As we were debating in our monday meeting yesterday about our brand, USV vs Union Square Ventures, I made the point that our URL is our brand and we use usv.com.
I am a fan of the three letter domain. Two is too short for me. Four is too long for me. I like three.I feel the same way about kids, but I do digress.
My mind started to wander in our monday meeting and I started thinking about how many three letter .com domains there are. I thought 26^3 = 17,576. But what I missed what that you can't repeat, so the correct answer is 15,600.
In either case, there are a finite and relatively small number of three letter .com domains. And I own on…
So today on MBA Mondays we are going to talk about something useful – Generating sales leads on a small budget. Every startup that wants to sell something runs into this challenge.
I asked Russell Sachs, who runs sales for our portfolio company WorkMarket to tell us how they do it. And this is what he put together. I think its terrific. I hope you do to.
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Uncovering Qualified Leads Without a Big Marketing Budget
It is hard to debate the fact that leads are the lifeblood for virtually every sales
organization. Without qualified leads, scaling a business can be a tricky thing to maneuver. For
large organizations with big marketi…
One of the mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is they move to business model before locking down strategy. The way I like to think about this is get the product right first, then lock down the strategy of the business, then figure out the business model.
Getting product right means finding product market fit. It does not mean launching the product. It means getting to the point where the market accepts your product and wants more of it. That means different things in consumer, saas, infrastructure, hardware, etc, but in every case you must get to product market fit before thinking about anything else. And, I believe, moving to business model …
I like what Sarah Lacy is doing with these monthly talks called Pando Monthly. I am going to do one on June 13th. Last week Sarah talked with John Doerr, who has been a role model for me for many years and someone I have looked up to for a long time.
It’s a long talk, more than two hours. But if you can put it on this morning and let it run, there’s a ton of good stuff in here.
I was at my friend Vanessa’s birthday party last night and another friend Cliff was saying to me that baseball is falling fast in popularity amoung the younger people in america. So we asked all the kids who were in attendance and sure enough baseball was considered “boring” and was not interesting to them. Soccer (football) on the other hand was rising fast. Among the kids in attendance last night, basketball was first, football and soccer were in a close second, with hockey and baseball in the rear view mirror.
So for fun friday today, I thought I would poll the AVC readers on our favorite sport:
What Is Your Favorite Sport?
Please parti…
I walked out of a meeting at 33rd and Park yesterday at 5:05pm. I had to be on a call in my home office at 5:30pm. Getting a cab is a bitch that time of day. The subway required a switch from the Lex to the L at Union Square and that can be tricky if you don't time it right. So I took out my phone, fired up the Citibike app, and saw that there was a Citibike station right across the street. Of course, if I didn't have my nose in my phone I could have figured that out by looking up.
I tweeted this out and hopped on the bike:
Getting on a @citibikenyc to get to my next meeting. twitter.com/fredwilson/sta…
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) May 29, …
Our portfolio company DuoLingo has had one of the top free education apps in the iPhone app store for the past year. If you want to learn a language for free on the iPhone, you can get it here. DuoLingo currently offers courses in the following languages:
The big news is that DuoLingo for Android launches today. Android is much larger outside of the US and this will significantly increase the number of users who can take advantage of free language learning on your phone. If you use Android and want to give DuoLingo a try, go here.
I hate it when companies try to run the table on a market.
Like Microsoft tried with desktop computing.
Like Apple tried with mobile computing.
Like Facebook tried with social networking.
And like Google is trying with the entire fucking Internet.
The good news that the market stops them. Apple and the Internet stopped Microsoft. Google stopped Apple. Twitter stopped Facebook.
Who will stop Google?
While it is true that Memorial Day serves as the unofficial start of summer, we should note that it is actually a day to remember our fallen service men and women.
As we wrap up wars half way around the world and bring our soldiers home, we should take a second and remember all of our soldiers who did not return from Iraq and Afghanistan. We should also remember those who did not come home from Vietnam, Korea, WWII, WWI, and countless other wars our country has fought in its short histroy.
Regardless of what you think of war, we can honor these men and women. If you can get to a military cemetery, put a flower or a flag on a soldier's grave…
Today, our eldest child graduates from college.
Last night, as we were leaving a house party with all of her friends and their parents and family members, Jess said "thanks for sending me to college dad". I replied "thanks for graduating Jess". Everyone got a chuckle. But I was dead serious.
