Occam's Razor
NOVEMBER 1, 2006
On this blog we have talked about the importance of the “Why” often. Web Analytics usually simply helps us understand the “What” Clickstream data typically does not tell us why something happened. We have stressed how important it is to know the Why in order to derive actionable insights around customer behavior on the website and outcomes from that behavior.
BeyondVC
SEPTEMBER 7, 2006
While reading the Wall Street Journal this morning, the Facebook story caught my eye. Facebook has clearly built a huge community and is one of the leading social networks on the web. However, I was mystified about the backlash the company received about its new service allowing users to better keep track of their friends and what they are doing. On the surface it seems like the company was trying to make it easier for their users to keep track of their friends’ whereabouts and online acti
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Tim Keane
OCTOBER 19, 2006
'Startups and angels: Along the way to success. By Tim Keane, Angel Investor, Golden Angels Investors, LLC. Home. Archives. Profile. Subscribe. « Calculating Market Share | Main. | Due diligence: An Entrepreneurs Perspective » October 19, 2006. Thinking about pricing. When mapping a market, its important to study pricing strategy. This seems like an obvious comment.
Cracking the Code
DECEMBER 16, 2006
Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 16, 2006. Why I disagree with Tony Zingale on the future of SaaS. A couple weeks ago, I attended the 13th Silicon Valley Annual VC/Entrepreneur luncheon organized by NVCA. The guest speaker was a well known and highly successful Silicon Valley veteran: Tony Zingale, President and CEO of Mercury Interactive.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
OnlyOnce
AUGUST 17, 2006
Fractals of Change: Are You an Entrepreneur? Tom Evslin's entertaining Top 10 Ways You Know You're an Entrepreneur. Some may dovetail nicely if I ever write up my read of The Fountainhead through entrepreneurial lens!
abovethecrowd.com
APRIL 27, 2006
MMOs (MMORPGs) Continue to Rock There is a great deal of interesting activity in MMO land these days. You may remember that we highlighted the invest-abilty of this trend/category about 18 months ago. Despite my enthusiasm, I could have never anticipated the massive impact of World of Warcraft. It appears today to be the most [.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Occam's Razor
JUNE 8, 2006
I am often asked what we look for when we hire Web Analysts or what quality do good Analysts possess or how to measure if a resource that already exists is optimal or how to mentor / motivate / guide our more junior Analysts to propel them to become great Analysts. This blog post is an attempt to answer all those questions wrapped into one. We all agree that reporting is not analysis.
BeyondVC
DECEMBER 22, 2006
A friend of mine called me the other day to ask for advice on what services (email, voice, apps) he should use to run his business with the caveat being that he wanted to spend as little upfront capital as possible and also have minimal ongoing maintenance headaches. As I started thinking about his question, I remember what it was like setting up our office in 1998 and the headaches and cost of buying a Nortel phone system and phones and hiring a Microsoft networking expert to get our office set
BeyondVC
SEPTEMBER 6, 2006
As you know, talent is the lifeblood of any company. Given that, I have written a number of posts on hiring (see here and here ). I recently saw Joel Sposky’s (Joel on Software) post on hiring great developers and thought that I would share it with you. He makes a number of great points and I have extracted a few pearls of wisdom for you: "The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market." "Numerically, great people are
Tim Keane
MAY 22, 2006
'Startups and angels: Along the way to success. By Tim Keane, Angel Investor, Golden Angels Investors, LLC. Home. Archives. Profile. Subscribe. « Compensation for Entrepreneurs | Main. | Pizzas, People and Progress » May 22, 2006. Pick Your Investor With Care. The great day has arrived. Tomorrow, you're going to close your first professional investment with "Fred," a wealthy individual you met at a networking event. Just this morning, he call
BeyondVC
JANUARY 31, 2006
The buzz around offshoring has certainly died down over the last year. For a period of time, you could not pick up a magazine or read a newspaper without a lead article on the dangers of offshoring. I had dinner tonight with a portfolio company CEO who has managed to shift most of his resources to India. Today the company has almost 100 employees in India, over 30 of whom have been with the company for 5+ years.
