Group items tagged

Web site for Andreessen Horowitz VC. List of blogs for general partners. The reason for linking into a16z is the $11.2 Million they invested in Meteor! Meteor is awesome. My guess is that Meteor will provide a very effective Cloud platform to replace or extend the Windows Client/Server business productivity platform. Many VC watchers are wondering if a16z can recover the investment? Say what? IMHO this is for all the marbles. Platform is everything, and Cloud Computing is certain to replace Client/Server over time. Meteor just move that time frame from a future uncertainty to NOW. The Windows Productivity Platform has dominated Client/Server computing since the introduction of Windows 4 WorkGroups (v3.11) in 1992. Key technologies that followed or were included in v3.11 were DDE, OLE, MAPI, ODBC, ActiveX, and Visual Basic scripting - to name but a few. Meteor is an open source platform that hits these technologies directly with an approach that truly improves the complicated development of all Cloud based Web Apps - including the sacred Microsoft Cow herd of client/server business productivity apps. Meteor nails OLE and ODBC like nothing i've ever seen before. Very dramatic stuff. Maybe they are nailing shut the Redmond coffin in the process - making that $11.2 Mill a drop in the bucket considering the opportunity Meteor has cracked open. The iron grip Microsoft has on business productivity is so tight and so far reaching that one could easily say that Windows is the client in Client/Server. But it took years to build that empire. With this investment, Meteor could do it in months. Compound documents are the fuel in Windows business productivity and office automation systems. Tear apart a compound document, and you'll find embedded logic for OLE and ODBC. Sure, it's brittle, costly to develop, costly to maintain, and a bear to distribute. Tear apart a Meteor productivity service and you'll find the same kind of OLE-ODBC-Script

AngelList is turning Silicon Valley upside down. It's basically Match.com for startups and business angels, and startups are raising millions from angels on the site almost every day, leaving VCs to scramble for dealflow and paying higher valuations. Not everyone likes it: last week O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures partner and Foursquare investor Bryce Roberts publicly left the site, saying it encourages a herd mentality. Meanwhile prolific startup investor Dave McClure says it's the most innovative thing to happen to startup funding since Y Combinator in 2005.

1)  What's the Best Android Phone for Verizon Right Now? Droid X. This was one of two reviews to break into the top 10, both of them on Android. It hit as the Android frenzy was reaching a crescendo and highlighted how a bigger screen could work on smartphones. This review and the number two post also hit the top mobile posts of the year. 2)  Android Sales Overtake iPhone. This has been a theme that has generated a lot of traffic all year. With Android ascendant, we saw the first quarter where recent sales surged past the iPhone. While the iPhone appears to still have a larger overall installed base, the reports of Android's rise touched off a lot of debate about where the two platforms will end up. 3)  Nexus One: The Best Android Phone Yet. This post went up in January and foreshadowed a big year for Android. While praising the device, Om said it still didn't match the experience of the iPhone, but it showed Google was ready to compete. 4)  4chan Decides to Do Something Nice for a Change. This was a nice change-up and showed that 4chan, despite its reputation for sophomoric humor and sexual imagery, could be used for good. The online community banded together to wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday. 5)  Your Mom's Guide to Those Facebook Changes and How to Block Them. Where would we be without a Facebook post in our top 10? This post looked at the expansion of the "like" button to outside websites and instant personalization and explained how users can sidestep the features. This fit into a larger story about privacy on Facebook, which never seems to get old. 6)  Is Apple About to Cut Out the Carriers? This post stirred a lot of conversation after we reported that Apple was looking at putting its own SIM card in iPhones to sell devices directly to consumers. The move would have allowed Apple to cut out European carriers. It looks like the plan didn't come to pass, but it illustrated the power of Apple and its am

Broadcast of Demo Spring 2011, where new companies demonstrate their stuff to Silicon Valley VC

excerpt: In China, the red-hot tech scene seems dominated by a small group of entrepreneurs who paid their dues in Silicon Valley before returning home to create successful Internet and software startups. Aside from finding fame and fortune, these "returnees" are also laying the foundation for a startup culture that will allow grassroots entrepreneurs to flourish as well. Returnees - Chinese nationals who studied or worked the U.S. - head up just 3 percent of all tech companies in China, yet they represent nearly 70 percent of all startups that go public in the U.S. market (still the largest measure of success in the industry), according to an internal study by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm GSR Ventures, which deals exclusively in China. The firm also found startups created by returnees were much likelier to become financially successful and hire more employees than startups founded by Chinese entrepreneurs who never worked in the U.S. Part of that may be cultural: a culture Jack Jia, a partner at GSR sees changing, albeit slowly. he still sees a "drastic" disparity between startups founded by home-grown entrepreneurs and their returnee counterparts during pitching sessions and business plan competitions all across China. Thus, he rarely funds companies headed up by Chinese engineers without managerial-level experience at tech companies in the U.S., even though he would like to encourage the growth of Chinese entrepreneurs who have stayed at home. "Most have no clue what they are doing. The basic expertise, the passion and experience is often lacking," he said. "And it's not that they don't have the same talent or ability, it's just they haven't been exposed to the same things as their American counterparts."