Dropping out of college is all the rage today in startup land (even dropping out of high school). And when it comes to our business, we really do not care if someone went to or graduated from college. We have funded many college dropouts and will continue to.
But there is also something to finishing something you started.
Yesterday afternoon, all th…
I am a big fan of bookmarking. I mean that in the largest sense. When I find something I want to read, watch, do, etc, I like to save it somewhere that I can find it when I need it.
When it comes to restaurants I want to go to, I like to use Foursquare's Save button. Here's how it works:
Let's say you are reading that Montmartre’s French Fries Are New York’s Best and you think "I have to try them".
You click the save to Foursquare button in your browser and this happens:
The default is that you will save that place to your "to do list"
But if you happen to have a list called "best french fries in NYC" like I do, then you can change the…
Yesterday and today we are conducting a virtual march on Washington to let our elected officials know that the time has come for comprehensive immigration reform.
If you are of the opinion that we ought to keep things as they are now, stop right now. This post and this march is not for you.
But if you are open minded about your fellow man, if you want the US to remain a nation of immigrants where we open our arms and borders to good people who want to come here, build a family, build a life, build a company, pay taxes, defend our country, etc, etc, then please join this march.
Last night I attended a #iMarch event at Appnexus and talked w…
No, I am not blogging about India Pale Ale, although I must say that I am a big fan of it.
I am writing about one of the best patent hacks I have seen in the decade that I have been working to find relief from the ridiculous patent system in our country.
Twitter came up with a concept last year called the Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA) and put a draft IPA up on GitHub. They have gotten a ton of feedback and have iterated and improved the concept since then.
The basic idea of the IPA is that it is a contract between Twitter and the engineer(s) and designer(s) who developed the IP. The contract says that Twitter will not use the patent o…
This Thursday from 1pm to 6pm, our portfolio company Zemanta is co-hosting a summit on native advertising here in NYC.
I've written and spoken a fair bit about native advertising so regular readers will likely be quite familiar with this topic. However, from what I am seeing out there, native advertising is really hitting its stride as social platforms and mobile consumption become the norm. If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur working in the advertising/marketing space, you should be paying attention to this trend.
I will be kicking off the event at 1pm with a brief talk and some Q&A.
If you want to go, here is a link to get a 50% d…
Back in the early days of AVC, I did a thing called VC Cliche Of The Week. There was an RSS feed of all of them powered by Delicious, but it is broken and most likely can't be fixed. You can find some of them on gawk.it.
One of the cliches I posted about is "success has a thousand fathers." I thought I would re-run that post. Here it is.
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You can count on it – when a deal works out spectacularly everyone involved will take credit for it.
This behavior is particularly annoying to the entrepreneurs who put the sweat, blood, and tears into the Company.
They watch the VCs take credit for the big success and it g…
We talk a lot of NBA basketball in the comments but I don't post about it. This blog is supposed to be about startups and tech, for the most part. But the Knicks lost last night in Indiana and my season is over. I will root for the Grizzlies and the Pacers now but I doubt I will watch many games.
This photo sums up the Knicks Pacers series. Actually it sums up the entire season for me.
Carmelo Anthony is an incredible talent. He has upped his defensive game in the past year and he carried the Knicks as far as he could. But he doesn't have a second superstar at his side and he could not beat Indiana all by himself.
Roy Hibbert played a grea…
It feels like its been a while since we did a fun friday around here. So here goes.
How do you like your morning cup of coffee?
I go with the Cortado, ideally in a shot glass. Here's one from Kava, the coffee shop near my home in the far west village.
So how do you take your morning cup? Photos please.
Google announced so many things yesterday that it makes my head spin. Goodness all around in Google land.
But there is one thing that really caught my eye. Google will start selling a Galaxy S4 running "stock android" in the Play store on June 26th.
When folks ask me what Android phone to buy, I am always torn between the S4 which I believe to be the best Android handset in the market right now and the Nexus 4 which runs stock android but has no LTE support (the phone I currently use).
Now, or at least in a month or so, I will have a good answer. Get the S4 running stock android. If you can afford it. It's $650 unlocked.
So RIM has decided that it is time to make Blackberry Messenger (BBM) cross platform. They announced yesterday that by this summer BBM will be available on iOS and Android.
