Tinder has hit number 1 in the App Store’s top grossing category for the very first time.Claiming top spot in the App Store likely has to do with the global launch of Tinder Gold, which lets users see who has liked them without swiping at all, among other premium features.Tinder’s initial foray into monetization came in 2015 with the launch of Tinder Plus, which lets users… Read More
September 1, 2017
Welcome to Force Friday, one of my favorite days of the year. I still fondly remember watching Star Wars with my dad when I was 11. As I walked out of the theater, I asked him if we could buy another ticket right then and watch it again. He denied me that night, but we went and saw it again a few days later.
Sphero just released two new droids, R2-D2 and BB-9E, which now rounds out the family that includes BB-8 and the Force Band (so you can control the droids with the Force).
Next up is the littleBits Droid Inventor Kit.
May the Force be with you.
Also published on Medium.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a social experiment regarding how many acronyms an audience can endure before passing out. Each week we dive into the world of venture capital, looking to understand exactly what’s going on behind the money. This week Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, and myself — Alex! — were joined by Samuel Angus, a partner on the corporate team of Fenwick and… Read More
Nothing appears to be in the way of Salesforce.com’s (NYSE: CRM) growth. After another stellar quarter performance, it is fairly evident that competitors, including the likes of Microsoft and Oracle,...
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Lan Xuezhao has spent the last few months pulling together $136 million for her new machine intelligence-focused venture capital fund, Basis Set Ventures. I met Xuezhao for tea on a park bench in Potrero Hill earlier this week to chat about her strategy for the fund. Read More
With technology and curious minds, several founders not only built great products and companies, they created the foundation for a strong and resilient technology sector that has been an economic driver and job creator in a country looking for stable footing. Read More
dApps, or decentralized apps, are open-source applications built on top of a blockchain. But here’s the thing – users usually can’t interact with these dApps unless they have tokens issued by these projects. For example, both Augur, a decentralized prediction market and REXMLS, a free global listing network for real estate, require tokens to interact with.But if you… Read More
Half a decade after it was founded, website building platform Strikingly finally decided its time to raise a Series A. The Y Combinator alum announced that it closed a $6 million round from investors including CAS Holding, Infinity Venture Partners, Sinovation Ventures, former Y Combinator partner Kevin Hale and TEEC. Strikingly also recently launched an app that lets users build and… Read More
In my post recently titled Does VC Fund Differentiation Matter? several people commented on some variation of âpeopleâ as the key to everything.
I donât view people as differentiation. I view them as the price of admission. Amy just walked by, read this over my shoulder, and said: âI donât know what that means.â Hopefully, by the end of this post, itâll be clearer â¦
Yesterday I talked to several VCs or entrepreneurs considering becoming a VC. I didnât know any of them â these were random intros from different people that I knew. I didnât have an agenda for each call. I was just curious and felt like meeting a few new people yesterday.
In each call, the person gave me their background and what they were exploring. Then they asked me a few questions. These questions were different versions of âwhat is your investment strategyâ and âhow do you decide what to fund?â
I went through my usual riff on this, which I should probably just put up on Youtube so I can point people at it rather than spend five minutes saying it over and over again. While I was doing this, a background process in my mind linked me back to the post I wrote on VC Fund Differentiation (or lack thereof). If youâve heard this riff before, the next bit will be redundant to you.
<riff>
We have a set of filters. For an early stage investment, we only invest in our themes. We only invest in the US. We donât have to be the first money in a company, but if the company has raised more than $5m, itâs too late for us. Our goal with this filter is to say no to almost everything within 60 seconds.
Assuming something passes through this filter, we then focus on three things.
Do we have an affinity for the product? We donât have to be daily users of the product, but we have to care about it in some way.Are the founders obsessed (not passionate, but obsessed) about what they are building? Passion is easy to fake. Obsession is not.Do the founders want us to be investors in their company as much as we want to be investors in their company? If itâs not bi-directional, thatâs fine, but itâs not for us.</riff>Ok â riff over.
Underlying item two and three is obviously the people. But itâs a characteristic of the people. Itâs a characteristic that, at least for us, that has worked over a long period of investing.
When I was a kid, my dad used to say to me âpeople are the price of admission.â He meant that if I was interested in getting involved in something, I should evaluate the people first.
If we did this before applying our filter, weâd never get anything done because weâd spend too little time looking at too many things. But, by applying the filter first, we can put most of our energy into evaluating the people involved and whether they want us to be involved.
Also published on Medium.
Disruptor Beam has already created games based on Star Trek and Game of Thrones. Next up is The Walking Dead, with the launch of The Walking Dead: March to War. To build the game, which was first announced last year, the company partnered with Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment. That means the game is technically an adaptation of the comics, but the environments… Read More
Keeping on track is hard. Over the years I’ve tried a number of personal information managers – PIMs, for short – from the original Palm V to my current iPhone/iCal/Vyte/phone tag method of making sure I’m in the right place at the right time. It rarely works. Something is always dropping out. An appointment added a week ago disappears while old appointments reappear on… Read More
De-cloaking today is a new startup from two of the founders of defunct food delivery company Take Eat Easy. Dubbed Cowboy, the company is building a new electronic bicycle that it claims will address issues that have historically stopped e-bikes from becoming a “fully fledged mobility solution”. Read More
HowStuffWorks has changed owners more than once in the past few years. Discovery sold the company to Blucora in 2014, and Blucora, in turn, sold it to digital advertising company System1 last year.Now, however, the nearly 20-year-old digital media brand is spinning out as an independent company. It’s also announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by The Raine… Read More
When Google Home was unveiled, many people immediately noted the smart speaker’s striking resemblance to a home fragrance diffuser. Now there’s a smart home fragrance diffuser that looks like a smart speaker. Pium, a self-described “next-generation smart diffuser,” is currently participating in Samsung Electronic’s Creative Square incubator program. Visitors to… Read More
Booze delivery startup Thirstie is adding a new twist to its model — it’s working directly with alcohol brands, starting with Dom Pérignon, to offer on-demand delivery. While Thirstie partners don’t mind the additional sales, the real benefit is in the data. Read More
Dropbox continues to tune its products as it tries to tap a bigger audience within larger companies with some updates today to its collaboration tool Paper, including the ability to preview documents before loading them. As a blank slate, Paper is increasingly popular with designers you might talk to in Silicon Valley. It basically turns the process of designing and building a product spec into… Read More
Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012? Ike Kavas: We got a few more sales people. We continue to expand in every location in America. If I remember correctly, our revenues went up to $550,000 that...
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According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the aggregate value of existing US home sales in 2016 was approximately $1.5 trillion. Researchers estimate that 5.5 million transactions were...
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Sramana Mitra: The truth is, you can learn income statement. Learning leadership is a much harder thing. Leadership is something that is either you have it naturally or don’t. It’s not so simple....
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One growing sector we can add to the travel accommodation list is long term stays for business travellers. Enter Cologne-based Homelike, founded in 2015 by Dustin Figge and Christoph Kasper. The German startup targets business travellers who need “long-stay” accommodation of a month or more and for which a hotel doesn’t really cut it. Read More
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