March 2010
18 posts
2 tags
Financial Reform Bill Uproar May Be Unwarranted
Yesterday I saw a tweet from Josh Kopelman and then this morning a post from Bijan about Senator Dodd’s financial reform bill suggesting that it would impose a 120 day review period on angel investing (which would be crazy). They are based on an article on the Huffington Post by Robert Litan from the Kauffman Foundation, titled “Proposed ‘Protections’ for Angel Investors...
4 tags
Heyzap Social (A Lean Success)
Yesterday Heyzap announced the launch of their platform for taking social games from Facebook to the rest of the web (coverage by Venturebeat and Techcrunch). This represents not only a terrific opportunity for both Heyzap and social game developers, but is also a perfect illustration of the lean side of the current fat versus lean discussion that has been unfolding between Ben Horowitz and my...
1 tag
Healthcare Reform and Sailing
Yesterday I tweeted the following quick thought about healthcare reform:
Reading abt passage of healthcare reform. At this point any reform beats no reform: once there is movement, the course can be corrected
Just wanted to quickly expand on the idea behind this, which comes from sailing (one of my favorite hobbies). With a sailboat you can find yourself “in locks” which happens...
Communicator: Done. Replicator: Next. The Future...
My post for today is over on the Union Square Ventures blog. It is about the future of making stuff (and has lots of Star Trek references).
“As kids, we say stupid things, and because there’s not a record of it, nobody is...”
– Christopher Poole in NYT interview with Nick Bilton. This is one of the most thought provoking quotes on online identity / privacy I have come across in a while.
3 tags
Hacking Textbooks - We Need It!
Since we held the Hacking Education event last year, I have continued to look at education as an area that will be deeply disrupted by the Internet. I recently cited the $7B or so annual college textbook market as a prime example. One of the trends that will contribute to this disruption is the still small but growing movement against getting a formal college degree in the first place. I am...
6 tags
The Sui Generis Startup
Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz has a guest post on All Things Digital titled “The Case for the Fat Startup.” In it he makes a case for raising a lot of money and investing it aggressively. Ben’s argument is related to my post from yesterday about “Winner Take All and Early Stage Valuations.” He justifies massive fundraising and spending by...
4 tags
Winner Take All and Early Stage Valuations
The range for early stage valuations is probably broader than I have seen it since the first Internet bubble. I am aware of raises at the moment all the way from pre-moneys of below $2 million to $50 million. These are all early-stage pre-revenue companies but with launched services.
What accounts for the huge range? There are of course the usual factors, such as the strength of the team and...
2 tags
Storms in Scarsdale
This has been a fairly rough winter. We had at least three separate storms that dumped over a foot of snow. And then just as it looked as if spring was around the corner with a couple of absolutely gorgeous days, we got a storm with a combination of tremendous rainfall and such high winds that more trees than ever before were knocked down.
Here is one just a couple of corners from our house...
4 tags
“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and...”
– Tim Bray in his post on joining Google
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Investor Signaling (Adding to Chris Dixon)
Chris Dixon had a great post yesterday about “the importance of investor signaling in venture pricing” that every entrepreneur should read. Leaving aside the classical economics strawman from the first paragraph (does anybody think that classical economics would apply to a small numbers situation with extreme information asymmetry?), the rest of the post is spot on. Here are a...
The Future of Browser Plugins (Hint: Let's Call...
At Union Square Ventures we have backed a couple of companies that use browser plugins at the core of their services (Adaptive Blue, Zemanta). We have always been concerned about the potentially lower sign-up rates from requiring someone to install a plugin. The installation process on Firefox required an onerous restart (even for updates to already installed plugins!). In fact, our concern has...
6 tags
Every Review Should Have A Comment Thread
Looks like I managed to put the entire post into the title, so maybe I should have just tweeted it. But here is a little bit of background. I was talking to a friend of mine last week who has a newly released app in the app store. She told me that while a lot of people loved it, some hated it. She wasn’t so much offended by that but rather annoyed at her inability to respond to the...
2 tags
The Business of Code, The Code of Business
Blogged about “The Business of Code, The Code of Business” yesterday on the Google Code blog. “The Business of Code” part talks about how the economics of being an independent software company are being transformed by the web and by cloud computing, potentially limiting the number of opportunities available. “The Code of Business” part addresses how the...
6 tags
Oscar Fight(s) Recap: ABC vs Cablevision, Hurt...
Yesterday’s Oscars were notable for two different fights: ABC vs. Cablevision and Hurt Locker vs. Avatar. The first of these is a perfect illustration of what I call “fighting over the digital pie.” The reason things got so vicious between ABC and Cablevision and resolved only slightly past the last minute (as far as Oscar coverage goes) is simple: dollars from TV distribution...
3 tags
The Internet Transformation (Talk Outline)
Today at noon I am giving a talk to the Japan Business Network in New York — an informal get together organized by my brother-in-law, Charles Danziger. The topic is the fundamental transformation of industries that the Internet will bring about. I am planning to use the following outline.
Some background on Union Square Ventures - about $300 million under management across two funds -...
3 tags
More Thoughts on EBook Pricing
The New York Times had a piece yesterday on ebook pricing, which I have written about before. Interestingly, the piece simply states and doesn’t question that an ebook retailer such as Apple should be entitled to a 30% fee.
What will Apple provide? There would seem to be four separate functions: discovery, payment, delivery and DRM. Let’s start with payment. The fraud rate for...
3 tags
Undercover Boss (In Your Startup)
We took a quick look yesterday at the Closing Ceremony for the Winter Olympics, which was painful (Shatner, really?) but as we flipped to another channel, we ran across Undercover Boss on CBS. The premise of the series is simple: a boss from a large company works “undercover” at the frontlines of the business. The (first?) episode was one of the family owners of White Castle working...
