View from Seed

JULY 31, 2014

More interesting, however, is reflecting on what “rhymes” across multiple investments within our portfolio. The above outline opens a window into the ideas crossing multiple investments within our recent portfolio, as well as where some of the next additions will likely originate. Recent Investment Themes.

Seed Stage 272

Seed Stage B2C Technical Review Disintermediation 272

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

The Innovation Portfolio. Companies manage these three types of innovation with an innovation portfolio – they build innovation internally, they buy it or they partner with resources outside their company. And as part of their transition to predictable processes, their founders may or may not still be at the helm.

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

This applies to both founders and to VC’s that work with them. You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. But I knew that to be a good decision maker I needed first hand knowledge rather than just a summary from my CTO.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 9, 2021

Matt was the co-founder/CEO of Return Path. The founders of each company talked and, in between efforts to decimate the other, agreed it might be worth merging to survive. It’s a follow-up to his previous book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business. I’ve been working with Matt since 2000.

Fractional CTO 70

Fractional CTO Cofounder Startup Lead Investor 70

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2016

We then help surround founders with other talent who want to join important causes but don’t have the startup idea themselves. The rest of our team included the founding CTO of Maker Studios (Ryan Lissack) and the CEO of DataSift (Tim Barker) so we seemed to all be in good company of ex Salesforce execs looking to make a difference.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Fractional CTO Cofounder Early Stage 150

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

The technical mastermind behind Replay is Brian Hackett (CTO, co-founder) who has been thinking about and working on this concept for a long time… in fact, his PhD at Stanford 10+ years ago laid the foundation for Replay. And that leads us to why we’re so excited: the team!

CTO Hire 78

CTO Hire Web Cofounder Software Engineering 78

Hunter Walker

JUNE 7, 2014

And my sense is the trend carries outside of our portfolio these days. Founders are building small, focused teams based on people they worked with previously and referrals from their networks. Now the employees carry your technology into the enterprise via their own phone and cloud services. What’s changed?

Technical Review 117

Technical Review CTO Hire Finance Stealth 117

BeyondVC

MARCH 18, 2018

For the next few years we collaborated on several co-investments and what ultimately attracted us to Guy’s new company (along with co-founders Danny Grander and Assaf Hefetz), was their bold vision to create a new platform for securing open source components with a dev-first focus. Founder-market fit ?—?GuyPod Repeat founders ?—?we

Open Source 60

Open Source Security Cofounder Software Review 60

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 1, 2022

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Advisory Board Member, 1% Senior Engineer,3 -.7% 7% Product Manager,2 -.3% 3% If you are not on this list, just worry about getting whatever your peers are getting.

Stock Options 343

Stock Options Advisory Board Stock Startup 343

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

The Scene Developers Nailing that elusive technical co-founder. Just last week, start-up supremo Naval Ravikant of AngelList wrote how the “oversupply” of founders starting companies is making it harder to hire for the average startup. Are there any ‘Founders Dating’ events coming up?”. Thursday, 8 March 2012.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Continuing my series of posts that I’ve been collecting that live at the intersection of Startups and being a Startup CTO : Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March here are the top posts from May 2010. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. It says what?!”).

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

Thanks to all of the amazing founders, advisors, co-investors, corporate partners, and others that helped make 2018 an amazing year. To that point, we are most excited when our founders are able to go from slide deck to product-market fit and Series A and beyond. AWS Reinvent Survivor Dinner with founders, Fortune 500 execs, and VCs.

Stealth 79

Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

But the thing I am most proud of about Rob is that he has taken a company with a uniquely talented founder & CTO – Nick Halstead – and managed to build a very tight working relationship with Nick where we drive world-class product development without having the usual founder / CEO conflicts.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Up and Running

DECEMBER 13, 2021

Fundraising isn’t easy for most founders. No longer are founders being asked to drive up and down Sand Hill Road, meet in small coffee shops throughout SF or NYC, or spend a meaningful amount of money getting around to all of these meetings. Don’t interrupt your co-founder or the investor. Know when to stop talking.

