Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

One of the great joys of doing the web series This Week in VC every week is that I get to spend time with great people debating the issues of our day including how our industry is evolving as well as insights into how companies got started, got their initial traction and dealt with adversities. And there you have it. Not a chance.

Connecticut 286

Connecticut Cofounder Silicon Valley Web 286

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 12, 2011

Chris runs a popular web interview series on TechCrunch so is used to being the guy asking the questions. This week I sat down with Chris Dixon, co-founder / CEO of Hunch and Partner at Founder Collective in the most recent installment of This Week in Venture Capital. Such that during that time, Chris “learned how to learn.”.

Technical Review 281

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Cofounder API 281

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 3, 2010

We had Farb Nivi , who is the founder & CEO of Grockit , a website that enables online group learning. Farb is the founder & CEO of Grockit.com. Web-based client for user stream data including Twitter (original focus), FaceBook, MySpace, Google Buzz, FourSquare and many others. Estimated 15mm downloads to date.

Founder 214

Founder San Diego SMS Los Angeles 214

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

I’ve been meaning to write this post since September of last year when Brad Feld first wrote about the The Founders Visa Movement. TWTFelipe is the founder of TWTApps , who had developed some really cool add-on applications for Twitter to extend its functionality. university in math or science&# (Thomas Friedman).

Technical Review 282

Technical Review Canada Green South Carolina 282

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2010

Gilt Group is currently the largest private sale web site in US. Founded in November 2007 in New York City by Alexis Maybank and Kevin Ryan (co-founder of DoubleClick); CEO is Susan Lyne (ex-CEO Marta Stewart Living Omnimedia) Revenue estimates: $50mm in 2008; $170mm in 2009 (versus budget of $150mm); $450mm forecasted for 2010.

Partner 240

Partner New York City Cofounder Syndicate 240

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

Timecodes: 00:00 Welcome, our guest is Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement. 8:17 How did you decide to go with either shrinkwrap or web only product? 00:45 Intro to Eric. 01:17 Background, before the Lean Startup. 01:53 Yale during the Dot Com Bubble. 3:35 The real entrepreneurs come out during a down economy.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2014

Think of web vs. mobile. When you look at a deal so much of what you’re trying to understand are the skills, resiliency , work ethic, motivation and team dynamics of the founders. Nothing blows up great opportunities faster than founders who are constantly fighting. Traditional software vs. SaaS.

Portfolio 364

Portfolio Chicago Sales Incubator 364

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2009

was the “static&# web. Traditional media companies published their stories on the web. was the 2-way web. I then remember when Amazon started selling books on the web. The Founder & CEO of Ad.ly So what do we mean by in-stream advertising? OK, many of you will know this but just to base line.

Technical Review 286

Technical Review Advertising Early Stage Internet 286

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2013

This obviously doesn’t scale once the founder can’t be in every sales meeting. They may have met you at a conference, attended a web conference or somehow else interacted with your company’s marketing department. So I often work with teams to get them to codify the key things they do well that the competition does not.

Campaign 336

Campaign Sales Software Customer 336

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

They can tell you the square foot costs of their property, they can tell you how much they spend on Amazon Web Services every month, they can tell you the 12 features that you’re working on for your next release. It’s different when you’re co-founders and one person gets the title COO. Who does finance report to?

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2014

I wrote this on my flight home from f.ounders & web summit in Dublin, Ireland late last year. My trip was scheduled around the annual Web Summit and the f.ounders conference, both of which have become the hottest must-attend event in Europe and rivaling any great conference in the US. The Origins of Web Summit / f.ounders.

Ireland 392

Ireland Global Las Vegas Switzerland 392

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

A Strong Pool of Tech Founders – Stating the obvious. Or how about the best example – Loic Le Meur gets everybody over to Paris every year for Le Web. Second-Time Entrepreneurs – The other byproduct of “wins” is you have second-time entrepreneurs who want to be founders of their next company.