Cracking the Code
DECEMBER 28, 2006
Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Thursday, December 28, 2006. Best Venture and Technology Podcasts for 2007. Being a San Francisco-Menlo Park commuter, I spend an average of 90mn per day on the road. I make the most of this time by listening to my favorite tech and venture podcasts.
Cracking the Code
DECEMBER 16, 2006
Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 16, 2006. Betting on the right guy. Venture Capital is about investing in the small, fast and agile company hoping that it will beat the large and slow incumbent. In this game, sometimes you win and sometimes you loose.
Cracking the Code
DECEMBER 9, 2006
Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 09, 2006. McKinsey highlight #1: the art of cost cutting or how to save 70m with a measuring spoon. Paris, November 1998. First week on the job. The phone rings - it was the staffing manager: "Philippe, come in my office, your life is gonna change!".
Cracking the Code
DECEMBER 7, 2006
Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Thursday, December 07, 2006. Zune vs. Ipod. Is the Zune going to dent Apples disproportionate share of the online music market? Posted by Philippe Botteri. at 5:19 PM. Labels: anecdotes , sales and marketing. 3 comments: Anonymous said. warhammer gold warhammer money warhammer accounts tibia money tibia gold tibia item runescape accounts buy runescape accounts rune
Cracking the Code
DECEMBER 2, 2006
Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 02, 2006. Cracking the SMB code. Small and Medium businesses have been the holy grail of High tech and software companies for quite some time now, but the quest is far from ending. "If you would ask me what part of the market is most underserved by technology companies today, Id tell you its small and medium sized business. and so I think its a v
BeyondVC
DECEMBER 20, 2006
I had an interesting call this morning with an entrepreneur who had been up until the wee hours of the morning reviewing legal documents for a big strategic partnership. He apologized about his state of mind which wasn’t exactly calm and cool, and we proceeded to discuss the issues and parse out the major ones from the minor details. As I reminded him of a conversation I had with my wife several years ago, we all had a good laugh.
BeyondVC
OCTOBER 17, 2006
On the heels of my earlier post on questions " entrepreneurs should ask themselves ," I got a flurry of emails from readers about other points that I did not address. Anyway, I strongly believe that we can sometimes get too enamored with our own technology and not do enough market assessment in the real world. Later this week, we are actually going to have a strategy review at one of my portfolio companies and these are the questions we are asking ourselves: What is our unique value prop
BeyondVC
OCTOBER 14, 2006
Mike Masnick of Techdirt has launched a new service called the " Techdirt Insight Community." Mike is an active blogger but also has run a corporate intelligence service for awhile mining the web for customized news and insight tailored for your company (think competitive analysis, updates, reviews on your products, etc. – check out Jeff Nolan’s guest post on Venturebeat for more).
BeyondVC
OCTOBER 6, 2006
I must admit that I have seen way too many social networking related plays that want to be the next MySpace of some niche market. When asked about monetization the standard answer is they have a much more focused audience than MySpace with highly targeted CPMs. Guess what, if MySpace is only monetizing a fraction of their visits, how can a tiny, little niche site scale to enough volume to make a meaningful business?
BeyondVC
SEPTEMBER 13, 2006
As an entrepreneur, you are most likely spending most of your time building your product and getting it to market. in other words, you are focusing on the big picture which is what you should be doing. I do want to share with you a couple of anecdotes about not forgetting to take care of the little things – little things like keeping proper files and records.
BeyondVC
AUGUST 9, 2006
Oftentimes I am asked what my plan for exit is when I invest in a company. Sure I have a plan when I invest, but it is impossible to predict the future. The best plan in my mind is to make sure that any company we invest in has a tremendous market opportunity with a real business model and high operating margins that can eventually generate real cash flow.
BeyondVC
APRIL 27, 2006
Here is a link to an article on VCs and VOIP (via Andy Abramson of VOIPWatch). There are some VCs who think it it too crowded and others (like myself) who still see opportunities. However, the one thing I was not pleased about is that the only quote the author uses for me did not include the rest of our conversation. I should have just pointed her to my blog post from last September on the topic where I say that: This battleground is about software and not devices which is why I believe companie
Occam's Razor
MAY 19, 2006
Numerous studies have pointed out that while almost all Fortune 500 companies have great investments in "Web Analytics" they still struggle to make any meaningful business decisions. Most people complain that there are tera bytes of data and giga bytes of reports and mega bytes of Excel and PowerPoint files. Yet no actionable insights, no innate awareness of what is really going on through the clutter of site clickstream data.
