Musings of a VC in NYC
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Regulators in China imposed a blanket ban on ICOs over the long weekend. A number of people have reached out to me via email and Twitter asking me what I think about this. I think regulation of ICOs is inevitable and a good thing if done right (ie lightly). The SEC’s comments on ICOs back […]
This chart from eMarketer really brings it home. We have a digital advertising duopoly. The difference between second and third place is massive. I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. I want to see the technology industry adopt new approaches to monetization, ideally not…
Mike Arrington posted about a secret meeting of angels and super angels in San Francisco the other night. In the post he suggests that they are colluding to keep valuations down, terms intact, and traditional venture capital firms, such as ours, out of their deals. It's the kind of blog post that Mike has become […]
I was watching this Charlie Rose interview with Lena Dunham and I was struck by this line: it’s really intense to be thrust into a managerial position before my time I have seen this a lot in my business and its always your talent for making things that puts you in this spot. And one […]
One of the things I’ve always struggled with as an investor in high growth tech companies is the tension between getting profitable vs growing more quickly. It has become a central tenet of tech growth investing (in both the public and private markets) that growth is more valuable than profitability and you can always…
The Economist has a cover story this week called Peak Valley. The article suggests that Silicon Valley’s lead as a hub for innovation has peaked and other regions are rising. It ends with the concern that innovation more broadly has peaked. I somewhat agree with “the rise of elsewhere” narrative and disagree that…
I was with some friends this weekend and one of them was talking about an investment committee meeting he attended and there was a discussion at that meeting about some of the threats out there in the macro investment landscape. One of them was “vanishing liquidity” and the significant change in net cash flows from […]
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]
My two favorite tech news aggregators are Techmeme and Hacker News. I visit both multiple times per day for a quick scan of what is going on in techland. They are very different and you can see that in action this morning. Here is the above the fold Techmeme right now (9am eastern): We might […]
The Brave browser team concluded an ICO for their Basic Attention Token yesterday in about thirty seconds. This led to this tweet: The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC’s didn’t even have time to put on a sweater vest. — briantobal (@briantobal) May 31, 2017 Of course…
I love Hackpad. And it's strange because most of what Hackpad does, Google Docs does. And I really like Google Docs. I use Google Docs dozens of times a day. But there is something about Hackpad that I like better than Google Docs for massively open online realtime document creation. Let's not turn that into […]
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]
If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year. You might think that all these big web services are flatlining. We have seen this in our […]
Yesterday Twitter announced that they plan to amend the assignments agreements that they sign with their employees. They call this proposed amendment the Innovator's Patent Agreement. I've been aware of this effort inside of Twitter for a while and I like to call this move the "Twitter Patent Hack" because I think…
I’ve said a bunch of times on this blog that the perfect pitch is a very short intro to provide context followed immediately by a demo. Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, John Britton of our portfolio company Twilio showed how it is done. If you do a lot of pitches, spend the six […]
A hallmark of startup companies, the tech sector more broadly, and certainly our portfolio companies, is that they include equity in their compensation packages for their employees, often all employees. If you work for a tech company, chances are good that you will get options as part of your compensation package. I…
Hi Everyone. Happy 2019. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in. […]
The Gotham Gal and I have been fortunate to accumulate signficant capital over the past fifteen years. And the vast majority of it is invested in startups. We get distributions from a sale of one company and within months that capital (after taxes) is invested in more startups (including non profit startups). This has…
I was talking to a friend about AOC’s proposal to increase marginal federal rates to 70% to fund investments in fighting climate change. My friend said he was disappointed that she didn’t propose a top federal rate of 83.25% so that the marginal rate in NYC would be 100%. He was joking but his remark […]
Dan Primack wrote in his friday newsletter: Public market investors have become less willing to leave their comfort zones, and it’s manifesting most obviously in the IPO market.Novel disruption has fallen out of favor, with many preferring more time-tested models like enterprise SaaS and biotech.Peloton yesterday…
I've been thinking a lot about the differences between first time and serial entrepreneurs. We invest in both and do not have a preference betweeen the two. But there are significant differences. The best first time entrepreneurs have been stewing on their idea for quite a while. It is a personal passion of theirs and…
The Pivot is celebrated in startup land. Huge successes like Twitter and Slack are all the results of pivots. So surely pivoting is a good thing, right? Well, I am not so sure. And I certainly don’t want entrepreneurs to think that pivoting is the right thing to do when their original idea fails. It […]
There is a big banking reform bill working its way through the Senate right now. It is sponsored by Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. It has a long name I can't remember, so I'll call it the Dodd Banking Bill. What does a bill attempting to regulate the banking industry have to […]
The folks at Behance and Cool Hunting asked me to talk at their 99% Conference a couple months ago. The 99% conference is aimed at creative professionals and is focused on Edison’s “99% perspiration.” And in the spirit of how to get your ideas to happen, they asked me to talk about entrepreneurship and the myriad […]
Last night The Gotham Gal and I had dinner with our friends John Heilemann and Diana Rhoten. As dinner was ending, the talk turned to chatroulette and what to make of it. John and I both had the exact same reaction the first time we used chatroulette; "how did it take 15 years for the […]
We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. In this sector of startupland, company creation is up, investment is up, there are plenty of success stories, and not all of them are based on quick flips and takeouts. There is real revenue flowing […]
The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. I am going to try to address that question in this post. First, a caveat. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much […]
There's a front page story in the NY Times today about the hyperactivity in web startupland. They quote from a few posts I've made on this blog and I think Jenna and Evelyn did a nice job with the story. The thing that's clear from reading the story is the hyperactivity is in the early/seed […]
Sarah Lacy has a post up on Techcrunch about Paul Graham and Y Combinator. In the post, she says: I’ve been a bit hard on Paul Graham and Y Combinator in the past. It’s not that I think he hasn’t been a great mentor to young entrepreneurs– he has. But that’s a lot of equity […]
Last week my friend Mark Pincus noted, via twitter, that I was not at the D conference and wondered if I knew something others did not. I replied back to Mark that I'm not a big fan of attending conferences. I don't go to TED and never have and don't think I ever will. I […]