Agile VC

FEBRUARY 10, 2015

David Cancel – Co-founder/CEO of Driftt (Co-founder/CEO of Performable at the time he first joined our group of advisors, after which he became HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer following and acquisition of Performable.). Mike Baker – Co-Founder/CEO of DataXu. Brian Shin – Founder/CEO of Visible Measures.

Software Review 100

Software Review Technical Review Entrepreneur Cofounder 100

Agile VC

APRIL 17, 2011

Kayak was started here in my backyard of Boston… co-founder & CTO Paul English and the product/engineering team is based here in Concord MA. 5) High Productivity: Kayak had 148 employees at the end of 2010. Last week ZipCar began trading and has a market cap of about $1 billion. of Kayak’s 2010 revenue.

Pre-Money Valuation 113

Pre-Money Valuation Liquidation Preference Dividend Common Stock 113

Agile VC

JUNE 25, 2012

Today Cloze has started to talk more publicly about their funding and also is starting to open their product more broadly. Having been involved in the formation and early growth of LinkedIn, I saw a clear opportunity for Cloze’s product. I hope you’ll have an opportunity to check out Cloze’s product.

Cofounder 140

Cofounder Stealth Silicon Valley Mobile 140

Agile VC

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

He had a clear vision of what he hoped to achieve with GrabCAD… to make collaborative CAD design easier in our connected world, where CAD engineers and product designers are more distributed. million CAD engineers and product designers using GrabCAD. Fast forward to today and there are over 1.5

Boston 154

Boston Acquisition Estonia Viral 154

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 12, 2014

What matters is the amount of money truly spent on a startup’s product or service. It’s hard for startups to capture more than a small fraction (10% or less) of a market, therefore a market must be measured in the billions for a VC to believe there’s a credible chance a startup can be a “venture scale” business.

B2B 246

B2B .Net Revenue Global 246

Agile VC

JANUARY 4, 2012

But some professional groups often have special characteristics that can best be served via a distinct community with SaaS products that extend deeper into their daily worklives. LinkedIn is an amazing horizontal platform and continues to serve a broad range of professionals.

Community 100

Community Estonia Syndicate Syndication 100

Agile VC

MAY 16, 2019

Even before that, we all knew that it was among the most rapidly growing SaaS companies in recent years and a product used (and loved) by millions of people. Slack employs a freemium model, with <15% of the organizations using the product as paying customers (88K paid customers out of >600K organizations).

Lock-up Period 100

Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 100

Agile VC

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

Regardless of what template or style you choose, the common facets I’ve seen from productive and efficient board meetings are as follows: Materials in Advance – this one is pretty obvious, but it makes #2 a lot easier. There’s also a happy medium between nothing and a package with 50+ pages across multiple documents.

Startup 209

Startup Early Stage Leadership Conversion 209

Agile VC

MAY 15, 2014

So stay tuned because in coming months we’ll be developing Growth Guides that cover a range of issues from product to sales to engineering.' We’re excited to be able to bring these Growth Guides to the seed stage ecosystem.

Seed Stage 193

Seed Stage Engineer Community Sales 193

Agile VC

MAY 22, 2014

Alibaba’s Tmall is a true marketplace like eBay, though many of the types of products sold on Tmall would be equivalent to what US consumers buy retailers own websites or Amazon. based on product category for all sales settled through Alipay (~80% of Alibaba’s GMV is settled through Alipay).

China 159

China Revenue Flash Affiliate 159

Agile VC

JUNE 30, 2016

Cruise control was invented in the late 1940’s and was first adopted on a production car in 1958, the Chrysler Imperial. People often don’t realize or take it for granted that the “machines” have been aiding drivers for some time.

Virginia 100

Virginia Acquisition California Global 100

Agile VC

APRIL 2, 2013

But the reality is new companies and new products don’t simply come into being themselves. So to me thinking about founders and early employees being in front of a new product isn’t about stroking peoples’ egos, it simply makes more logical sense.