IntalioCloud takes on Salesforce.com with public-private cloud design. Note that business applications developed for use in Salesforce's platform have to use the company's proprietary programming language, while IntalioCloud is open to many languages such as JavaScript and Ruby. Third, Intalio says it provides 25 gigabytes of data storage per account, much more than Salesforce. $42 Mill in VC The nexxus here is that both salseforce.com and Intalio need to provide integration into the MSOffice productivity environment to compete with Microsoft Azure.

Must read for every entrepreneur!  When your product and service can command these kind of terms, for sure your company is worth investing in. "A founder-friendly term sheet When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet.  I've tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder.  A few people have asked me if I'd share it, so here it is.  I think it's pretty founder-friendly. If you believe the upside risk theory, then it makes sense to offer compelling terms and forgo some downside protection to get the best companies to want to work with you. What's most important is what's not in it: *No option pool.  Taking the option pool out of the pre-money valuation (ie, diluting only founders and not investors for future hires) is just a way to artificially manipulate valuation.  New hires benefit everyone and should dilute everyone. *The company doesn't have to pay any of my legal fees.  Requiring the company to pay investors' legal fees always struck me as particularly egregious-the company can probably make better use of the money than investors can, so I'll pay my own legal fees for the round (in a simple deal with no back and forth they always end up super low anyway). *No expiration.  I got burned once by an exploding offer and haven't forgotten it; the founders can take as much time as they want to think about it.  In practice, people usually decide pretty quickly. *No confidentiality.  Founder/investor relationships are long and important.  The founders should talk to whomever they want, and if they want to tell people what I offered them, I don't really care.  Investors certainly tell each other what they offer companies. (Once we shake hands on a deal, of course, I expect the founders to honor it.) *No participating preferred, non-standard liquidation preference, etc.  There is a 1x liquidation preference, but I'm willing to forgo even that and buy common shares (and sometimes

Excellent and well worth the time to read! Founder of DropBox tells his story and it's full of insight, wisdom and naked truth. excerpt: "I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing - who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk. The problem is a lot of people don't find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong - I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn't going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best. It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice. "

Great interview. Interesting statements about Microsoft's future (or lack thereof).    excerpt: Steve Blank is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a guru. The serial entrepreneur turned writer and professor has a big theory: entrepreneurship is a skill that can be taught. At Stanford and Berkeley, Blank teaches scientists to get out of their labs and find real customers for their ideas -- without getting bogged down in the traditional MBA weeds of spreadsheets and revenue models. There are two major strategies. You either build, or you buy. What do you buy? You can buy IP, you buy teams and people, product lines, companies, P&Ls, bottom line. I think Google has tended to focus on teams and products. If you look at their most innovative counter to disruption, Android, it had nothing to do with the company, they bought it. Not only did they buy the technology, they bought the individual who's the driving force between what might keep them in business. The one thing they haven't figured out how to either build or buy is to counter Facebook. You look at Microsoft going through this -- Microsoft is the living dead. Microsoft is a standing joke now in the technology business. The one game you could see playing out is they buy Skype, they buy Nokia, Steve Elop finally injects some life into the company and replaces Ballmer and Microsoft reinvents itself. Elop is a great politician and a great IT guy, and maybe they could reinvent themselves along that axis. But it wil never happen as long as Steve Ballmer is Bill Gates's best friend. Microsoft is the new Wang. Remember Wang?.....................

Today's high-tech entrepreneurs have at their command more than just the ability to invent new technologies - they have mastered the discipline and the methodology required to harness those technologies in order to serve customers. Such a combination of new technology and new understanding is unlocking new opportunities. In order to maximize such opportunities, this generation of entrepreneurs combines extremely low costs with faster cycle times to produce what I call lean startups.

Good intro to LeanLaunchLab.com.  Great idea for startups! excerpt: Entrepreneur Steve Blank has spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about how ineffective old-fashioned board meetings are when it comes to building and scaling startups.