111–120 of 200 posts
It's not surprising to hear they plan to slow down investing. But that's not necessarily a reflection of the overall market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with that, but I also have the experience of visiting my sister in 1995 and asking her if she understood the funny string at the bottom of a Toyota commercial that was a URL. She did not. And her only email address was one she had for work, because everyone else either wrote letters or talked with her on the phone. The point I'm trying to make is that many things of the current wave will pass into obscurity a…
I wonder, though. Your two examples are both open standards. How many companies go under (or get acquired) and take their technology with them? We're not working together, we're letting investors decide what we make, and in the end what we produce is ephemeral. Is our greed hijacking progress?
As for the question, greed always hijacks progress, that is the lesson of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
So the above is obviously written through a VC lens. Through an entrepreneur's lens - who also survived the dot-com bust (at etoys.com) and has since run several failed and now successful businesses - I'd add the following: The most valuable advice in this post reminds me of Marc A's awesome blog entry. Quote: "Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.…
Lots of valuable stuff in this comment. It kind of deserves a post of its own. I would love to read more about your experiences. I bet a lot of entrepreneurs can learn a thing or two from them.
The more I learn the more I realize I don't yet know - and hiring people smarter than I am tends to amplify that effect. So I still don't feel like I'm even close to being an expert - but I can share war stories, data and things that worked and did not. I'll try to get back on my blog and I might get my wife/co-founder involved. She's also been forged in the fires of startup hell and has a lot of wisdom to share I think.
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So basically any startup with an iOS only product (disclaimer our's is iOS only).
Given that iOS has a 40%+ market share in the US, no.
So the above is obviously written through a VC lens. Through an entrepreneur's lens - who also survived the dot-com bust (at etoys.com) and has since run several failed and now successful businesses - I'd add the following: The most valuable advice in this post reminds me of Marc A's awesome blog entry. Quote: "Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.…
What happens when you have competition with 10x or 50x the VC funding?
What happens to long-term product development when all you do is short term / small-scale improvements in order to 'better serve' your customers?
What happens to your core IP advantage that may be several years now but will have disappeared after doing long stretches of "feature" developments to chase after customers?
The cynical side of me wonders if all this is "helpful advice" from VCs is just designed to bring valuations down to earth.
I am a cynic about VCs "Talking their books" but this is a little different: - The stock market is off 20%. - Very few IPOs. - Many hot IPOs are under the offering price. - Most of the public market investors that have entered late in the game (Fidelity, etc) are marking down their positions, and holding off on new investments. Every solid company should have a "What would we need to do to get cashflow positive?" sce…
You know what kind of companies generally survive? Companies that make more money than they spend. I know, duh, right? If you make more than you spend, you get to stay alive for a long time. If you don’t, you have to get money from someone else to keep going. And, as I just said, that’s going to be way harder now. I’m embarrassed writing this because it is so flipping simple, yet it is amazing to me how many entrepre…
Granted, a lot of tech "startups" in SV are not innovating and should probably not be classified as true startups, nevertheless, that's the differentiating factor.
> If you are in Silicon Valley and your customers are mostly well-paid consumers with no free time, or other venture-backed startups, well, I’d be worried. That's the most beautifully I've heard this thought articulated. I constantly hear people in SV talk publically talk about how they're living years in the future due to getting services from startups that haven't yet hit other markets. These people are very wealth…
One lesson from 2001 is that Startups who Serve Startups tend to get hurt in the downturn as their customer are unable to pay them. Case in point Exodus. [0] This is especially relevant given the "Build something you want to use yourself" ethos.
The flip side is that if you make something that saves General Mills, Coca-Cola and P&G money, you'll always have a buyer.