Last October, I skyped into an entrepreneur meetup in Milan and talked for 30 minutes. This was arranged by AVC community member David Semeria.
The main topics were building a tech community outside of the main startup hubs, raising angel and venture capital in a market where there isn't much of that, and the differences between US and european investors.
When I watched this video this morning, the audio and video were out of sync which made it hard for me to watch. I ended up listening more than watching. I hope you all don't have that same problem.
Drawing is one form of creative expression that has not made a rapid transition
to the digital/online world. The tablet may well change that. Paper is
one of the most amazing tablet apps I have seen. It is beautifully made
and the art that people are creating on it is inspiring.
It
seems like there is even more potential that can be unlocked with
drawing. Draw Something showed that everyone can draw something (no pun
intended). But Draw Something is a two person game. It is not massively
multiplayer and social in the way that Twitter, Instagram, and
Foursquare are.
Enter DrawQuest. DrawQuest is the creation of our portfolio compan…
At the top of this blog, in the nav header, you will see "TV". This is new. When you click on it, you will go to fredwilson.tv. This is also new.
fredwilson.tv is a linear feed of videos that are pulled from AVC, fredwilson.vc, and my twitter feed and shown in reverse chronological order (from when I posted them). You can click on the play button and start watching/listening. They will keep playing until you've had enough. You can click on the arrows on the far left and far right to fast forward or rewind. If you move the mouse, the controls will come up from the bottom and you will get info on what is playing, where it came from, and what …
It's no secret that USV invested in Hailo at the end of last year.
What is less well known is why we would do that.
Hailo announced the financing today and also a bunch of impressive hires for their US and Asia operations and they also disclosed a bunch of numbers for the first time.
Hailo is as big in their home city (London) as Uber is in SF and across the ten markets they are in, Hailo has similar scale as Uber in total transactions per day, week, month, and year. Hailo is different than Uber though. They focus exclusively on the regulated part of the market and as a result they can offer lower prices and a higher liquidity of cars to t…
The Internet is a data generating machine. According to Eric Schmidt, every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. It's also incredibly good at presenting that data, both to humans and machines.
So it makes sense that collecting and publishing data is one of the primary business models on the Internet. Here are some of the examples that you all created on the revenue model hackpad:
View Data on Hackpad.
I like to think of data businesses in two categories; businesses that aggregate and then publish data and businesses that generate their own proprietary data by virtue of the servi…
Business model matters.
The quote of the week for me was this one from Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer:
The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.
Netflix will have to produce shows that are worth watching. HBO has proven it can do that over and over again for years. Netflix has not.
But Netflix allows you to have a direct relationship with them and use your account on almost every connected device I can think of. HBO requires you to have an account with a cable company and then even if you do, it is hit or miss whether you can use their service on the device you want to.
That's what I mean by business model m…
Here's a great interview that ReasonTV recently did with Peter Weijmarshausen, who is the founder and CEO of our portfolio company Shapeways. It's only 6 1/2 minutes long so it's short and sweet.
So they did The Crunchies yesterday. It got me thinking about award shows. I am not a fan of any process that selects a best of anything that doesn't involve the parties getting out on a court or field and battling it out. But clearly award shows are a big deal and people love going to them, watching them, and winning them.
And what exactly is the point of selecting the best of any of these things? The best movie? Was it really the best? The best social media company? Was it really the best? The best book? Was it really the best?
Why can't we celebrate the diversity of the work, the many efforts that were made, and all the amazing things th…
On February 14th, the entire USV partnership will be in Salt Lake City and so courtesy of our friend Bryce, we are going to do an event called Sessions @ The Leonardo.
We've done this format before, usually in our event space, and its a lot of fun to do a public appearance with all of my partners. We finish each other's sentences, tee up topics for each other, and tell stories together.
It is from 4pm to 6pm on February 14th at The Leonardo. The event is free but space is limited. RSVP here.
The President announced yesterday that he was in favor of a Startup Visa. Hallelujah.
That led me to go back in time.
The first time I posted about #startupvisa on AVC was September 23, 2009.
The first time Brad Feld posted about #startupvisa was September 10, 2009.
The first time Paul Graham posted about #startupvisa was April 2009.
