Stephanie Tilenius, who is an EIR at Kleiner Perkins, wrote an interesting post on curated marketplaces last week. She mentions our portfolio companies Lending Club, Etsy, and Kickstarter in her post.
Stephanie argues that the old rules of building marketplaces, that led to big businesses at eBay (where she worked) and Amazon, are giving way to a new set of rules. This line, in particular, got my attention:
Consumers now demand beautifully designed and curated experiences, especially in a mobile-only marketplace.
I agree with Stephanie that marketplaces need to be simple, beautiful, and easy to use on mobile in order to succeed in the worl…
AVC regular Donna White posted this to her Tumblr yesterday:
I'm a crotchety old guy. I worry about all these new companies. I’m glad that they’re easier to start, but the problem is, they’re just as hard to finish as they have always been.
The quote is from Mike Olson in this post.
The thing in Mike's quote that really speaks to me is the difference between starting and finishing. Starting requires an idea/inspiration, a team, some technical skills, the ability to iterate on the MVP and find product market fit. That's hard for sure, but what happens after you find product market fit is even harder. That's called building the company and b…
Bitcoin was in the news this week and once again the association wasn’t all that positive. As I have said publicly, privately, and on this blog numerous times, I think so much of the discussion of Bitcoin misses the big point, which is that at its core, Bitcoin is a technology, protocol, and platform for entrepreneurial innovation.
Bitcoin is simply a transactional commerce layer for the global Internet. And once you wrap your head around that, the opportunities for innovation on top of Bitcoin turns out to be enormous.
But how does it work? Well, its not simple to understand. I think this video does a good job of explaining it.
It's friday and I am going to talk about a feature I have highlighted here before. It's the #Discover tab in Twitter. This feature just gets better and better and recently they overhauled the design to eliminate the noise and bring simplicity and clarity. I like it very much.
You can see that tweets of stories/posts/etc now reveal a short bit of the story. And tweets of photos show the photo in the timeline.
The other great thing is you get relevant news and interesting tweets from your friends comingled, as the screeengrab above shows.
If you use Twitter a lot, as I do and as I suspect many of you do, it knows you very well and does a fan…
My friend Jordy was cleaning out some old desk drawers and came across this today
I met Jordy in 1991, the year Euclid invested in the business he and his partner Ronny started, Upgrade Corporation Of America. I wrote a blog post about the important lesson those guys taught me fairly early in my career.
There is no way Jordy could have had my business card prior to 1991, so that tells me I did not have an email address at that time. I recall Steve Case handing out AOL floppy disks at some tech conference I went to in 1991 or 1992, so I think I got AOL email around that time. I still keep my AOL email address for old times sake. I am fredwil…
Yesterday was a milestone day in the history of NYC taxi cabs. For the first time ever, you can now get into a cab, get taken where you want to go, and get out of the cab without taking out your wallet to get cash or a credit card.
Most of us have experienced this wonderful feeling with Uber or Hailo in London, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, Dublin, etc, etc but it has not been possible in a cab in NYC. Until yesterday.
The NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has been conducting a year long pilot program to allow mobile apps to hail yellow cabs on the streets of NYC. Until yesterday, you could hail a cab from a mobile app but you could not…
Apparently SOFTBANK is offering a phone in Japan that can produce a full day's charge in 10 minutes of charge time. This is something I've been wanting for a long time. When I talk to friends and family about it, I call it a turbocharge.
The fact is that no smartphone I've used since Blackberry has been able to get me through a day without running out of battery. I used to use smartphones where you could access the battery and I would carry a spare one with me during the day. I stopped that a few phones ago and now I just look for charges everywhere I go. I've gotten good at asking bartenders, receptionists, and baristas for charges.
If a t…
Sometimes I think we all are forced to learn the hard lessons first hand and that there is no other way.
And then I come across a post like this and am reminded that the Internet/Blogging/Generosity of Others can change that dynamic and is changing that dynamic.
Ryan Sarver had one of the most challenging jobs at Twitter during some of the most challenging years for Twitter. He joined the product team in 2009 and found himself managing the API and "platform" aspects of Twitter. Back then the API had been widely adopted but the business model and terms of use were not well defined. Ryan stepped right into that s**t.
And so he's writing a …
Hunter Walk has a good post up on the coming competition among angels with syndicates to get into deals. Hunter observes:
My guess is there are also some angels who were popular when they represented a $25k check but won’t be as sought after if they try to push $300k into a round.
What Hunter is getting at is the difference between leading and following. A lead investor sets the price and terms of the investment, takes a large part of the round, and usually agrees to represent the entire round on the board. Then everyone else gets to pile in behind them and piggyback on all of that work. And the entrepreneur and lead investor allow the foll…
A few weeks ago I did a 40 minute talk with Matt Turck at the Data Driven NYC meetup. Matt's a super sharp guy and talking to him was a lot of fun and we got into a bunch of interesting stuff.
