Month: April 2010

I just read Dave’s post taking on location based, startup apps like foursquare, gowalla and others.

I have a lot of respect for Dave but I disagree with two particular points in his post

1. Only early adopters will use these apps:

“the current method of check-ins are a classic case of early-adopter lust for shiny objects, & they have not a damn thing to do with long-term sustainable mainstream consumer behavior. no way any normal motherfucker is gonna do this check-in shit.”

2. Facebook will win this market:

1M users in 12 mo’s is *pathetic*… can u even spell the word “viral”? Facebook will CRUSH u like a friggin’ bug.

My take:

First of all, there are tons of non-geeks using Foursquare right now. My wife isn’t an early adopter and she’s an active foursquare user and the mayor of about a half a dozen places. i have plenty of friends on the service that arent tech folks. And these days I get about 5 invites a day from non-early adopters as well.

The bottom line is that foursquare provides a great social utility (which is getting better) and it’s fun at the same time. That’s a wonderful combo.

Growing from zero to 1M users and accelerating is amazing. They should end the year with 8-9M users at worst and skies the limit on the high side.

Then there is the “can’t facebook/google/[insert big company here]” offer this and kill everyone argument. I just don’t buy it. but then again that’s my nature otherwise I wouldn’t do what I do.

If I was afraid of all big players, I wouldn’t have invested in Boxee, Tumblr, Twitter to name a few.

The focused startup has so many advantages over the big, broad based established players. There are so many examples of this but here’s a classic one.

If you have been reading this blog from time to time or even with some regularity, you’ll know that I’m a bigger fan of the open mobile web than mobile apps. At least from a philosophical point of view, especially in a world of private APIs and app stores playing the gatekeeper role.

Yesterday I had a funny experience on the iPad.

I wanted to find a take out place for dinner. I tapped the Yelp app. It hasn’t been re-written so it looks pretty bad on the iPad. And I was wondering if I should use it in 1x or 2x mode.

Then it hit me. Why not open up Safari on the iPad and just goto yelp.com

Guess what. It worked like a charm.

I’m not sure why Yelp would need or want to re-write for the iPad.

The web wins again!

I think I’ve written about this subject before – the balancing act between work life and family life.

For those of you with spouses, kids, partners…I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

It’s not easy to have a balanced life. I’m not even sure such a thing exists. But what I do know is that its about making priorities and choices. Priorities & choices. Rinse. Repeat.

While I have my doubts that a truly “balanced life” is consistently attainable , I think we are all working on the balancing act. You love your family more than anything and you love your work.

Earlier this week I was talking to a friend of mine that said he would have moved to the bay area years ago but his family wanted to stay east. His priority was his family. With hard work and enormous talent he’s made a wonderful life here in the northeast. It’s all worked out just fine.

We moved back to the east coast after a decade in the bay area for the same reason. I love SF – but we decided in 2001 to raise our young family near our parents, siblings and cousins.

In many ways from a career standpoint that was tricky. I didn’t know anyone in Boston when I moved here. My whole social & professional network was tied to folks with 415, 650 and 408 area codes. But we made a plan and went for it.

And that worked out just fine. In fact, if I didn’t move back I don’t think I would have been a VC (although who knows) and I wouldn’t have been able to meet all the wonderful people that I work with and count on as friends & colleagues in Boston and NYC.

I don’t know where this post is going but I felt the need to jot it down.

The balancing act is something we are all going through I suspect and it’s good to remember why we do what we do.

Last week, i was at an event chatting with a few VCs.

One of the VCs who is from silicon valley, asked if we use “east coast terms”.

Before I could reply, another Boston-based VC said that he uses an east coast term sheet for local investments and but uses his west coast term sheet for bay area investments.

There were too many things going on for me to interject but I’m not sure what they are talking about.

I invest in startups on the east coast and west coast. I don’t have do anything strange or unusual in our term sheets and closing documents. I use the same terms regardless of the location.  And none of the founders i work with on the west coast tell me that my terms were “east coast”.

The only difference I can think of between east and west coast term sheets is that some east coast VCs lock up startup employees with non-compete agreements and they can’t do that with California employees. 

I’m against employee non-compete agreements so I don’t ask for them in either case (unless I’m working with a co-investor that requires it and I fail to convince them otherwise). I don’t get the double standard and probably never will. 

Otherwise, I use highly competent law firms that understand what’s important in startups like Gunderson Dettmer and Fenwick & West. There are a few important terms (valuation, option pool, etc) and then everything else is just boilerplate at this point. 

But I don’t understand the idea of different terms for different coasts. Doesn’t seem fair or right to me.