Founder 85

Founder Cofounder SMS Seed Stage 85

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Founder Dialogues : Eric Paley plays talk show host on this recurring fireside chat style event that has featured Boston’s BEST founders. OnStartups: One of the largest online startup communities founded by HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah. link] – Not a meetup, but a great mentorship program started by serial CTO Sean Lindsay.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

One of his investors called him, “the best CFO in our entire portfolio.&# ). I wrote a blog post about being hands on where I argued that startup founders need to be hands-on or in my words, “you can’t run a burger chain if you’ve never flipped burgers.&#. But even then I think it’s funny.

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

View from Seed

JULY 24, 2015

The invite-only event was attended by 300 of the area’s best tech leaders, founders, product managers, designers, developers, investors, engineers, salesmen and women, and more, all of whom are hard at work in consumer tech. Half our portfolio is consumer. On Tuesday, July 21, we hosted the first-ever Boston Consumer Tech Summit.

Boston 120

Boston Cofounder B2C PR 120

Seeing Both Sides

MARCH 4, 2015

There are a number of founder leadership models that can work well as a startup evolves. Getting the founder model right is critical because the founder is the soul of a company. Zuckerberg Model - Named after Facebook''s Mark Zuckerberg, this model is where the founder hires a #2 early on so (e.g.,

Leadership 20

Leadership Founder CTO Hire Hiring 20

Cracking the Code

MARCH 24, 2015

We were fortunate to host very talented speakers from our portfolio (Ilya Sukhar from FB/Parse, Steve Marx from Dropbox, Bill Ready from Braintree, Ali Rayl from Slack, Eric Wittman from Atlassian, Sam Mac Donnell from HotelTonight.) gathered at the event. It is not very polished but was designed for a fast read.

API 48

API Fractional CTO CTO Hire San Francisco 48

Up and Running

DECEMBER 27, 2018

Dan Brown, the inventor of Bionic Wrench and founder of Logger Head Tools, is a prime example. It has more than 40,000 patents in its portfolio. Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures. You can read the bright side of Dan’s story here. It acquires patents from almost every domain.

Intellectual Property 93

Intellectual Property Technical Review Due Diligence Cofounder 93

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing launched a virtual portfolio management game on Facebook in January 2008 and a similar version shortly thereafter on kaChing.com. Because kaChing prefers its portfolio managers to have a long track record, the marketplace launch (i.e., A portfolio manager’s entire track record & holdings had to be disclosed.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Lightspeed Venture Partners

APRIL 12, 2016

Since then, as a team, we’ve been fortunate enough to invest behind the vision of the founders of some tremendous consumer companies across messaging, social media, e-commerce, Internet of Things, marketplaces and gaming. For that reason I was thrilled when Aaron Batalion joined as my partner in November.

Technical Cofounder 60

Technical Cofounder Cofounder SCRUM Committed Capital 60

SoCal CTO

APRIL 9, 2013

And they should not get to count items in their portfolio that were done at another company/job - yes, that''s quite common, especially in new firms. But you may also want to get in touch with people at companies that they have been showing you as part of the portfolio. Make sure you know exactly what the company did on each project.

Web Development 204

Web Development Web Developer Los Angeles 204

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Advisory Board Member, 1% Senior Engineer,3 -.7% 7% Product Manager,2 -.3% 3% If you are not on this list, just worry about getting whatever your peers are getting.

Equity 237

Equity Stock Options Advisory Board Stock 237

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

So we as VCs search for entrepreneurs/founders who have the whole package or as much of it as possible. They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. I want our associate to have empathy for the customers we serve — our portfolio companies. Few people have it. Was I too harsh?

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur CTO Hire South America Salary 293

Rob Go

DECEMBER 11, 2013

Partners are prone to bad behavior too, but because they are the “decision makers”, founders are more likely to just shrug their shoulders and move on (although everyone has their limits). Here’s my 2 cents on what VC associates should do (or not do) to avoid being annoying and unhelpful to founders.