It's a shame that it takes almost four years before a good idea gets the President's support. And its a greater shame that there are many in Congress who will still vote against this idea.
We have a two year rotation program at USV for most of our non partner positions. We hire incredibly talented people, suck them into everything we are doing for two years, and then ask them to leave. The USV alumni group is becoming quite a collection of talent.
For much of last year Christina debated what she was going to do at the end of her stint. We made it even harder on her because we flirted with extending her stay. But at the end of year, she packed up her desk and headed out.
And today she explains all of that and what she's been doing since on her blog. I particularly like this part:
Why did I want to do something different? In …
Licensing, according to wikipedia, is an authorization (by the licensor) to use the licensed material (by the licensee). Of all the business models listed on the revenue model hackpad, licensing is the least net native business model. There is very little about the internet that makes licensing work better and there is a lot that makes it work worse.
Here are some of the ways licensing can be used to build a business:
View Licensing on Hackpad.
The first five items in that list are related to the software business and reflect the dominant business model for software before the internet came along. Software used to be sold (licensed) with m…
What do you do when you don't want to sell your company and you don't want to go public either? We've been discussing this issue here at AVC for a long time. I think back to this post from 2008, almost five years ago now, as the kickoff of this long running conversation. This is something I care a lot about because my business model requires getting liquid but I hate the idea that my business model creates problems for the entrepreneurs we back.
Here's a great three minute discussion of this issue between Chad Dickerson, Etsy's CEO, and Sarah Lacy, from last thursday night's PandoMonthly event.
I've been having frequent private conversation…
One of the most aggravating things about commerce online and on mobile is the inconsistent checkout experience site to site and app to app. It's one of the many things that keeps me shopping at Amazon and clicking on the PayPal button when its available. That and stored payment credentials.
Last week I saw something that makes me think we may be heading in the right direction. Stripe, the fast growing payments company, introduced Stripe Checkout. Now, if you choose to use it, Stripe will give you a standard checkout form for both web and mobile. It's a few lines of code in your app and Stripe takes care of the rest. It is optimized for the u…
One of the guys who taught me the venture capital business used to say "success is in inverse proportion to the number of VCs you have on your board." He was right. For a few reasons. First of all, most VCs get on your board by virtue of financing rounds you do. If you do a lot of financing rounds, you will collect enough VCs on your board to field a basketball team. And that sucks. And it means you had to raise too much money too. All of which are bad things.
But there is another reason and it became perfectly clear to me on Tuesday when I had back to back board meetings.
The first meeting was almost a celebration. The company had put tog…
Today is the Women Entrepreneurs Festival at NYU. Many of you know that the Gotham Gal is the co-founder of this event with Nancy Hechinger who is on the faculty at NYU ITP.
The live stream of the festival is here.
This is the third year this event has been put on and I attended the first two and I will be there today.
This event celebrates and educates women entrepreneurs. The conventional wisdom has it that there aren't many women entrepreneurs but the truth is they are all over the place.
The Gotham Gal has been writing a post every Monday featuring a women entrepreneur for a few years now and she never runs out of women to feature.
…
I get policy types asking me this question a lot – how can we help local startups?
Well one way is to use their products to deliver better and more efficient services to citizens.
The State Of Iowa is demonstrating how it is done today with our portfolio company Dwolla, which happens to be located in Iowa.
Today, they are announcing that:
The State Of Iowa will accept payments with Dwolla
This will allow the state to collect ~$100 million a year in taxes
New partnerships are on the horizon with property taxes, vehicle registration and others
They will explore new opportunities for collecting and issuing government payments
Dwolla is…
Transaction Processing is not a "net native" business model. There have been businesses built up around processing transactions for a long time. But the Internet and Mobile present some challenges in processing transactions and therefore there are opportunities to build substantial businesses around helping companies process transactions.
If you look at the Revenue Model Hackpad, you will see that there are a number of different kinds of transaction processing businesses:
View Transaction processing on Hackpad.
The first four examples in the hackpad are related to credit card processing, the next three are related to banking transactions, …
My partner Brad is fond of reminding us at USV that taking the offline model for something and porting it to the web is not often the best way to build a business online.
