Deep Web, Levels of Trust, Focus, Chris Dixon, Saas Economics and Choosing a Product Manager. Partech’s New $240 Million Growth Fund Will Close France’s Funding Gap. 2014 was the year of seed funding, 2015 will be the year of late stage funding for Partech Ventures.
The French venture capital firm just raised $240 million to launch the Partech Growth fund. This new fund will back late stage startups in Partech’s traditional industries and areas. But this time, the firm will invest between $12 million and $50 million per round. Three new general partners joined Partech to head the effort, with Omri Benayoun and Bruno Crémel handling France-based startups and Mark Menell staying in the Silicon Valley to invest in American startups and help the rest of the portfolio.
Monegro — Deep Web Marketplaces. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been frequenting the deep web marketplaces most famously used for buying drugs online with Bitcoin.
I wanted to see if there was anything we could learn about how these illicit marketplaces work that could be applied to improve the legal marketplaces we invest in at USV. As part of my research, I purchased an item on Evolution (no, not drugs – a pair of furry boots) in an effort to understand the dynamics of these marketplaces, from trust and safety to flow of funds. This is what I learned in the process. Privacy Deep web marketplaces can only be accessed using Tor, a decentralized computer network that anonymizes traffic such that it’s harder to trace an individual user through their IP address. Products Lots of drugs.
Brand and Reputation Brand and reputation means everything to sellers. Flow of funds Escrow Shipping. The Three Levels of Trust with Successful Co-Worker Partnerships. I think a lot about how to create and maintain highly effective teams.
To be a part of a highly effective team, you need to have mutual trust with your team members. Many companies approach this problem organizationally, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced individual tackling it one co-worker at a time is the right solution. So, I thought about what trust really means with your co-workers, and found that there are really different levels of trust in an organization. I’ll break them down here. Successful startups say “no” “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” – Warren Buffett We’ve been spending the past few weeks at Homebrew helping several of our portfolio companies work through their planning for 2015.
It’s no surprise that during these conversations incredible ideas for new products and features, partnerships, revenue streams, technologies, etc., emerge. So we and our founders all remind ourselves about the value of doing just one thing (or a very small number of things) exceptionally well. Often times it’s easier for companies to choose to do lots of different things. A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Chris Dixon About Venture Capital and Startups. 1.
“If everyone loves your idea, I might be worried that it’s not forward thinking enough.” Anyone thinking about starting a business should be searching for mispriced opportunities. While markets are mostly efficient in eliminating opportunities for extraordinary profit, there are always areas of an economy in which there are significant uncertainty. These areas are excellent places for a startup to look for opportunities.
The best entrepreneurs have learned that large businesses are investing huge amounts of capital in areas in which extensive information is already available, and that it’s most advantageous to create new businesses where information is not available. Dixon also says in this insightful post that “you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret.” While most businesses do not require a result that generates extraordinary profit to be a success, this is not the case for a startup that seeks to raise venture capital. 2. 3. 4. “The best ideas come through direct experience. 5. Understanding SaaS: Why the Pundits Have It Wrong.
Tune into any cable network stock market channel and the airwaves resonate with one consistent theme: SaaS companies are simply too expensive.
In fact, we might even be in a bubble! The argument goes as follows — high revenue growth coupled with lack of profits means these businesses are fundamentally broken. Just as we saw in 1999-2000, investors’ willingness to pay for growth at any cost will end and many SaaS companies will be left behind. image: Andreessen Horowitz. The ideal product manager - StartupCFO. It took me several years in the Startup World to fully appreciate the importance of a good product manager.
In the Web World especially, product and user experience drive distribution. It’s not about marketing a crap product that no one uses (that was the old PC, desktop software era). Today, if you build an amazing product it does the marketing for you. At the earliest stages, product should be led by the founder and CEO. That person should set the vision, translate that into product requirements and stay really close to users and their usage patterns.