CTO Hire 68

CTO Hire Partner Software Developers Software Development 68

Version One Ventures

JUNE 24, 2020

Today, one of our newest portfolio companies, Cape Privacy , announced their seed fundraise in conjunction with the public launch of their privacy platform. This marks the second time we’re investing in Gavin Uhma , Cape’s co-founder and CTO. You can read more details about the launch here.

Artificial Inteligence 78

Artificial Inteligence Cofounder Open Source Portfolio 78

Genuine VC

DECEMBER 3, 2014

The benefits have been touted previously : an anchor for attracting and retaining talent in Boston, as well as a breeding ground for the next set of great Boston entrepreneurs and founders. Already, a handful of groups have spun out to start new ventures, like the teams at Driftt , Bedrock Data , Grokky , and NextView-backed InsightSquared.

Boston 279

Boston IPO B2B Cofounder 279

K9 Ventures

JUNE 23, 2011

I’m pleased to announce the developer launch of K9 Ventures’ portfolio company, card.io (pronounced card-I-O). I’ve known Mike Mettler, the co-founder and CEO of card.io, for a while now and first met Mike when he had just left AdMob. It’s been a busy week folks! As the name suggests, card.io

Cofounder 93

Cofounder Mobile API Portfolio 93

Genuine VC

AUGUST 3, 2012

For us, the investment is certainly fresh and newest in our portfolio, but it also feels familiar. Her co-founder and CTO Yee Lee worked with both my partner Lee Hower and myself (at PayPal and Venrock, respectively). And Board Member James Reinhart is already part of the NextView family, as CEO of portfolio company, thredUP.

Seed Stage 199

Seed Stage Cofounder Portfolio Curation 199

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 21, 2017

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Advisory Board Member, 1% Senior Engineer,3 -.7% 7% Product Manager,2 -.3% 3% If you are not on this list, just worry about getting whatever your peers are getting.

Stock 140

Stock Stock Options Advisory Board Startup 140

K9 Ventures

SEPTEMBER 8, 2018

Yesterday, K9 Ventures portfolio company, Forethought AI , was declared the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 Startup Battlefield competition. Immigrant Founders. Deon Nicholas , the co-founder and CEO of Forethought, grew up in some of the toughest neighborhoods of Toronto, Canada. A Canadian (eh!),

Lebanon 104

Lebanon Cofounder United States San Francisco 104

Ben's Blog

JUNE 28, 2011

In Gates and Ellison’s minds, the corporations who owned the Information Super Highway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish” as Microsoft’s then Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold referred to it at the time. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Super Highway carried.

CTO 78

CTO Internet Illinois Cofounder 78

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

Other players such as Obopay have set out to focus on mobile person-to-person cash transfers, mFoundry (a GRP portfolio company) has focused on mobile banking and a mobile wallet and one of my favorite companies m-via is focusing on mobile remittances (right now between the US and Mexico). 15mm in Series A. Read more: TechCrunch.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 13, 2011

When I joined my first start-up after graduation, e-commerce leader Open Market , I found the operating philosophy of the founder jarring - he declared no one would have titles in the first few years. If you needed a title for external reasons, our founder told us, we should feel free to make one up.

CTO Hire 54

CTO Hire Cofounder Portfolio Founder 54

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 17, 2013

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Advisory Board Member, 1% Senior Engineer,3 -.7% 7% Product Manager,2 -.3% 3% If you are not on this list, just worry about getting whatever your peers are getting.

Stock Options 224

Stock Options Stock Advisory Board Startup 224

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

Rob Kingyens- Founder and CEO of Qubed Education. Rob Kingyens , founder, and CEO of Qubed Education , doesn’t think things have to be this way. Rob Kingyens- Founder and CEO of Qubed Education. Rob Kingyens- Founder and CEO of Qubed Education.

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Southern California Design Media Programming 68