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10+ Trends: Recap of 2011 and What’s Next…

thebarefootvc

Discovery, in contrast to search, took center stage as Pinterest displayed hockey stick growth (and raised VC money near a $200M valuation in late 2011). Disruption in the Education Space: When I first started looking at education technology investments in 1999, very few VCs would go near the sector.

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Scaling is Hard, Case Study: Akamai

Seeing Both Sides

Technical founders Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin built the original prototype at their lab at MIT starting in late 1996 before raising capital, so in a sense Akamai’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was a prototype with the basic architecture and traffic mapping in place that validated algorithms for the founders and investors alike.