Community 378

Community San Diego Silicon Valley Los Angeles 378

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

I recently spoke at the Founder Showcase at the request of Adeo Ressi. I spoke about how Amazon Web Services deserves far more credit for the last 5 years of innovation than it gets credit for and how I believe they spawned the micro-VC category. I said that at the Founder Showcase, too. some founders lose their life savings.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

Both of his co-founders worked with him previously and both worked on ad management platforms. The first big wave of this change came from the introduction of the iPhone, which was the first well built mobile device for using the web. He knows the ad management and ad network businesses. Optimization technology is not new.

Mobile 282

Mobile Management Southern California Application Development 282

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 26, 2015

On the one hand it denied Facebook from enormous amounts of web traffic that Google controlled at the time but in the longer-run due to network effects of social networks it made Facebook significantly more powerful. If you have success you have to make hard choices.

Oauth 150

Oauth Software Review Technical Review IPO 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

Bill Gross is the man responsible for the overwhelming amount of monetization on the web. On the founder’s side it’s about taking money off of the table and / or having strategic reserves for big acquisitions. That said, the founder is Stewart Butterfield , who co-founded Flickr. High Profile Deal of the Week: 1.

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Affiliate Valuation San Francisco 271

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

It proved to be fortuitous because it allowed me the time & space I needed to get to know tons of founders and VCs and to hone my craft. For start, there are many types of businesses that are large or complex “considered purchases” that have higher close rates over the phone than on a web form. Why does that matter?

IP 223

IP Intellectual Property IRR Cofounder 223

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 13, 2011

This time frame – 2005/2006 – web 2.0 Was about a billion dollars on the IPO” and “was one of the first web analytics companies. and one of the founders of Oblong, John Underkoffler, was an MIT Medialab PHd., was starting. You have a company called Oblong (in your portfolio) which is a Minority Report type company.

Technical Review 288

Technical Review Venture Capital Silicon Valley Software Review 288

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

ShoeDazzle has Kim Kardashian as a co-founder / company as a spokesperson as well as Brian Lee who was a co-founder at Legal Zoom. There are three “megatrends” as he puts it – real time data, the social web and flash marketing. Add this new model to the mix. No doubt there are a ton of knock-off competitors preparing to launch.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2011

In general, we seem to be building too many positive re-enforcement systems on the web. I was at a dinner about a year ago with a few VCs and startup founders. . “My desire for this “Opposing Views Reader” is related to my concern about information cascades. How about “agree” and “disagree” buttons?

Startup 313

Startup Guerilla Silicon Valley Portfolio 313

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

This is part of a series of advice for founders who need to raise money from venture capitalists. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. I always tell founders … “An investors job is to deploy capital and make a return. This is where most founders err.

Term Sheet 332

Term Sheet Due Diligence Campaign Sales 332

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2018

I never thought of this until I became the Founder & CEO of my first startup company. I tried it, it worked incredibly well and meeting with people (in person, in a web conference or on the phone) is ALWAYS better for you to understand their buyer needs and them to better understand you.

Cap Table 336

Cap Table Due Diligence Forecast Churn Rate 336

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2010

There were prominent founders of business like PriceGrabber, LowerMyBills and MyLife. Lee Essner is formerly a senior exec from WeddingChannel and has much experience in running a successful web property. DoubleClick and Amazon and is led by co-founders Jason Lehmbeck and John Zimmerman. And of course we had, TheMan.

Los Angeles 276

Los Angeles Stealth Securities and Exchange Commission Southern California 276

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2010

Your measurements are automatically sent via wi-fi to the cloud and stored in a password protected portal viewed on the web or on your iPhone. The founders claim that up to 75% of the population has some form of sleep deprivation. It’s a wi-fi enabled scale that measures your weight, body fat and BMI (body mass index).

Technical Review 278

Technical Review Software Review Alabama Silicon Valley 278

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

Finally, I do want to mention that Mike was the founder of DogPatch Labs , which has facilities in Cambridge, New York and San Francisco. Founded by Shervin Pishevar (COO of Webs). Current round: $2mm Series B from Tomorrow Ventures (Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google) and Lars Hinrichs (Xing founder). Total raised: $18.3mm.