Data Driven NYC #18 – Fred Wilson from Matt Turck on Vimeo.
The Congress and the President have to agree on a deal to lift the debt ceiling by Oct 17th in order to avoid a default on the US’ obligations. The House Republicans seem hell bent to extract some big concessions from the President in order to agree to lift the debt ceiling. And the President is refusing to negotiate over the debt ceiling. Seems like yet another deadline driven drama in Washington.
So let’s have some fun today and guess whether this thing is going to get resolved or not. I am voting that they will figure it out once again and avoid a default.
Will The US Default On Its Obligations On Oct 17th?
Professor Larry Lessig has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in a case arguing that limiting large political contributions is Constitutional and exactly what the Framers had in mind when they used the word corruption.
As part of the evidence he has submitted in his brief, Larry created a Tumblr with 325 citations from the Framers themselves showing that they had a very broad understanding of the word corruption. This will be the first time that a Tumblr has been submitted as evidence in a Supreme Court case.
Today at noon eastern, Larry and Senator Elizabeth Warren will have a livestreamed discussion about the Supreme Court case. The s…
I did some digging on Monday as I was thinking about ten years of AVC. Here are some of the more interesting numbers I came across:
– The AVC community has donated $203,939 to DonorsChoose campaigns over the years. 1,322 folks from the AVC community have supported campaigns reaching 53,486 students.
– There were 6,232 posts on AVC in the first ten years. You will notice that is well north of 1 post per day. In the early days, AVC was like a tumblog, with short posts from me multiple times a day. That changed when Tumblr came along and I moved those kinds of posts to fredwilson.vc
– There have been 154,490 comments on AVC. 22,490 of them we…
Last Thursday morning, I took the Lexington line (4 train) up to Fordham Road in the Bronx, then transferred to the Bx12 bus for a few stops and got off at the corner of Fordham Road and Crotona Ave. I walked a half a block south on Crotona Road and arrived at Grace Dodge Vocational High School, the home of the Bronx Academy Of Software Engineering. [foursquare, google maps]
(I originally wrote Grace Hopper Vocational High School – a freudian slip)
The Brox Academy Of Software Engineering (BASE) is the sister school of The Academy Of Software Engineering (AFSE) which opened in Union Square last fall. This is the second of hopefully a handfu…
Ten years ago today I set up a TypePad account and started writing online. That first post was not much, other than the start of a habit that has transformed my life and my career.
The early years were all over the place. I would write about the music I was listening to, the places I was visiting, my family, and increasingly my work. Some of you were there at the start and when I see you show up in the comments now it brings a smile to my face. You know who you are and I am most appreciative of your commitment. Regular readers are the lifeblood of a blog and a blogger.
Early on I learned about trolls and haters. They stung and it hurt. But …
This is a question I like to ask our more developed portfolio companies who have built large markets/networks/user bases. I ask them "if you were a startup and you wanted to compete with our company, how would you go about it?"
I think it is very important to understand your weakest flanks/vulnerabilities and then shore them up. If someone will compete with you by coming at the market "mobile only" while you struggle with maintaining a large web and mobile presence, then you should know that. And it probably means you need to rethink your mobile strategy so you can close off that open flank. If someone will compete with you by offering a fre…
I am in Paris this weekend and I always love being here. I am reminded of attending LeWeb back in 2008 and having dinner with Jeff Clavier and Reid Hoffman and our wives.
And I remember meeting with Alex and Eric from SoundCloud at LeWeb that year. We didn't invest then, nor the first time Alex pitched me, but a little more than a year later Alex sold me on the third pitch and we are very happy that he did. I mention an entrepreneur pitching me about 22 minutes into this video. That was Alex (and Eric).
I've been going back and forth with Loic about coming back to Le Web this year. I would very much like to do that, schedule permitting, an…
A common complaint about Etsy is that it is so full of great stuff but it is hard to find it. I've heard that consistently since we first got involved in 2006. That hasn't hurt its growth, which has been amazing, but it has made the buying experience difficult.
Enter Etsy Pages, where bloggers and design/fashion brands curate Etsy for you.
If you like Apartment Therapy, here's what they think is great on Etsy right now.
If you like Food52, here's what they think is great on Etsy right now.
And if you are a fan of West Elm, here's what they think is great on Etsy right now.
Check them out and I think you will like them. As my colleague B…
I had dinner with my daughter Jessica last night. We got to talking about creativity. She's a photographer. I asked her how she thinks Pieter Hugo comes up with his ideas for photos. She said "I bet he reads a lot about the topics he is interested in and then writes his own thoughts down and from that comes the ideas for the work".
That led to a long discussion about the value of reading and writing, with a particular emphasis on writing. I told her that I toiled in the VC business for close to twenty years before I hit my stride and the reason I found my stride was my adoption of blogging.
