Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2009

so compelling (other than the fact that the CEO Sean Rad is a great young technology leader and his advisers – Brian Norgard , Dan Gould and Evan Rifkin - are some of the guys I respect most in the LA tech market.). That’s a good thing – it means there’s a market. 30% is the market opportunity.

Technical Review 286

Technical Review Advertising Early Stage Internet 286

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

Dave’s a great guy with a good sense of humor and a broad knowledge of the market, which is why I was excited that he could be on the show. It is a platform to help brands building viral marketing campaigns. They focus on trying to drive engagbranded social media marketing campaigns (e.g. Enter ShoeDazzle. GroundTruth.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 15, 2011

Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics. And figuring out who is referring your traffic is a very important part of determining how you allocate your marketing budgets. This happens with other marketing campaigns, too.

Analytics 292

Analytics Social Media Campaign Viral 292

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2013

When polled 88% of marketing professionals said they couldn’t accurately measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and the majority said lack of ROI measurement is their single greatest frustration with social media (Forbes). Clicks are also a simple measure that you can get from basic link tracking packages.

Technical Review 307

Technical Review Marketing SEM Campaign 307

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2010

Contributing overall with marketing and community outreach activities. Excellent analytical capabilities. Analyzing industries / companies. Assisting on company due diligence. Monitoring & reporting on company performance. Responding to portfolio company requests. Self starter.

Los Angeles 290

Los Angeles Technical Review Due Diligence Venture Capital 290

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified. We will seeing the growth of social networks around topics of interest like StockTwits for people interested in investing in the stock market. it’s not because you can create short links but because of the analytics that bit.ly

Social Network 297

Social Network Networking Internet EC2 297

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 1, 2009

In my previous post, The VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) I wrote about the reasons why the VC market came to a screeching halt in September 2008 and remained largely shut until at least April 2009. There are now signs the VC market has gathered pace meaning it’s a great time to be fund raising. This is one book-end of the cycle.

IPO 255

IPO Investment Bankers Venture Capital Marketing 255

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2010

I usually say something like, “I know this market reasonably well so feel free to pick up the pace and drop from 50k feet to 5k feet. OK, I understand your market is big. If a driver starts to call bullshit on your product or market it’s OK – actually, it’s expected – that you stick up for yourself.

Analytics 358

Analytics Audience Entrepreneur Portfolio 358

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

You may be a better communicator, have a higher IQ, be more of a natural leader, be more persuasive, be more analytical, etc. At the margin you can make yourself better at sales, product design, marketing, leadership, capital raising, etc. Tags: Entrepreneur Advice Start-up Advice Startup Advice Tech Market Analysis.

Silicon Valley 289

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur United States Leadership 289

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

It isn’t written by them or any marketing department – so please take it for what it is. Who would have guessed 5 years ago that Netbooks would have had such a big impact on the PC market? Optimization, at its core, is an analytics platform that gives you the power to figure out how to make money.

Mobile 282

Mobile Management Southern California Application Development 282

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Using Balsamiq instead of SnagIt, Website Optimizer over just Google Analytics and FTP). I changed that quickly when the market shifted and I had to lay off more than 80 people – many of whom were friends. I was too much Accenture, not enough Startup.

Warrant 333

Warrant Germany France Cost 333

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 13, 2011

We have a theme we call Protocol, which are technology protocols and markets built around technology protocols like SMTP for email and RSS. Was about a billion dollars on the IPO” and “was one of the first web analytics companies. So we have five themes – Digital Life and Distribution are the other two.”. Human Computer Interaction.

Technical Review 288

Technical Review Venture Capital Silicon Valley Software Review 288

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

I got him talking about this on This Week in VC including a quick demo of his dashboard - I think I'll shoot a separate sequence with just a walk-through of their analytics. one of the best in industry that I've seen is how Scott Painter measures his business at TrueCar. It's brilliant.].

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 12, 2013

He shared tons of information about how how they were using marketing to quantitatively make marketing decisions at HauteLook and acquire customers for prices that were far cheaper than similar companies. The feedback was always universal, “that was the most helpful marketing meeting I’ve every had.”

Partner 360

Partner Las Vegas Los Angeles San Francisco 360

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

We try to hire deeply analytical associates to can help companies problem solve and who make us better investors. But putting no time into anchoring your beliefs because you’re too busy executing sales, marketing, support, product & engineering is an easy recipe for leadership drift. Conviction. Winning paves over any flaws.

Leadership 150

Leadership Southern California Hiring San Diego 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

The strategy of GigaOm and where they differentiate in the market. We talked about the negative effect of Apple’s closed system attitude but how that will be a gift to the market because Apple’s cracking of the operator hegemony has forced the industry to innovate. Offers cloud-based web analytics software provider.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 6, 2010

trying to determine one’s math capabilities you might like to ask a detailed analytical problem to solve. We were not actually raising money yet, we were “pre marketing,&# “relationship building&# or whatever you want to call it. If you’re: raising money you might like to ask how the investor makes decision.

Churn Rate 311

Churn Rate Due Diligence Dividend Conversion 311

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2014

I was trying to be more analytical than critical. My point was that Amazon continues to dominate the web services business because AWS continues to cut prices & margin in the same way a hypermarket does to control market share. And of course they are also focused on the US Hispanic market. I wasn’t.

