A traditional and effective way to launch software platform companies is to recruit early developers and host hackathons. Singly, the social data platform company did just that on June 3rd in San Francisco. Singly offered a grand prize of $10,000 to whomever created the most creative and interesting app based on the Singly API. The [...]
Why Should eBooks Cost $15?
Apr
16
Last week’s announcement by the Justice Department that they are suing Apple and several of the world’s biggest book publishers for conspiring to keep eBook prices high generated plenty of media coverage. One challenge in wading through this coverage is that most of it tends to be written by…journalists. And some journalists are also authors. [...]
Continuously Updated Awesomeness − The Spotify Play Button
Apr
11
I was completely psyched by Spotify’s announcement of their new play button to embed legal, licensed music into web pages. The web has needed this for far too long, and this is the missing step to enable Spotify to become the universal music platform on the web, allowing us to share songs with each other [...]
Network Effects Are Magical
Apr
09
The following is a guest post by my partner Brian Ascher in our Palo Alto office. He blogs at VC Waves where this originally appeared. This set of thinking drives many of our investment decisions. If you are not one of these models, you should be. Network Effects are magical. They are the pixie dust [...]
How to Negotiate Valuation With a VC
Mar
28
This post originally appear on NASDAQ on Tumblr. So, you have received a term sheet from a VC to fund your financing round. But you aren’t comfortable with the valuation. So, how do you negotiate? Here are a few pointers: 1) The first is to understand the VC firm’s philosophy on price and term sheets. [...]
As Big Media Goes Digital, Markets Shrink
Jan
16
Lots of debate, lately, about Big Media and their bumpy transitions from analog incumbents to digital providers. Over the past few weeks we have had debates around the proposed PIPA and SOPA legislation, Rupert Murdoch (that bastion of new media savvy) railing against Google as a “pirate” and @fredwilson chiming in on the predictable monopoly [...]
Got Klout?
Jan
04
Marissa and I are pleased to discuss our latest investment (and our first one as a team). We are excited to join with fellow firms Kleiner Perkins and IVP in investing in the internet’s standard for measuring influence, Klout. As the internet moves from pages to people, Joe Fernandez‘s vision of the need for “Pagerank [...]
“Great” is Tough to Pick out of the “Good” Crowd
Dec
02
The following is a guest post by my partner, Bryan Roberts. (@brobertsvc) He is one of those legendary VCs who, at about my same age, has invested in many of the most spectacular healthcare companies created over the past decade. He has been the highest-ranking healthcare investor on the Forbes Midas List since 2008. He is [...]