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. One of his investors called him, “the best CFO in our entire portfolio.&# ).

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 10, 2012

I’ve been spending time looking at marketing conversion metrics at portfolio companies lately. We’ve been testing things like: How do Facebook “Likes” perform relative to FB ads that drive you directly to a web page. I’ll write up some thoughts in a blog post format soon.

Marketing 297

Marketing Metrics Campaign Portfolio 297

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. You have a company called Oblong (in your portfolio) which is a Minority Report type company. was starting. More recently some Chamber of Commerce’s have started to endorse it.”.

Technical Review 288

Technical Review Venture Capital Silicon Valley Software Review 288

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 12, 2013

Greg was the first person to share with me the insights of mobile conversion and why with a simpler product selection and conversion funnel they would get higher conversion on mobile than on the web. So I started introducing him to portfolio companies. He walked me through both the logic and the math. Many more improvements afoot.

Partner 360

Partner Las Vegas Los Angeles San Francisco 360

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 27, 2011

Where Stealth is Good – There’s a lot of discussions on the web about whether startups should be stealthy before they launch or not. And these ideas have ways of seeping into board discussions with portfolio companies as in, “have you ever thought about trying A, B or C?&# You need some guidelines to make decisions.

Early Stage 380

Early Stage Stealth Marketing Startup 380

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 2, 2011

It’s apropos because there is so much noise these days with email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, web shows, etc. I get company portfolio requests (review board packs, sign legal docs, help with fund raising, review a new candidates resume, help with press release, request for meeting to discuss topics, etc.).

Email 287

Email Bankruptcy Equity Technical Review 287

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”. If you have multiple versions of your product, how many are web vs. mobile? You Manage What you Measure. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important. How do the mobile customers break down by device type?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 1, 2009

And Ron Conway has proclaimed that he wants to do up to 40-50 rapid-fire deals in the next 18 months in what is becoming known as the “real time web” (e.g. But there are many zombie VC’s with no more investments left in their portfolios so it’s hard to know which trend has more impact. This is one book-end of the cycle.

IPO 255

IPO Investment Bankers Venture Capital Marketing 255

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

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. Online service offering privacy certification for web sites. Offers cloud-based web analytics software provider. Providing web abalytics to 2,100+ brands (including: BofA, Office Depot).

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

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). These are all “billion dollar industries” he says.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

When he entered the industry he caught the tail end of the dot com bubble and then was immediately thrust into a 3-year period of “triage&# where VC’s had to deal with problems in portfolio companies. Founded by Shervin Pishevar (COO of Webs). Scans the web for a kid’s activity in realtime and sends alerts. -Co-Founders

San Francisco 230

San Francisco Los Angeles Cofounder SMS 230

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Make sure to call the companies in that VCs portfolio that didn’t succeed. Do a web search to find companies that they didn’t give you. Said it's mighty strange, without a doubt, Nobody knows you when you're down and out. Ask the CEO’s about the VC when the chips were down.

Venture Capital 288

Venture Capital Term Sheet Cofounder Partner 288

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

It’s also worth noting as data would suggest from this SVB venture funding report, lower costs to build tech & operate businesses implies the possibility of lower loss ratios in portfolios. It’s not just that we’re connected to the Internet at higher speeds and for longer; we’re actually always tethered to the web. And the future?

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2014

Web Summit. But they are also a tax on your time with portfolio companies, looking for new investments, running your shop and honestly they are a tax on your family life. Angels have been prolific for years now and they, too, rely on downstream money to cover their bets. And we live in public so many people are able just to reach out.

Cofounder 374

Cofounder Syndicate Syndication Early Stage 374

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2010

Make sure to call the companies in that VCs portfolio that didn’t succeed. Do a web search to find companies that they didn’t give you. Said it's mighty strange, without a doubt, Nobody knows you when you're down and out. Ask the CEO’s about the VC when the chips were down.

Term Sheet 298

Term Sheet Venture Capital Stealth Cofounder 298

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2011

The VC sense of accomplishment or failure is blunted by being slightly removed and by the portfolio effect. It was well past the Internet boom, well into Web 2.0, I’m enjoying the diversity of working with 6-7 portfolio teams on a regular basis on strategic issues. I think it looks something like the graph below.

Entrepreneur 384

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 384

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

Other signs of engagement are: they ask you to meet with portfolio companies (they want feedback on your product and you), they ask you to meet a colleague, they set up a call to go through a product demo / financial walk-through, they ask to speak with customers, etc. even if it’s just a web conference call walk through.

Term Sheet 332

Term Sheet Due Diligence Campaign Sales 332

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2012

He was one of the first guys that I know who laid out his stall and said I want to do “big data” investments that take advantage of the explosion of data now available on the web. A quick survey of their portfolio tells you just how many high-profile startups have included them in their rounds.

Community 304

Community Los Angeles Startup Silicon Valley 304

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2011

The VC sense of accomplishment or failure is blunted by being slightly removed and by the portfolio effect. It was well past the Internet boom, well into Web 2.0, I’m enjoying the diversity of working with 6-7 portfolio teams on a regular basis on strategic issues. I think it looks something like the graph below.

Entrepreneur 176

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 176

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

But the short answer is that the best intro is from a portfolio company of that VC or by other entrepreneurs whom that VC respects. You need to build genuine relationships with these portfolio startup founders as well as trust with them and the rest will follow. I wrote a longer post on how to access VCs that you should read.

Developer 366

Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2014

Web Services, led by Amazon’s AWS, which reduced the costs a further 90%. The “Three C’s” of the Internet … The infrastructure and web services phases of the Internet are built. Open source computing, which reduced costs to start a company by 90%. But what is it we actually DO on the Internet?

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Kansas City Startup Venture Capital 390

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2011

I always try hard to make this blog a place where you can learn lessons rather than an advertisement for portfolio companies. I am on record as saying that my opinion is that Web 2.0 “And importantly Web 2.0 “And importantly Web 2.0 But less considered is the fact that the success of the Web 2.0

Term Sheet 303

Term Sheet Mobile Cofounder Early Stage 303

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2011

This version has some additional details on a portfolio company I’ve invested in, which are disclosed below. Skype is an amazing web company. An edited version of this post originally ran on TechCrunch. The annual Apple event where no real hints about what products they plan to release are floated in the public domain in advance.

SMS 325

SMS Non-Compete Differentiation Social Network 325

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

The “ Amazon deal &# was so large that, according to another Revolution portfolio company Clearspring , it materially changed sharing on the web that day. We talk about barriers to entry, scale, and the social element as they pertain to evolution of group buying. LivingSocial supported the largest social buying event yet.

Cofounder 277

Cofounder Merger Founder Venture Capital 277

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 9, 2011

I thought about things I never had to as an entrepreneur: check size, ownership percentage, deal stage, portfolio construction and risk. When the market tanked they had the “triage problem&# – which portfolio companies to save, which to kill. Yesterday was a Monday. And not a pleasant one. So no new deals got done.

Stock 305

Stock Technical Review Marketing Greece 305

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2011

Who are you on the web? It’s almost like the web equivalent of Facebook Connect. On the web each website wants you to log in to their website using a proprietary user name and password. Here’s three important things to know about Twitter’s future that are more nuanced than “what am I eating for lunch?”

Florida 324

Florida API Seattle Semantic 324

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2017

https://medium.com/media/cc969482e7abf6b75d3c0958c8ee409d/href I moved to Los Angeles in 2007 and as a VC who had built his career as a programmer, database designer, program manager, CEO then VP Products at Salesforce, I wanted to build a portfolio of software investments.

Media 210

Media Los Angeles Russia Viral 210