South America 291

South America Colombia Mexico Vertical 291

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

A social analytics platform for Facebook app developers and publishers that provides detailed demographic and engagement data. Analytics also extend to iPhone and web apps using Facebook Connect. Company plans to use the capital to build out sales and marketing and r&d. -a Kontagent. -A a fbFund winner. See: TechCrunch.

San Francisco 248

San Francisco Venture Capital Analytics Government 248

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 20, 2015

Our perspectives on the topic wax and wane with market cycles. Here’s what I believe, but won’t claim to “know” because every time I think I know something the market seems to do something entirely different. And if you’re lucky and hit product/market fit straight out of the gate – awesome.

Churn Rate 150

Churn Rate Silicon Valley Brazil Valuation 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 28, 2016

I began experimenting with time-of-day, number of Tweets, headline text, etc and learned a ton about usage patterns of Twitter and I even invested in a social media analytics company called Awe.sm, an influencer network called Adly and a data firehose company called Datasift (who now powers the Facebook Topics feed). Think about that.

Social Media 240

Social Media Media Curation SMS 240

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 25, 2010

Start by defining the problem you’re solving – I see way too many early-stage entrepreneurs who start their companies with a product definition rather than a market problem. I covered this a bit in my post about the market definition slide in fund raising. Here’s my take on the topic: 1. Kind of the obvious next step.

Product 348

Product Silicon Valley Oauth Design 348

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

One of the investment themes I’ve been focused on in the past 3 years has been Performance-Based Marketing. When I started investing the US advertising market was $300 billion with only 10% of it ($30 billion) of it being online and measurable. I believe that many social networks confused this idea. Early evidence is good.

Advertising 284

Advertising Las Vegas Affiliate RSS 284

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

What analytics are you going to use? When I asked many traditional producers about YouTube money they got they told me, “I got the talent, the audience will come.” ” Me, “ok, but who is going to provide your technology? How are you going to drive social adoption? How will you grab email addresses?

Silicon Valley 374

Silicon Valley Los Angeles Distribution Java 374

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 8, 2010

I guess let’s file this under sales & marketing advice. I started with the hosted version and then migrated to an installed version so I could use Google Analytics and some other products. First, most blogging tools have analytics built in. Then you can install Google Analytics to your website. Wordpress does.

Analytics 286

Analytics Audience Hosting Email 286

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2010

We’ll be conducting a series of educational programes covering: fund raising, team building, product development, sales, marketing, business development and how to prioritize your time as a CEO. The company’s analytics comprehensively monitors customer behavior over multiple networks, including location-based mobile networks.

Los Angeles 276

Los Angeles Stealth Securities and Exchange Commission Southern California 276

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 3, 2010

Provider of real-time data and predictive analytics for web site publishers. Pricing engine helps publishers ascertain ad inventory pricing by analyzing ad transaction data from the market/exchanges. MetaMarkets.

Founder 214

Founder San Diego SMS Los Angeles 214

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

It’s a market, after all. And I’ll know in 18 months whether we have product / market fit. I use analytics. It’s hard for me to imagine investing in companies in which you don’t use and understand the products and markets. The industry isn’t dying. It is changing. And reinventing itself.

LP 374

LP Later Stage IRR Term Sheet 374

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I told people privately my perfect spec: computer science undergrad from MIT (or any other great school), 2-years at McKinsey but no more than that (I love the analytical framework that the top strategy consulting firms provide. Ask if you could shadow different functions like marketing, finance or product management.

NPV 337

NPV Chicago Balance Sheet Database 337

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 21, 2010

This is the market that Wonga serves and they are killing it! Peer-to-peer lending service; started on FaceBook; claim to own 79% of the US peer lending market in March 2010 with a whopping $8,664,750. Big market. LendingClub. 24.5mm in Series C. There are obviously equivalent tests in most countries. What I like?

Venture Capital 265

Venture Capital Social Network Angel Investor Chad 265

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 27, 2016

Wearables are clearly an important market but to me a much broader use case is bringing real-world objects into the computing world and there is no better mechanism than Computer Vision. A mobile marketing company could track campaigns and then measure increases in retail traffic driven into local stores.

Marketing 150

Marketing Database Early Stage Artificial Inteligence 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

Was it massively better software, better companies, better markets? It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified. We are also seeing the growth of social networks around topics of interest like StockTwits for people interested in investing in the stock market.

Social Network 318

Social Network Networking Internet Technical Review 318

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on.

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2011

We’re in a market where 800-pound gorillas throw their weight around and the rest of the market races to react and survive. It is the same movie I saw 10 years ago when every VC would say to me, “yeah, I get that you’re an online document sharing service, but what’s going to happen when Microsoft enters the market?

SMS 325

SMS Non-Compete Differentiation Social Network 325

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 27, 2011

If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this. And to prove the point I have the analytics from this post. You wouldn’t.

Startup 373

Startup eCommerce Audience Community 373

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2010

Google Analytics vs. Facebook’s new analytics tool. BookRenter – plus a discussion about Chegg … what is going on in the university book market? We talked about the analogies between what NetFlix achieved in movies and whether this is relevant to the book market. These are both either “remnant” or free ad types.

Venture Capital 217

Venture Capital Los Angeles Oakland Asia 217

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2011

Finally, DataSift has an enormous about of historical data already stored we we can help you go back and retrieve some older data for analytical purposes. Real-time information drives decisions about marketing spend on movie releases. has now made these analytics available to the public. Real-time information drives commerce.

Viral 307

Viral Las Vegas Syndicate Syndication 307