John Markoff's piece in the New York Times on online education got me thinking about that this morning. MOOCs are all the rage in the online ed world these days. And most of the MOOCs I have used remind me a lot of the traditional classroom model of teaching. The question I am noodling is if there is a better way to teach when you have tens of thousands of people wanting to learn something that you can teach them.
John contrasts the MOOC model to our portfolio company Duo…
I am currently reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise which I am enjoying very much. So I’ve got Nate on my brain right now. Here’s a great hour long talk that Nate did at Google in late November.
At USV we invest in a lot of networks and marketplaces. These are messy places where anyone can post most anything and it can be hard to find the good stuff. Enter the explore page. Using data, analytics, social signals, and often some human element, the explore pages are incredible places to discover amazing stuff. Here are some of my favorites:
SoundCloud Explore
Tumblr Explore
Kickstarter Discover
Foursquare Explore
If you are building a service that empowers people to post all sorts of things, I encourage you to create an explore page where your users can make sense of it all.
AVC regular and all around fun and smart guy Andy Swan and his brother Landon have built Voomly. Andy came into USV yesterday to tell me and Andy about it. As you would expect, he also brought a signed bottle of Pappy. As JLM would say, it was well played.
Voomly is a service that folks who have expertise can use to build followings and sell subscriptions to newsletters and Q&A services. I joined the service during our meeting yesterday but I chose not to sell any Q&A services at this time. I did pay and subscribe to Andy and JLM on Voomly and have already asked both of them a question and received a reply.
The service is not (yet) a market…
Holger Luedorf has been doing business development in the web/tech/mobile sectors for almost 15 years. He currently leads Business Development (BD) for our portfolio company foursquare. Holger has contributed a guest post with a bunch of great advice for startups that are just getting around to BD and what they should do and what they should not do. His views and opinions are his own and not those of foursquare.
—————————————————————————————-
The Beginner’s Guide to Start-up BD: 15 Basic Rules
A lot of the rules below will seem like no-brainers to any seasoned business development manager, but I think it is worth putting them together in o…
I was watching this Charlie Rose interview with Lena Dunham and I was struck by this line:
it’s really intense to be thrust into a managerial position before my time
I have seen this a lot in my business and its always your talent for making things that puts you in this spot. And one of the big challenges is that the "managerial position" (as Lena calls it) is often in conflict with the talent for making things that got your there in the first place.
I am not saying that folks who are talented at making things aren't talented at managing people. I have come to believe that most people can be talented at managing people if they want to be. …
We've covered advertising, commerce, and subscriptions so far in this series on business models. And while they are the big three of Internet business models, they all existed well before the Internet. They are not Internet native business models.
If there is one thing I have learned investing in Internet businesses over the years it is to pay attention to things you can't do without the Internet. And that describes peer to peer pretty well. Like the Internet, a peer network empowers the edges and devalues the middle. I like peer networks very much.
If you look at the revenue model hackpad, you will see a list of some interesting peer netwo…
One of our portfolio companies is working on a cool unreleased product and is racing to the finish and needs additional bandwidth. And they have a second version of the product spec’d and need a strong iOS developer to get that out as well.
This role requires real iOS experience and a willingness to work on a small fast moving team. I can explain a lot more over email. If you are interested, contact me here.
We all have tools that keep us focused, on schedule, getting stuff done. This thread is going to where we share our favorite with each other.
Mine is Lasso.
Disclosure: The Gotham Gal is an investor in Lasso's parent Edison Jr. So I have a financial interest in its success. That said, I think it's awesome.
Lasso is one of those "less is more" hacks that just works. You sync your calendar to Lasso and anytime you have a phone number in a calendar event, Lasso calls you on one of more of your phones, you pick up, and you are connected. It is particularly helpful with conference calls when you don't want to type in all the codes and such. La…
The 5am routine is back! I am writing this from my home office. We slept at home last night. Ten weeks in hotels is over. Thank god.
It's hard to feel sorry for yourself when you are staying in nice hotels when others who were displaced from Sandy are in much worse situations. But being out of your home for a long period of time sucks no matter where you are staying.
Here's what I missed the most:
1) home cooked meals from the Gotham Gal. We got one last night. It was the best meal I've eaten in months and we have dined at some of the finest restaurants in the world in the past two months.
2) saying goodnight and good morning to my kids e…