Occam's Razor
MAY 17, 2006
We all wish that our key internal partners, business decision makers, would use Web Analytics data a lot more to make effective decisions. How do we make recommendations / decisions with confidence? How can we drive action rather than pushing data? The challenge is how to separate Signal from Noise and make it easy to communicate that distinction. This is where Excellent Analytics Tip #1, a recurring series, comes in.
Occam's Razor
MAY 22, 2006
This post is a primer on the delightful world of testing and experimentation (A/B, Multivariate, and a new term from me: Experience Testing). There is a lot on the web about A/B or Multivariate testing but my hope in this post is to give you some rationale around importance and then a point of view on each methodology along with some tips. I covered Experimentation and Testing during my recent speech at the Emetrics Summit and here is the text from that slide: Experiment or Go Home: Customers ye
BeyondVC
MARCH 1, 2006
Trust me, I love having well capitalized companies. However, having too much money can be a curse, not a blessing. More often than not, I see management lose financial discipline and avoid making hard decisions when capital is abundant and not scarce. To many executives, money does solve all problems. And yes, having money allows an entrepreneur to do many things with his business like hire more talent, scale the back-end infrastructure, and ramp up sales and marketing.
Occam's Razor
MAY 15, 2006
Imagine walking into and out of a supermarket. If you did not purchase anything then the supermarket managers probably don't even know you were there. If you purchased something, the supermarket knows something was sold (they know a bit more if you use a membership card). Visiting a website, you leave behind a significant amount of data, whether you buy something or not.
Occam's Razor
NOVEMBER 12, 2006
The topic of my speech at the E-consultancy Online Marketing Masterclasses 2006 in London ( sign up here ) is "Conversion Rate Optimization: What, Why, How" While working on one of the slides (Tip # 9) the realization dawned that we measure conversion rate rather sub optimally and in a way that grossly overestimates the improvement possibilities.
Occam's Razor
AUGUST 28, 2006
How many metrics can you call adorable? Site abandonment rate is an adorable metric, to me : ), for these reasons: Money, money, money baby. IMHO there isn't a metric out there that can tell you a lot so quickly and any improvement you make to it will directly and immediately impact the bottom-line. It measures the customer interaction in a very small number of web pages, probably one for cart and two to three for checkout.
BeyondVC
DECEMBER 6, 2006
It is near the end of the year and I would hope by now that most companies have been through a revision or two of their strategic plan and budget for 2007. While strategic planning and budgeting is a task that some may find quite onerous or even useless, it is an imperative process and one that will help align your team and continue driving the growth of your business.
BeyondVC
JULY 6, 2006
As I mention in an earlier post , companies evolve and need different types of management with different profiles as they grow. A clear kiss of death that I have seen more often than not is hiring a VP of Sales too early. Here is the typical scenario – you just signed 3 or 4 customers in a couple of different verticals and you feel that all you need is some bodies on the street to grow your business.
BeyondVC
FEBRUARY 11, 2006
Scott Maxwell has another excellent post on his blog. This time it is on a company’s need to measure and monitor their business. In an early stage business, I typically see two types of companies. There are those companies that do not measure and monitor much and instead drive their business by a "seat of the pants" decision making process.
BeyondVC
AUGUST 6, 2006
Attraction to fame is part of our culture. There are dozens of magazines, tv shows, and websites devoted too all things celebrity. This attraction to fame also extends to the business and tech world as well – bringing a household name to your company can instantly elevate the perceived status of your business. All that being said, I personally have a serious problem when anything related to fame creeps into personnel decisions for an early stage company.
BeyondVC
DECEMBER 31, 2006
There are many things that I am thankful for this year, but one of the best things that could happen to the New York tech scene is the growth of Google. Last year Google opened a huge office in Chelsea and moved about 500 employees into the new location. While I initially thought that most of the staffers would be associated with advertising sales or content business development, through my various visits to the office I was surprised to learn that there were lots of engineers working on some si
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