Founder 100

Founder Entrepreneur Employee Startup 100

Agile VC

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

A small portion (4%) comes from other “software and data products” which is mostly the Square Cash product, which gives businesses faster access to their credit card funds (essentially a very short term receivable loan). Again if you refer to the Google spreadsheet I created , you can see the gross margins by product line and by year.

IPO 165

IPO .Net Revenue Acquisition 165

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

The three obvious buckets are of course to invest heavily in new products (the Apple TV or iWatch or whatever), return cash to shareholders (via dividends, buybacks, new class of preferred shares, etc), or acquire stuff. I don’t mean buying Hon Hai (aka Foxconn) to control vast labor and production of Apple’s hardware.

Hungary 168

Hungary Dividend Vertical Preferred Stock 168

Agile VC

AUGUST 22, 2011

I suppose many folks simply believe “platform” seems sexier than just a “product” or a “service”, even a great product. Just be an killer product or an awesome service, and if you can succeed at that (a hard challenge itself) good things will likely happen. And that’s totally ok.

Silicon Valley 113

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Startup Syndicate 113

Agile VC

MARCH 30, 2012

The good folks at IA Ventures have a primer slide deck publicly available , as big data is the core element of their investment thesis, and they divide the world into companies that sell data, those that compute & sell data, and data driven products. But for consumer web companies, I think the short answer is not really.

Business Model 113

Business Model Silicon Valley Advertising B2B 113

Agile VC

MAY 10, 2012

Yet agriculture is a massive global industry and one that is increasingly reliant on data for a range of needs – improving production, benchmarking across farms, even regulatory and financial reporting. When you think of web-enabled startups, farms don’t instantly spring to mind. feedstocks).

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley Cofounder Seed Stage Syndicate 223

Agile VC

JUNE 12, 2012

In fact my first job as an early employee of PayPal was as Product Manager responsible for our mobile products (WAP-enabled cell phones and our legacy Palm Pilot IR port product) and the first international version of PayPal. The product seemingly never evolved to what it could have been. link] leehower. Great post!

Mobile 250

Mobile Disintermediation SMS Government 250

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

I started off as a product manager and while I never actually slept over at the office, there were frequently late nights. On multiple occasions I’d get in to the office in the morning and find our CEO (Elon Musk at the time) asleep on the couch in our little product team lounge from the night before.

Startup 188

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 188

Agile VC

SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

Providence Equity invested $100M at a $1B valuation not because of their technology or product, but because the network owners contributed a lot of valuable content… or at least access to it for 2years. Hulu’s interesting because Fox, NBC, and Disney (ABC) all jointly owned the company. It’s not just Hulu either.

Silicon Valley 100

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Syndicate Syndication 100

Agile VC

MARCH 18, 2012

Those of us in the tech ecosystem think of and use Twitter in slightly different ways, but the mass market usage of the product is consumers seeking exposure to news, celebrities, and sports stars. There are lots of celebrities leveraging Twitter to sell their own products or establish e-commerce curation businesses.

Media 113

Media Advertising Silicon Valley Revenue 113

Agile VC

APRIL 27, 2012

Apple’s not a startup but thanks in large part to the spirit Steve Jobs infused in the company, they do an incredible job of imagining a product from scratch as it should be.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Syndicate Syndication 124

Agile VC

APRIL 28, 2014

Few have mapped out a market opportunity in detail, and then fought and scrapped to bring an innovative product to that market. Few have quit secure jobs and gone without paychecks to pursue an entrepreneurial dream. And even fewer have done all three and been successful in the process.

Silicon Valley 150

Silicon Valley Acquisition Software Restful 150

Agile VC

JUNE 17, 2015

I started off as a product manager and while I never actually slept over at the office, there were frequently late nights. On multiple occasions I’d get in to the office in the morning and find our CEO (Elon Musk at the time) asleep on the couch in our little product team lounge from the night before.

Startup 100

Startup Cofounder Seed Stage IPO 100

Agile VC

MARCH 13, 2012

Patents and the threat of patent infringement lawsuits provide maximum leverage against a competitor when they’re in the middle of a strategic inflection point… a major financing, acquisition, or large product launch.

