May 2012
9 posts
1 tag
The story behind the story on all the hyper-growth
Why is it that Viddy, Socialcam, Pinterest, and others have suddenly accelerated their growth in such a short timeframe? The surface answer is, of course, the integration with Facebook’s open graph.
But that’s the symptom, not the cause.
The New Platform Wars: Facebook vs Apple vs Android
What’s really happening is that Facebook has woken up to the fact that it was not a major player in the...
“Investing in the things that make our collective lives better—the very...”
– I don’t agree with everything in this post, but I certainly agree with that. (via Reaction Wheel)
Hackathons, pitch days, and the value of practice
At Conduit, every once and a while we would have a Pitch Day. A pitch day, usually a Friday, was one where anyone on the team could pitch a new game that we would consider building in the future.
We continued this practice at Zynga and there were always small groups of the team that became obsessed with putting something great out there. Others, however, thought this was a useless exercise since...
In defense of hype
For a startup ecosystem that is all about optimism, it’s ridiculous how much petty backstabbing and general negativity there is when new stuff comes along.
To pick only one topic area, here is a random assortment of negativity on the general funding environment I’ve heard just in the last week:
AngelList is overhyped. It’s adverse selection for people that either cant raise...
“Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 tag
"Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again."
I will not be exposing on the bubble talk. But I will reblog when it’s something worth reading. And MG nails it (props to Josh K as well) in a post worth every entrepreneur reading.
parislemon:
In my last post, I linked to something that First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman wrote in 2007. His post was prompted by — wait for it — a New York Times piece declaring that “Silicon Valley’s math...
April 2012
8 posts
The New SparkCapital.com →
The new site is live.
We tried to keep it simple, straightforward, and let the pictures do the talking. It’s still evolving, and we plan to add a lot more photos of our portfolio companies, a few less of us. That is, as soon as we get around to their offices and take some shots. Other suggestions welcome (iterate iterate iterate!)
mokoyfman:
You’ll notice that the site revolves around...
1 tag
Instagram is worth 1%, not $1b
The best way to think about the value of Instagram is not to think about $1 billion or $30/user, it’s this: 1%
The value of Instagram is tied up in Facebook being valued at an unprecedented $100 billion valuation. To use the case that Paul Graham makes for YC: do you believe that Instragram adds an incremental value of 1% to Facebook?
So before you as an entrepreneur start naively making the...
1 tag
"This is not an EBay auction where top price...
Some absolutely top shelf advice for entrepreneurs from the CEO at 42Floors (YC’12). I’ve always tried to treat getting an investor as both a financing event and a *hiring* event. Especially for an A round you are hiring a board member, an additional team member with a lot of hard and soft influence on the future of your business. What process would you use to evaluate adding a senior...
Just say no to testing red vs blue →
The problem with A/B testing is not the testing, it’s the inputs. If you are an early stage company and you need 2x returns you need to be swinging big.
I personally found this hilarious, tested these 2 ads for the sake of curiosity 15k impressions each:
- Nice picture of actual in-game content - Green call to action button w/ “free”, “free online racing” - Trust symbol (EA = reputable,...
A startup is not a small business
A startup might be small, even tiny, but the experience of running a small business has very little comparison to a startup.
A small business is an understandable, sustainable, repeatable company looking for ways to optimize, improve, and grow.
A startup is more like an unstable particle, a set of questions and theories of answers. It is a temporary state, a search for a repeatable, massively...
1 tag
March 2012
9 posts
The Pinterest opportunity
You can tell a company is more than hype when the spammers start making real money. They only care about cash, not the hot thing on Techcrunch, and they are clearly on to Pinterest’s amazing engagement. There is an opportunity in Pinterest today for both legitimate startups and sleazy folks like Steve just like there was in Google SEO, Digg, and Facebook virality.
While Pinterest needs to crack...
1 tag
Is Twitter now a viable platform?
With the spectacular growth of Draw Something there’s been renewed chatter about whether Twitter is a viable platform for other products to grow on. Draw Some, after all, at least partly attributes their unprecedented growth to Twitter.
Will we finally be able to see a product grow and monetize with Twitter as its primary communication channel? Does Draw Some hold any lessons for other non-game...
