Agile VC

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Today Optimus Ride announced a $5.25M seed round of funding to continue developing their unique approach to autonomous transportation. The pathway to that end goal is both uncertain and extraordinarily complicated given the technological, economic, and societal developments that will be required.

Cofounder 100

Cofounder Partner Software Networking 100

Agile VC

MAY 15, 2014

So stay tuned because in coming months we’ll be developing Growth Guides that cover a range of issues from product to sales to engineering.' Our goal is for these Growth Guides to be useful not only to the startups we invest in here at NextView, but for the broader startup community.

Seed Stage 193

Seed Stage Engineer Community Sales 193

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 5, 2014

If you’re collaborating very closely with alpha customers, you may give away the product during initial development phases. There’s a myriad of pricing and payment structures for B2B companies – subscription, transaction-based, term/perpetual licenses, OEM/embedded services, etc.

Revenue 234

Revenue Product B2B Marketing 234

Agile VC

MARCH 13, 2012

It expended 14M to develop a technology that was stolen. First, Leader is an “operating business”, not an “IP holding company. It was born without thought of “trolling” as I doubt that overused buzzword existed at the time.

IP 100

IP IPO Social Network Silicon Valley 100

Agile VC

AUGUST 14, 2012

The company isn’t simply a game developer, but is pushing the artistic and technical boundaries of what a “mobile” game experience can be. And SkyVu’s team is creating a truly cross-platform company… they built the first plug-in for in-app purchases on Android/Unity and made it available to other developers.

Mobile 140

Mobile Angel Investor Networking Revenue 140

Agile VC

APRIL 28, 2014

Picture this… some people that seem at the fringes of the mainstream (developers & entrepreneurial types) do some stuff that you don’t really understand (innovation & company building) and then poof the entrepreneur possesses vast riches.

Silicon Valley 150

Silicon Valley Acquisition Software Restful 150

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

On paper it makes sense… ~$10B market cap, deals with lots of content owners, a nascent library of Netflix developed content, and a happy/loyal consumer base. Apple could buy Disney instead (~$98B mkt cap) and own a vast library of content and the “infrastructure” to develop more (ABC/ESPN, movie studios, etc).

Hungary 168

Hungary Dividend Vertical Preferred Stock 168

Agile VC

MAY 16, 2012

Opportunistic VC investors focus less on developing very specific theses and more on cultivating a deep, rich network around the entire firm. Sometimes we develop themes on our own and then pursue investments based on that thesis. We want to make sure we’re open to thinking about these opportunities with a blank canvas.

Seed Stage 124

Seed Stage Silicon Valley B2B Syndicate 124

Agile VC

JANUARY 3, 2013

While there’s a broad ecosystem of third party developers at the app level, even there you’ve seen the platform owners fight hard to bundle their own apps most notably in the maps showdown between Apple and Google.

Mobile 124

Mobile Software Open Source Search 124

Agile VC

MAY 21, 2012

ad-tech, analytics, development platforms, etc) the list is slightly different. were fairly active a few years ago though neither is as active today and big media conglomerates like Disney are fairly sporadic as they embrace web-based media. On the B2B SaaS side or enabling services (e.g.

Acquisition 162

Acquisition Silicon Valley B2B Seed Stage 162

Agile VC

JULY 19, 2012

One of the earliest examples of this turned out pretty well when one of Kleiner Perkins’s young investment professionals (29yr old Bob Swanson) bugged a UCSF professor in the last ’70s about starting a company to develop medicines using recombinant DNA.

Cofounder 193

Cofounder Limited Partner Early Stage LP 193

Agile VC

AUGUST 22, 2011

It encompasses not just a technical infrastructure but also a user experience framework, usually some form of a selling channel, and a defined large-scale developer ecosystem. A software platform is truly a foundation on which entire businesses can be built. Facebook is a platform and companies like Zynga have been built upon it.

Silicon Valley 113

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Startup Syndicate 113

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 2, 2012

The next chunk comes from Facebook’s platform, in essence “taxing” the revenues of app developers like Zynga, which represents 15% of revenue. That’s actually a combination of Payments (the 30% share Facebook takes from app developer revenues) and advertising spend for ads Zynga buys on FB to acquire customers.

IPO 100

IPO South Korea Venezuela Revenue 100

Agile VC

JANUARY 18, 2012

But more often it’s when the founders feel that the right set of personal circumstances exist (professional experience, developments in their private lives, etc), in conjunction with all the other reasons to become a founder.

Entrepreneur 100

Entrepreneur Cofounder Silicon Valley Seed Stage 100

Agile VC

MARCH 18, 2012

While Twitter has acquired various client apps like TweetDeck, they let various 3rd party developers pursue the premium service revenue opportunity. Twitter has ceded the premium service business to others.

Media 113

Media Advertising Silicon Valley Revenue 113

Agile VC

JUNE 13, 2019

Chewy has also started to introduce some private label brands, which presumably will drive higher product gross margin, though this is still fairly early in development. Gross margins have been steadily improving in recent years from 16.6% in 2016, to 17.5% in 2017, and 20.2% The other way we often look at margins is contribution margin.

Leadership 100

Leadership .Net Revenue Acquisition 100

Agile VC

JULY 11, 2012

The names of these once great, now defunct firms may not be terribly familiar today but here are just a few examples: American Research & Development [Boston] –> Founded by George Doriot and depending how you count it, either the first or second formal VC firm in the US.

Silicon Valley 240

Silicon Valley Carried Interest Cofounder Boston 240

Agile VC

JUNE 12, 2012

Virtually every mobile payments system in the developed world (see note #3) just piggybacks off the credit card system. Systems like M-Pesa (see note #3 below) took off because in developing nations prepaid wireless minutes were a parallel currency, fungible for real money.

Mobile 250

Mobile Disintermediation SMS Government 250

Agile VC

APRIL 13, 2012

I’m not suggesting that there aren’t lots of hard technical problems being solved in today’s startups… nearly any developer worth his or her salt could build Facebook or Twitter like products for a few hundred users, but few can make them scale to hundreds of millions.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley San Francisco San Jose Startup 185

Agile VC

JUNE 25, 2012

Is CardMuch integration available these days to third party developers? For example Twitter, who made the website prior to developing a mobile app, still has yet to integrate a feature to accept or deny followers for users with locked profiles. link] leehower. Thanks Matthew. Ahmed Diabate. This sounds like a great business.

Cofounder 140

Cofounder Stealth Silicon Valley Mobile 140

Agile VC

OCTOBER 5, 2012

But again the day-to-day tasks are farther removed from operating a business, and it’s rare to be able to develop domain expertise that’s relevant in the longer term. One advantage of the policy/politics world is that exceptional people can often get a lot of responsibility at a very young age, similar to working in a startup.

Founder 217

Founder Cofounder Later Stage Operations 217

Agile VC

MAY 10, 2012

But increasingly even centuries old industries like agriculture are becoming highly automated, in both developed and emerging economies, with more internet connected systems and data nodes generating raw information. Some of this data remains in “siloed” offline computers (pun intended) or even requires manual input.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley Cofounder Seed Stage Syndicate 223