As all of you know, I write every day. It is my d…
Runway is the amount of time you have until you run out of cash. Or until you raise another round. Or until you can get the business self sustaining/profitable. Runway is survival. And so everyone in the startup world is obsessed about runway.
And yet, if you wanted to make your runway as long as possible you would raise as much cash as you could and/or you would keep your expenses as low as possible. I have seen teams do both and you know what? Neither works too well.
The fact is that the amount of money startups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success. Yes, I mean that. Less money raised leads to more …
We see gamification all over the place on the web and mobile. We are collecting followers in Twitter, likes in Instagram, levels in Candy Crush (I don't play Candy Crush but I know people who d0), and mayorships in Foursquare. People like playing games.
But as the folks from Stack Overflow say in their fifth birthday post on Stack Overflow,
gamification has never gotten a single person do anything they didn’t already basically like to do
When I read that line, it struck me as basic truth. Gamification can amplify things people already like to do. But it cannot get someone to do something they aren't inclined to do in the first place.
So…
I am a big fan of exit interviews. I have learned more doing exit interviews than most other management techniques. When people are on their way out and have no fear of saying exactly what they think, you can learn a lot.
It is rare for an investor/VC to do exit interviews. I only do them in situations where there seems to be a significant problem in a portfolio company and I want to get to the bottom of it.
But if you are the CEO of a company, you should be doing exit interviews with everyone who leaves your company until your company gets to the point that it is impossible to do that. Once you pass that point, your senior team should be …
We invest in a lot of marketplaces. When they scale, we often hear complaints from early adopters, amplified by the media, that the early adopters are getting hurt by the "mainstreaming" of the marketplace. You hear that kind of argument with other kinds of networks as well. When Twitter went mainstream, a lot of the early adopters complained that it had lost its soul.
I think most of this thinking is emotional, but not rational. A rising tide lifts all boats, or at least most of them. Kickstarter has published some data on this issue. I like this part from that post:
Spike Lee brought three decades of fans to Kickstarter when he launched h…
A friend sent this video to me this week. I enjoyed it and I suspect you all will too. Best of all, it is only 2 1/2 minutes so it won’t take up much of your day to watch it.
I like to do two kinds of posts on Friday, Fun Friday and Feature Friday.
I thought we would try something today which is to combine them.
So we are going to take turns in the comments talking about an app we like and our favorite feature in that app.
Since that’s what I do regularly in Feature Friday, I am going to refrain from doing it here and all the action will be in the comments today.
The New Yorker has a piece on Stanford's StartX. They ask some interesting questions and end with this one:
If the university is a farm, do the students become the cows?
I have promoted this idea of becoming an early stage investor to a number of Universities and schools within Universities for some time now. It isn't the IP and patents that are held by Universities that interest me. It is the human capital that is inside of them.
Universities are organized to educate students and do cutting edge research. The byproduct of that is a lot of great ideas. In an era when the cost of a University education has gone up way faster than the value…
Yesterday I posted about the two big things that were going to happen. They happened. I watched. Here are my reactions:
NYC Mayoral Race – As expected Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota won their races. There is some question this morning whether de Blasio will need to do a runoff election with Bill Thompson or not. Either way, neither of them are what NYC needs which is to move agressively forward, not to head backwards. As Joe Lhota said in his victory speech, all you need to do is travel around to parts of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn that fifteen years ago one could not walk into without taking their lives into their hands and marvel at the…
This blog, which will be 10 years old in two weeks, was initially called “AVC: Musings of a A VC in NYC”. I thought I might like to think out loud when I named it that. Turns out I do.
So I am going to muse out loud about two important things that will happen today.
First, I am going to vote in the NYC Democrat Mayoral Primary this morning. I plan to vote for Chris Quinn who The Gotham Gal and I have known for around ten years. Chris is a great person and I think that among the Democrats, she will do the best job maintaining the policies and attitude that the Bloomberg administration brought to City Hall. Sadly, I don’t think Chris ran a gr…
Getting information via email is so old hat in the age of social and mobile media. But I can tell you that many folks get AVC via email and they like getting it that way very much.
I just subscribed to Benedict Evans' email newsletter. He sends it out on Sundays and it talks about the week that was. I like the sound of that although I will probably read it on the web via my Nexus7. But at least the email is a reminder to go read it.
I use a service called Feedblitz to power my email service. If you want to subscribe to it, you can do that here. At this time, I have 4,433 email subscribers to AVC and the open rate hovers around 40%.
For co…
I have tried unsuccessfully to use a task manager many times over the years. I must have tried to use Outlook's task feature a dozen times unsuccessfully before leaving Outlook for the Google Apps Suite.
With the advent of mobile and web apps, and the combination of them, I have tried again, hoping that the mix of web and mobile might change things for me. My most recent attempt was a mobile and web app called Wunderlist. I am sure some of you use it. And I am sure some of you use other task managers.
I know that I am a highly disorganized person and it is all that I can do to manage (badly) my email and calendar (with a lot of help). I hav…