Lessons learned? What it’s like to run Google’s $2 billion venture capital fund. When Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to set up a venture-capital fund back in 2009, they chose a relatively little-known neuroscience graduate, entrepreneur, and biotechnology investor to run it. His name is Bill Maris, and over the past five years, he’s become one of the most important and powerful men in Silicon Valley. Each year, Maris has $400 million to invest in startups.
So far, Google Ventures, of which he is managing partner, has poured $2 billion into 300 of them, including the likes of Uber, the car hailing service; Slack, the office messaging system; Medium, the blogging platform; and a host of life-sciences and health companies. Corporate venture capital funds have been around for years. Chip maker Intel, for example, has had one since 1991. They serve the dual purpose of enabling tech companies to earn returns on their vast cash reserves, and help them keep abreast of innovation in ways that giant lumbering corporations often struggle with.
No. The Mind of Marc Andreessen. On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents’ Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world’s most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road’s newest and most unusual firm.
Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm’s deal team and its seven general partners—the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Doshi had run the gantlet before. Now he was back for more. Mixpanel was emblematic of Silicon Valley’s outsized worship of unicorns.
Getting Started - MakingSociety. Getting Started MakingSociety helps you build your hardware startup. On this page, I’ve gathered MakingSociety’s key articles to get you started. Hardware Startup Global Strategy From Idea to Product: 10 Steps For Creating a Hardware Company Best Entrepreneur Books to Build a Hardware Company Product Design How to Package a Product 37 Marketplaces to Share, Buy and Sell Designs for 3D Printing 20+ Open Source Furniture Designs How to Find an Industrial Designer Manufacturing – Distribution Compare All Materials Available at Online 3D Printing Services 5 Key CNC Machines in a Fab Lab The Worlwide List of Open Source Hardware Online Stores Funding The Investors Who Want to Hear About your Open Hardware Startup Open Hardware Entrepreneurs’ stories From Etsy to Kickstarter: the Story of The Question Block Lamp Discover OpenReflex, the Open 3D Printed Camera Hardware Startups Quotes: A Make HIW 2013 Anthology Jerry, a Do-It-Together Server that Connects Makers in Africa Welcome on MakingSociety!
Recent Posts. Guide to Business Development and Partnerships. Learn More Section 1: What is Business Development? When you ask 10 people to define “Business Development”, chances are that you will get 10 different answers. Here are some of my favorite articles that try to answer this question: Section 2: Why Should Companies Invest in Business Development? Thought leaders agree that every company should invest in business development, as it can help the company achieve tactical goals (like accelerate revenue growth) and/or strategic goals (like an acquisition).
Below are some great articles on this topic: Section 3: When Should Companies Invest in Business Development? Thought leaders agree that early-stage start-ups should avoid investing in BD until the company has achieved a degree of Product / Market fit. Section 4: How Should Companies Execute a Business Development Plan? I have broken the “How” down into a couple of sub-segments, as there is a lot of ground to cover. a) Building the Business Development Function Great BD folks are hard to come by.
Why Profitability Matters. Why Profitability Matters The industry loves to focus on the extremes — the unicorns, the implosions — and we make celebrities out of the biggest winners and losers. We applaud startups that raise massive amounts of money at huge valuations, but the simple math is that most don’t survive, and with every raise comes increased risk and higher exit requirements. We celebrate VCs who find the unicorns, but the simple math of venture is that they plan on most of their companies failing.
And the few that don’t fail, rarely reach profitability. Well, I’m proud to announce that Bitly is now one of those rarities, having recently reached profitability. We worked very hard as a team to get there. Why profitability? But with this comes with deeper issues. This isn’t to say we won’t invest in growth, we’ve doubled our business each year by doing just that. Now, I’m not saying that building a high growth, high cash burn company can’t be valuable nor the right strategy.
What I'd tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years. This is, in no particular order, what I'd tell myself about startups if I could go back in time to when I first got involved. Which is probably the same as what I've learned. This is most definitely not advice, the "you" here is directed at me. So is "I". Grammar is hard. You're definitely going to end up building too much and shipping too late. Be obsessive about avoiding thisSomeone's always already working on the same idea and that's not a bad thingAlways refuse if someone asks you to sign an NDA before hearing their ideaLike it or not, most networking in London is focused around drinking.
Pearltrees. Six years at SoundCloud, Five Lessons Learned. A few weeks ago I opened Twitter and just started writing. It was an avalanche of thoughts, insights, and learnings I’ve gathered over six years at SoundCloud, helping a startup become the world’s largest audio and music platform on the web. As a college dropout, lead singer in a hardcore band, A&R-turned tour manager, marketer, and failed founder, joining SoundCloud six years ago is up there in the highlights of my life. I’ve learned so much. Over 20 tweets and 2 hours later, I found myself wanting to unpack some of those thoughts as they seemed to resonate with people. It’s hard to expand on ideas, to put them on paper and hope that others find them valuable.