San Francisco 230

San Francisco Los Angeles Cofounder SMS 230

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

Tracy DiNunzio isn’t your typical Silicon Valley startup founder. This was the first in her string of web properties. And through this industry legitimacy she was able to get the ear of Dany Levy, the co-founder of Daily Candy. She now recognizes the need to have co-founders. She focused on her customer.

Silicon Valley 363

Silicon Valley Cofounder Entrepreneur Startup 363

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

So they create a task list of all the marketing activities an organization can do: press releases, web site updates, customer case studies, blog posts, daily Tweets, Facebook fan page, attending conferences, etc. You have a marketing department with three people. They’re tasked with doing … marketing.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Retention PR SEO 164

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2011

We had to buy Oracle database licenses, UNIX servers, a Sun Solaris operating system, web servers, load balancers, EMC storage, disk mirrors for redundancy and had to commit to a year-long hosting agreement at places such as Exodus. Linux (instead of UNIX), Apache (web server software), MySQL (instead of Oracle) and PHP.

Venture Capital 334

Venture Capital Software PHP Open Source 334

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 8, 2014

Over the past decade we’ve had high-profile exits at many companies that pioneered monetization techniques now used across the web including Commission Junction, Value Click, ShopZilla, Price Grabber, LowerMyBills and a newer breed including Invoca, Burstly, Shift, Rubicon Project, Gravity, Convertro, Retention Science and so forth.

Los Angeles 376

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Seattle 376

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2014

Web Summit. Co-founder discontent. Reference checking is to confirm or disprove a strong, positive intuition you already have about founders that could lead to an investment or a pass. What would this founder do if he got an offer to be acquihired quickly by Facebook? And there’s conferences. Oh, the conferences.

Cofounder 374

Cofounder Syndicate Syndication Early Stage 374

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

We also talked about how brands are increasing driving much of their traffic to Facebook and away from their own web pages. Founded in April/May 2010 by Diego Berdakin (Ex-Slingshot Labs) and Josh Berman (Ex-Slingshot Labs, MySpace Co-founder) in Santa Monica, CA. Online service offering privacy certification for web sites.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 24, 2016

The mistake most founders make is sending out last-minute board packs. The following are the biggest mistakes I see founders make in board meetings: Allowing board members to get in the weeds. There are always times where one member needs to be on a web conference or telephone call due to travel conflicts.

Metrics 196

Metrics Strategic Investors Later Stage Management 196

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 14, 2009

And a great product starts with the founder. You need to make it an effort by researching on the web and going and doing 50 coffee meetings with people. You cannot be just a biz dev type, salesperson, marketing genius or whatever and divorce yourself from product. Great companies are built by having great products.

Silicon Valley 291

Silicon Valley Ireland Technical Review Valuation 291

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Another called Parker Harris, the co-founder and CTO. Web service architecture that provides a content management platform for the Internet. It included one firm who I asked not to call Salesforce.com as a reference (they were our largest pilot customer) and in their kindness they called Marc Benioff (the CEO) and asked his opinion.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2010

I was recently speaking with some founders about their fund raising process. Do a web search to find companies that they didn’t give you. You’d be surprised how many ex-founders and ex-CEO’s you can find this way. They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm.

Term Sheet 298

Term Sheet Venture Capital Stealth Cofounder 298

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2010

Palm (acquired by HP ) – In our interview we talked about how transformational mobile computing is and why it’s different than web computing (e.g. Klout measures influence on topics across the social web to find the people the world listens to; assigns a Klout score to Twitter members. Segment Two: “Deal of the Week”.

IPO 236

IPO .Net Venture Capital Strategic Investors 236

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

when you missed your targets, when your co-founder quit, when the competition chose your competitor or when the other investors around the table lost confidence? Do a web search to find companies that they didn’t give you. You’d be surprised how many ex-founders and ex-CEO’s you can find this way.

Venture Capital 288

Venture Capital Term Sheet Cofounder Partner 288