from a business colleague while I was sitting in the lounge at LAX waiting for yet another delayed flight. This colleague is a lawyer with whom I work on a deal and have done so for a couple of years. By all accounts I now consider him a friend. He caught me while I was sipping a Bloody Mary and thinking a bit a business situation that bummed me out.

startup 363

startup real estate VC venture capital 363

Gust

DECEMBER 19, 2012

For November 2012 we are noticing an interesting trend of product ready companies declining, while concept stage companies are rising. This trend is mostly led by a decrease in product ready internet web service companies in the US, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom, and with an increase in concept stage companies in Spain, India, Brazil and the United States.

startup 154

startup investing investment 154

Berkonomics

DECEMBER 21, 2012

OK. So I occasionally read suspense novels to break up the relative monotony of constant business books. A sentence in the one I am currently reading caught my eye. “There are three types of advice,” the wise White House Senior Counsel to the President told the young White House attorney. He referred to the three as legal advice, moral advice and political advice.

advice 70

advice 70

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 19, 2012

It’s easy to call a tablet a larger a mobile phone. Or a replacement for a notebook or ultrabook. But to dismiss tablets as scaled clones of their bigger and smaller brothers is a mistake. Tablets are the third type of device: the one with the most revenue potential for ecommerce and developers alike. Tablets drive greater volumes of traffic, that convert to paid at better rates, and drive better qualified and less expensive leads through advertising.

development 40

development 40

Gust

DECEMBER 18, 2012

Consider this (emphasis is mine): Ads are the Internet’s tax on users who want free apps and websites. Allmost all free apps and services have ads. Ad-supported companies are akin to the government in the sense that they are both really good at finding ways to charge you without it seemingly coming out of your pocket. Many people’s taxes are taken automatically out of their payroll, so they don’t think of that money as being theirs to begin with.

education 144

education opportunity support 144

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Gust

DECEMBER 20, 2012

There is no specific ratio between “sweat equity” and cash in a venture, and that’s actually not a good way to think about the issue. The bottom line is that cash is cash is cash, and everything else is “not cash” The reason is that cash is fungible, which means it can be interchanged for everything else, from programming skills to vacations on the Riviera.

ventures 136

ventures investing investment angel investing 136

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 18, 2012

When I started working at Google, I heard the word generalist over and over. “We only hire generalists,” I was told. Eight years later this mantra is pretty common. I hear it often both referring to the desired characteristics of new hires and also the aspirations of a team - “we want to be a team of generalists”. At the time, I understood the word generalist to mean someone really good at a lot of things.

technology 40

technology startup 40

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 17, 2012

The famous global macro hedge fund manager George Soros once said, “I don’t play the game by a particular set of rules; I look for changes in the rules of the game.” Inside the House of Money. Soros' insight is equally well applied to startups. Successful startups discover and leverage changes in the rules of the game. Discovering the changes in the rules of the game is one of the hardest things about starting a company, but understanding precisely the change and developing a hypothesis for expl

startup 40

startup networking technology opportunity 40

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 16, 2012

Email and most meetings aren’t work. We all know this to be true. But huge swaths of our days are allocated to meetings and answering email. It’s impossible to accomplish much aside from information dissemination. A close friend, who like me is a productivity nut, asked me a question that made this point clearly: What fraction of your day is spent in meetings you asked for compared to meetings that were asked of you?

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40

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