But today, I’m going to give it a shot. Here are 5 nuggets that I want to share in more depth: Company culture = a collective of people living shared values Culture is the sum of your people living the company’s core values day in and day out, amplified by how those values are communicated internally and externally. 2. 3. 4. 5. Startups: Go fast, but pitch slow | Alex Iskold. Techstars program mantra is DO MORE FASTER. Coined by Brad Feld and David Cohen in the earlier days, the saying reminds founders that they are on the clock, and have the opportunity to get years worth of work done in just 3 months. But when it comes to demo day, the culmination of the program, the advice is the opposite. Instead of going fast, we tell the CEOs to go slow and to say less. We tell them to SAY LESS SLOWER. Why?!? Because nobody can understand you, when you pitch fast, and say a lot. You know your business and everything makes sense in your head.
Going slow on the Demo Day pitch does not mean being dispassionate. To make the pitch go slower, you will need to have less words. Craft your pitch. And then to deliver truly great pitch you need practice. So remember this, founders, DO MORE FASTER, but when you pitch, SAY LESS SLOWER. p.s. same exact thing applies to investor meetings, saying less and slower makes a big difference. No email at AngelList. We use very little email at AngelList. Most of our communication happens on Yammer, HipChat, Tracker and face-to-face. This probably gets us a 90% reduction in email. If you’re running your company via email, you’re missing out on newer, more effective communications technologies.
Yammer is our company mailing list Yammer has nested conversations, search, inline images and likes. We use it for asynchronous communication across the whole company. HipChat is for IM HipChat is an IM app for desktop and mobile. It also supports multi-person rooms (we have a room for our engineers) and it has an API that we use to feed other rooms with exceptions, GitHub notifications and deploys. We use HipChat for synchronous 1-on-1 and group communication. If you’re using Skype for IM, try HipChat. Tracker is for product specs We use Tracker to spec out goals and tasks for new features. Face-to-face is for everything else The biggest companies weren’t built remotely.
When we use email Screenshots Yammer HipChat. We don't pay you to work here. Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing. When planning new products, companies often start by segmenting their markets and positioning their merchandise accordingly. This segmentation involves either dividing the market into product categories, such as function or price, or dividing the customer base into target demographics, such as age, gender, education, or income level. Unfortunately, neither way works very well, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who notes that each year 30,000 new consumer products are launched—and 95 percent of them fail.
“The jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?” The problem is that consumers usually don't go about their shopping by conforming to particular segments. Rather, they take life as it comes. And when faced with a job that needs doing, they essentially "hire" a product to do that job.
What Is Strategy? My post on Product>Strategy>Business Model got a lot of comments and other reactions out there on the social web and from that I realized that many confuse strategy and tactics. And so I thought I would attempt to define strategy in business. I like this definition that I got at wikipedia: Strategic management is a level of managerial activity below setting goals and above tactics. Strategy takes what you want to achieve and develops a plan to get there. From strategy you can develop tactics and implement them. For me, strategy is as much about what you are not going to do as what you are going to do. Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve these goals are usually limited. Strategy also involves how you are going to differentiate from competitors. The basis of competition Companies derive competitive advantage from how an organization produces its products, how it acts within a market relative to its competitors, or other aspects of the business.
Into the Age of Context. Into the Age of Context I spent most of my early career proclaiming that “This!” Was the “year of mobile”. The year of mobile was actually 2007 when the iPhone launched and accelerated a revolution around mobile computing. As The Economist recently put it “Just eight years later Apple’s iPhone exemplifies the early 21st century’s defining technology.”
It’s not a question of whether Smartphones have become our primary computing interaction device, it’s a question of by how much relative to other interaction mediums. So let’s agree that we are currently living in the Era of Mobile. Let me first define what I mean by Age of Context. The Age of Context is being brought about by a number of technology trends which have been accelerating in a parallel and are now coming together. The first, and most obvious trend, is the proliferation of supercomputers in our pockets. While the end number varies, industry analysts all believe the number of connected devices starts to get very big very fast. What Do You Need to Do to Improve Sales? Here's a Start ... | Bothsides of the Table. I write about sales often both because it’s the lifeblood of any organization and because in my experience it is the area in which more startups are least experienced or inclined. I also write and talk about it frequently because raising capital is a part of sales and this is important for entrepreneurs to understand.
To make it simple and easy to remember – there are three basic rules of sales: 1. Why Buy Anything? 2. Why Buy Me? 3. This post will cover the first. If you ask any experienced sales leader they’ll tell you there are three things to know about being effective at sales: Qualify, qualify, qualify. But how do you qualify? Do you have a problem I could solve? The starting point is to ask yourself whether the person you’re dealing with has a problem that is solved by the solution you offer. The other obvious area in determining interested parties is to find referrals from trusted sources. What is the single biggest mistake I see inexperienced startup people do in sales? 2.