IP 100

IP IPO Social Network Silicon Valley 100

Agile VC

AUGUST 1, 2012

productivity – Evernote). There will undoubtedly be some differences, but broadly speaking this will look roughly similar to other new waves of technology adoption within businesses. Gameloft, Rovio) and a couple $1B+ revenue companies in Asia (GREE, DeNA). That leaves advertising based consumer models.

Mobile 160

Mobile Advertising Bandwidth Web 160

Agile VC

OCTOBER 2, 2011

The Kindle Fire isn’t the first Android tablet and other products out there from Samsung, HP, RIM, and others have features the Fire lacks. Because consumers don’t want a portable touchscreen computer… they want a product that integrates content & media suite seamlessly with the hardware.

Business Model 100

Business Model Silicon Valley Seed Stage Syndicate 100

Agile VC

MAY 7, 2014

People compare it to Groupon frequently which helped pioneer “flash sales” in the US, though Groupon historically has sold a lot of service based offers (restaurants, spas, etc) whereas Juhuasuan is primarily products like a Zulily, Gilt, etc.

China 187

China B2B Flash IPO 187

Agile VC

JULY 24, 2013

The subprime analogy for venture would be to invest in the somewhat less desirable startups (in terms of team, mkt oppty, product, etc) but to price one’s investment capital appropriately. [see Note 1 below re: subprime crisis of 2008-9]. So why doesn’t the same model work in VC?

Valuation 200

Valuation Early Stage Distribution LP 200

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

A lot of successfully achieved goals are mainly the product of working hard on the “fundamentals” and nailing the small stuff. The football analogy is blocking by the offensive line and tackling by the defense, as opposed to the more sensational touchdown pass or or diving interception or 90-yd punt return.

Silicon Valley 100

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Syndicate Syndication 100

Agile VC

DECEMBER 5, 2011

There’re lots of reasons why we’re pleased to be involved, from the market opportunity and product and beyond, but of course team is central for all startup investments. Objective Logistics just closed a $1.5M seed round from NextView, Atlas Venture, and Google Ventures, and angel investors.

Silicon Valley 100

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Syndicate Syndication 100

Agile VC

OCTOBER 17, 2011

Even companies that primarily sold server side products (Oracle, EMC) were able to do so because there was a desktop computer in every corporate cubicle, manufacturing station, and retail point of sale. Even in the consumer space, desktop computers were typically a “home computer” shared by all occupants until very recently.

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley Seed Stage Syndicate Syndication 133

Agile VC

MARCH 5, 2019

One of the powerful features of some businesses is that the strength of their product and brand creates a flywheel whereby they grow revenue perpetually, even without adding new customers. But it does not appear to be the case as of now that riders today overall rely on Lyft way more heavily than they did 3 years ago.

Aggregator 100

Aggregator .Net Revenue IPO 100

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

Some may end up having more modest outcomes that product a decent return on investment, which we fully understand and are supportive of. The potential for outsized investment return only comes with taking significant risk, especially when investing at the seed stage, so many of the companies we invest in will ultimately be unsuccessful.

South Korea 124

South Korea Seed Stage Silicon Valley Syndicate 124

Agile VC

NOVEMBER 6, 2013

revenues –> profits –> cash flows) yet when they were acquired, but they had built a very successful product with great potential to build a business. Instagram hadn’t built a true business (e.g. Value of Media vs E-Commerce vs Premium Services.

IPO 194

IPO Aggregator B2B Internet 194

Agile VC

MAY 23, 2012

We don’t think of Apple as a “chip” company even though literally every product they make only exists because it’s chock full of semiconductors. Now we only think of chip companies in the narrow sense of semiconductor manufacturers like Intel.

Internet 182

Internet Silicon Valley IPO Seed Stage 182

Agile VC

JANUARY 12, 2012

When a startup doesn’t match the stage where a particular investor focuses, founders may get a response along the lines of “This is interesting to us, but come back once you get from X phase to Y phase” That could be from seed stage to a larger Series A financing need, or to progress from pre-product to post-revenue.

Seed Stage 100

Seed Stage Silicon Valley Syndicate Syndication 100