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
Veo, a Copenhagen-based startup, wants to “democratise the recording of football”. By taking advantage of developments in AI and video camera technology, the company offers a solution for amateur soccer clubs that want to video and stream matches and training sessions without the need for a camera operator or vision mixer/editor. Read More
Appier, a Taiwanese startup that helps companies harness artificial intelligence to make marketing decisions, announced today that it has raised a $33 million Series C round from an impressive roster of Asian investors. They are SoftBank Group Corp., Line Corp., Naver Corp., EDBI and Hong Kong-based financial services firm AMTD Group. Read More
For the third year, MetaProp NYC is bringing together a group of startups focused on real estate tech. This time, the companies are tackling issues like green buildings, apartment entry and parking. Most of them are based in New York, but some come from as far away as Singapore.“Our incoming accelerator cohort is indicative of the increasingly fast global growth and demand for… Read More
An SEC filing turned up this morning showing that Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover is investing out of a $3 million AngelList Angel Fund going by the name Weekend Fund. We previously reported that Hoover was a deal lead through the Angel Funds product — but now we know the size and name of the vehicle. Read More
It may well turn out, as technologists are already suspecting, that AI makes everything better. But plenty of startup founders are still in the experimental phase of figuring out whether — or maybe how much — machine learning can improve an existing app category. Read More
August 29, 2017
The Audible version of Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job, 2nd Edition is available for pre-order and will be on out on 9/19. My co-author, Sean Wise, read it using his deliciously dulcet voice.
Jason and I also finished the Audible recording of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, 3rd Edition and expect to see it up on Audible in 60 days. More when itâs out.
Itâs a lot of fun to read your own audio book like I did for Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with and Entrepreneur, the book I wrote with Amy.
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: How much money did you get from your friends and family to start this company? Ike Kavas: Less than $200,000. Sramana Mitra: How did you find these four people in India? Ike Kavas: I...
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