Kickstarter in 2012
Kickstarter published a retrospective on 2012. It's worth browsing. Here's the lead in
Fred Wilson
369 items collected
369 matching items · newest first
In Between: The Tough Place To Be
In a comment on the latest tally of VC fundraising, NVCA President Mark Heesen said: “The venture capital fundraising environment has settled into a ‘new normal’ which is characterized by a barbell structure of larger funds which are stage and industry agnostic on one end, and smaller, early stage, industry or region specific funds on the other. This is certainly true and has been for a long time. The two successful models seem to be the large megafund and the small early stage fund. It's hard to be anything else in VC. Entrepreneurs need to understand this. There are a ton of options out there for early stage funding. And if you get to th…
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models – Subscriptions
When I got into the venture capital business in the mid 80s, software was sold. You would pay a large sum to acquire a license to the software and then a much smaller annual fee for maintenance and support. Today, most software is sold in a subscription model. You pay a monthly fee for the right to use the software. If you stop paying the monthly fee, your right to use the software goes away. Maintenance and support is bundled in. The emergence of the subscription model has made the software business better. In the old upfront license fee model, software companies would trade at 2-4x revenues. Now they trade at 6-8x revenues. That reflects t…
App to App Handshakes
I wrote a post a few weeks ago asking when and if we would have a mobile web that acts and feels like the desktop web. The discussion was fantastic and I have a lot of takeaways and to dos from it. In the environment we are in today, I see the mobile OS as the foundational app and I see the third party apps as features in that OS. This view comes from Tim O'Reilly's Internet Operating System construct adapted to the mobile environment. In effect, the mobile OS has assumed the role that the browser plays in the desktop web. The cool thing about the Internet OS with web apps as features is that the features are interoperable. I post a picture…
Outsourcing Reversal
I do believe we may have reached peak employment, as discussed in the comments here recently, and as my partner Albert has been discussing on his blog over the past several months. Any serious and intellectually honest jobs agenda must deal with that reality. But I also believe stagnating wages here in the US vs escalating wages around the world presents an opportunity for the US that we are not, as yet, doing much with. This was in the WSJ today (or maybe yesterday): While wage costs in the U.S. have been about flat in recent years, they have been rising 20% a year in China, a trend Mr. McNamara expects to continue for at least five years.…
Feature Friday: Privacy
The Gotham Gal and I went out with friends last night. As can happen, we got talking shop towards the end of the night. And specifically we were debating the significance of Snapchat. The debate was about whether the feature that makes Snapchat special (you know your photos won't end up on Facebook) is the basis for a standalone app and business. My view, having lived through this debate with Twitter and Foursquare, is that mobile apps are features in the mobile OS and that Snapchat can and likely will own this feature in the leading mobile operating systems even though institutionalized copycats (ie Facebook who copies everything) can and wi…
Amour
The two best films of 2012 that I saw were both French films with subtitles, Amour, which I saw last night with the Gotham Gal, and The Intouchables, which we saw when it came out last summer. The Intouchables is a joyous film about two people in need coming together to enrich each others' lives. It is uplifting. Amour is not. It is a gut wenching account of an elderly husband caring for his dying wife. The film made me deeply uncomfortable. There were scenes I couldn't even bring myself to watch. It is said that great art makes you uncomfortable and if that us true Amour is great art. I dreamed about the movie and woke up with it on my mi…
MBA Everydays
Tom Eisenmann is a professor at Harvard Business School. He published this “best of the startup blog posts of 2012” the other day. Go take a look at it. It was a revelation to me when I saw it yesterday. I tweeted it out right away. We are witnessing an important change in education. The practicioners are creating curriculum that the schools are leveraging. But more importantly, everyone is leveraging it. Hacking education indeed.
The Fiscal Mess: Death By A Thousand Cuts
Whomever came up with the term fiscal cliff to describe the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the simultaneous sequester of across the board spending cuts did not do us any favors. I honestly had hoped we would get both. But that was never going to happen once it was framed as driving over a cliff. Who wants to do that? Instead we got some small deal that essentially raises taxes on the highest earners and a kick the can approach on everything else. We are going to address our ridiculously high deficit in a series of crisis driven deadlines instead of the rational way, which is to sit down and hammer out a "grand bargain." I do agree that…
Collection coverage
facebook: linked
linkedin: unchecked
podcast: unchecked
reddit: unchecked
substack: unchecked
web: linked
x: linked
youtube: unchecked