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Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.
I generally blog between 5:30 A.M. and 7 A.M. I will from time to time add something during the day, but for the most part blogging is an early morning activity for me.
If you are successful, you will be cloned. That's life. In fact, it's a sign that you've made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.
The venture business is a bit of an apprenticeship business, so the firm I worked for didn't let me make an investment until I was 30. That was probably a very smart thing.
Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible.
One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.
There are so many startups out there raising money. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's a good thing. Entrepreneurship is in vogue. Innovators are innovating. Makers are making.
So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illiquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster.
The Web is going to capture an increasing share of people's attention, and billions of dollars are going to flow in. What Web 2.0 is about is harnessing those dollars in highly leverageable ways.
I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.
If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That's why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.
Certainly anything that is news or opinion needs to be free on the Web, because the Web is this very fluid medium that is very much driven by links and the flow of visitors through a discussion via links.
I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.
Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all 'User First, Brands Second' services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.
It's not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.
I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.
I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so, if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.
I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.
Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.
We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.
Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.
When there were not very many Internet companies, the supply of Internet companies to the market was small and the appetite for them was large. Therefore, if you were in the business of creating Internet companies in 1996-98, you had a market that provided massive demand for that.
Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.
The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.
New York's niche is content, and content is becoming more valuable. Just think about what is more valuable: MTV or the cable system that you use to get MTV? Howard Stern or the radio station you use to listen to him? Ultimately, technology becomes a commodity, and content - real, true branded content - becomes more valuable.
My venture investing career has three phases, all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to Internet. The second, at Flatiron, was Internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.
Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.
You simply can't be tentative in a startup. You have to go for it at every chance you get. And if the leader of the organization is anxious, his or her fear pervades the organization. Everything comes from the top in a company. So if you are starting a company or building one, face your fears and move past them. It's critically important to your company.
I also like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators, which generally show only the headline. So you have to give people a reason to click through. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading it should be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what is happening in the technology, Internet, and VC markets.