Faraday - continuing the quest for minimal →
Following on the footsteps of Clear’s wonderfully minimal todo list app. Faraday gives the clean treatment to calendars.
I prefer this approach so much more than the current Apple “faux-real” textures.
Why aren't more people copying Amazon Prime?
While on vacation last week Megan and I spent a day in the town of Ashcroft, Colorado. Actually, calling it a town is a bit of an overstatement. It’s a deserted valley with a few houses and one (great) restaurant that you have to snowshoe 45 minutes to get to because the road is closed in winter.
As we are packing up the car and I’m trying to not think about civilization, suddenly a...
Come on founders, get to work →
Someone had to say it. I have always said, building a business is a lot harder than starting most people think. “I’m worried that in all the hype, in all the “we launched our company” events, and “we changed our name again” parties, and “we redid our website – come celebrate!” shindigs, and the SXSW […]
February 2012
6 posts
New OSX could make the Mac as game-friendly as the...
The new version of OSX that Apple announced today feels like it could strangely make the Mac as valuable a channel for games as Facebook or the iPhone.
I say strangely because the Mac has typically been a backwater for games. Even with the the launch of an App Store, transition to Intel chips, and Steam coming to the Mac it remains a distant second fiddle to the PC which is itself in decline....
Clear for iPhone →
Like seemingly everyone else in the tech blogosphere, I’ve been playing with Clear, a new personal organization app from Realmac Software, for the past few weeks.
Super simple. Slick UI that’s bound to be copied quite a bit. Lovely.
Macstories, The Next Web, SiliconFilter, and TechCrunch have solid reviews.
(Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Orchestra, a competitor to Clear.)
On becoming an investor and joining Spark Capital
Today I’m thrilled to say I’m joining the team at Spark, making the switch from entrepreneur to investor. I’ve known the guys at Spark for years and have admired the unique approach, and the unqualified success they have had. This is a big switch for me, but made easier by working with close friends that I respect.
As you could imagine I thought about this decision rather...
Stuck Like Glue: Zynga Accounts for 12 Percent of... →
Facebook said social games are currently responsible for “substantially all of our revenue” when it comes from payments.
In December, Zynga went public, raising $1 billion, and is obviously one of the companies most reliant on the social network. But now with Facebook’s financials also public, we can see that the two companies are actually interdependent.
Startups are not a chess game.
One of the really hard things to do as an entrepreneur is to not try and solve for too many problems at once. I’ve found it is one of the first things I end up talking to early stage entrepreneurs about (twice today, actually). And something I struggle with myself.
We like to think strategically: “what if we had that many customers?” “how is this going to...
January 2012
1 post
“Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Timehop is awesome.”
– Timehop, A Time Machine For Your Social Media Updates, Gets $1.1M From Foursquare Founders And Others | TechCrunch
(via rickwebb)
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
3 posts
24 hours with the Fire
24 hours in with the Kindle Fire and I feel like I’m coming to the same emotional place as I did with the Droid. The first 10 minutes were “wow, I think this might actually make it!” — but it buckled under extended use from lack of polish.
The good.
Hardware: A better form factor for media consumption than the iPad. ”woah it looks tiny!” were my first thoughts...
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
3 posts
July 2011
2 posts
2 tags
June 2011
2 posts
Quality or quantity
I’ve been a member of Netflix since the year they were founded, yesterday I cancelled. Netflix remains one of the companies I absolutely love. Their ability to eat away at their current business to invent their next business is inspiring.
But as a user I find I have little time to watch television. If I’m going to fill those hours, I want it to be something really excellent, and I...
Um ... Yeah →
It’s a VCs job to take meetings. So them reaching out to you is more about them than you.
tedr:
Received: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:30 PM
Hi Ted,
My name is Aaron and I’m an analyst with ***** Venture Partners, a $2 billion fund that specializes in profitable, fast-growing software and internet companies. Given Dogster’s impressive track record, I thought that a quick chat...
March 2011
2 posts
Wishing Color the best. Envy gets you nowhere, and building companies is a tough business no matter how much money you have.
February 2011
2 posts
What does the next Flickr look like? →
“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan
Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that...
Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That... →
After all, it will cost a lot of taxpayer dollars to enact Obamastroid just plummeting us further into debt. Why can’t Obama just understand that free markets will work this out?