The time to do this was in 2008/2009 when BBM was huge and everyone was on it. The core users were beginning to leave for iOS and eventually Android and if RIM would have let them take BBM with them, they would now own the biggest cross platform messenger out there. BBM is great and everyone knew how to use it and was comfortable with it.
But RIM execs waited four years to make this move. When BBM hits iOS and Android this summer, they will face dozens of cross platform …
Boards can be pretty patient. They can put up with a lot of failings, particularly in the early days of a startup when the product isn't where it needs to be. But one thing a Board cannot tolerate is when a CEO loses the confidence of the team.
I feel that I must say this because I know that many folks in our portfolio read AVC. This is not a post about any specific company or any CEO or any team. This is just a statement of fact that I wanted to put out there because I was thinking about it.
If I think about the times I have had to remove a CEO, by far the most common reason was the loss of confidence of the team in the CEO. You get the ca…
It's Monday, time for another lesson I've learned in the venture capital business. Today I will tell a story that I love telling. It has some of my favorite people in it.
Back in 2004, early in my blogging career, I heard about a service that had just launched called Feedburner. It provided a number of useful services for a blog's RSS feed. So I went and signed up and AVC became one of the first users of the service. I immediately liked the service and the idea. So I contacted the founder/CEO Dick Costolo, who has gone onto bigger and better things. I told Dick that I was interested in making an investment in Feedburner. My friend Brad Feld …
Happy Mothers Day to all mothers out there. I am particularly grateful to the two mothers in my life, my mom and the Gotham Gal.
I looked at the mirror the other day and saw my mom in my face. I like that. She is a beatiful woman and if I age as well as she has, then I will be a lucky man. I am looking forward to calling her today and catching up on things as we do most every sunday.
We were at dinner last night with a young couple. The young man asked me when we started having children. I told him that the Gotham Gal insisted we have kids before we turned thirty. And so we did.
Jessica was born when we were 29. I am not sure that I was …
Yesterday I dedicated a song on Piki to my friend Whitney. He DM'd me and said "I haven't had that happen to me since the days of call-in radio shows".
Dedicating a song is my favorite feature on Piki. It is generous, fun, and viral.
I did it this morning with my daughter Jessica.
I picked a song
And then at the bottom of the dialog box, I typed in her name
That's all there is to it. She gets notified and ideally comes back to Piki and listens and/or picks some more music for everyone else to hear.
Virality is critical to make a social app spread. But the viral features must also be fun and meaningful. Dedicating a song is both and…
Patent trolls are one of the biggest scourges on the startup ecosystem in the US. The ideal solution, which was recently taken by the country of New Zealand, would be to ban software patents outright. But try as we might, it seems unlikely to happen in the US in the near term.
But that doesn't mean we aren't making headway against the trolls. A couple years ago, we got the America Invents Act which made some substantial changes to the way patents are reviewed and litigated. That bill had a provision (section 18) that allows financial services firms to take litigation over "covered business method patents" out of court and put them through a …
The almost two year long slump is over. I've led a new venture investment for USV, which closed a few weeks ago and was announced last night. The company is Coinbase and my blog post announcing the investment is on the USV blog. The WSJ also wrote about it here.
This hiatus, which I've blogged about a bit on and off, was mostly a result of being very full up with responsibilities for existing investments. I have made twenty investments since the founding of USV in the fall of 2004 (now 21) and have only exited six, so I have had fourteen investments that I am responsible for at USV. I take our responsibility to our portfolio companies higher…
Disqus quietly pushed this out in the past few weeks.
The cool thing is this is interactive, meaning you can click on any of those bubbles and get to the blog post and discussion. I've been doing that every morning in addition to my regular collection of discovery tools.
I think it does a great job of showcasing the diversity and energy of the Disqus community. Well done Disqus team.
I told this story in the comments to saturday's video post, but since not everyone reads the comments and I want this to make it into MBA Mondays, I figured I would turn it into a case study.
In the early days of Tumblr, I used to bug David Karp, the founder and CEO of the Company, about comments. Though I had hacked my tumblog with Disqus, I wanted to be able to comment on other tumblogs and the vast majority of them had no comments because Tumblr did not support them natively. I was fairly persistent in my argument.
But David held firm. He wanted Tumblr to be a positive place on the Internet. The entire design of the service was with that…