I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it: insanely great. Steve wasn’t just using “insanely” as a synonym for “very.” He meant it more literally—that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
Tag: startups
What comes after follow & followers?
It’s no secret that the follow/follower model in Twitter was a meaningful breakthrough in social experiences.
It’s elegant, simple and works.
And as a result we see this model in some of the most popular products around today. Each adding their own flavor of the follower model.
It’s only Tuesday but I’ve already met with four startups this week that are about to launch new social products that also use the follow/follower model.
And that is perfectly fine. Yet just because its beautiful in Twitter doesn’t mean it can work everywhere
It also makes me wonder what comes next. Will every network and community be built on top of this framework? Or will we see alternatives tuned for content discovery and consumption.
On this topic, Medium is interesting. Amazing content and user profiles (here’s mine) but they don’t have a follow/follower model at this time. Particularly fascinating since Medium’s CEO/founder, Ev Williams, is a Twitter cofounder.
It seems to me the biggest challenge with follow/follower models is the idea of yet another network to join and how to discover new content outside of your feed. Tumblr does an excellent job with tracked hashtags and reblogs. Medium does it with collections.
I’m quite interested in how this evolves and where this might take us.
So much new hardware and I couldn’t be happier
When the first consumer internet wave hit, I was part of an early stage start up called WebTV Networks. We designed a tightly integrated product with software, hardware and internet services.
We sold over a million units and Microsoft acquired the company.
During those days we saw other startups building ambitious consumer electronics as well. Companies like Palm, Handspring, 3DO, Danger just to name a few.
Since then I’ve been smitted with consumer electronics. If you listen to any of our podcasts, Nabeel and I talk about hardware in pretty much every episode.
A few years back another fellow geek friend Antonio and i were talking about how back in the day we had much more hardware to play with. But at the time all the best hardware/software was coming out of a single company — Apple. That felt discouraging.
Well, what a difference a few years make. Now we have startups building extraordinary consumer products again. Things like Nest, August, Oculus Rift, Myo and many others have been introduced and are simply mind blowing.
I’m thrilled to see founders and investors getting inspired again to build these products. There is no doubt that hardware is hard. But it’s also awesome and I hope this trend is here to stay.
(Oh and yes, we will soon announce a some new consumer electronics investments as well. Stay tuned!)
Jelly
More than six years ago I joined Twitter as a user of the service.
I was immediately taken by it’s simplicity, power and how it connected us all. And it had this rare combination of being fun and important at the same time.
I was so taken with the product that I asked my friends for an introduction to the founders. The first Twitter cofounder I met was Biz. We hit it off and shortly after that I met Ev and Jack. Those founders just blew me away. Our firm led the second round and I served on their board for the next 3 years.
The founders are all still involved in Twitter in a variety of capacities. But they are also working on new things as well. Jack started Square. Ev started Medium.
And Biz started Jelly.
When Biz told me about Jelly I was inspired. The vision is powerful and important. The company & product is in so many ways a reflection of the values that Biz holds dear. I love that.
The team at Jelly is equally awesome. Ben is driving engineering along with Austin. And my friend Kevin leads the business side.
So today I’m delighted to announce that we led Jelly’s first round of capital and I’ve joined heir board of directors. Biz has the full write up about our investment along with an amazing group of individual investors — Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Al Gore, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Jason Goldman, Bono, Greg Yaintanes and Roya Mahboob.
I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to partner with such a talented team again. And I can’t wait for you all to see what they are building
Picking up our own tab
In the earliest days of a company the most critical things are team & product development. Founders energy needs to be primarily focused on those two things. Everything else is often a distraction.
Raising capital for startup companies also requires a big effort. Choosing the right investors that respect/support your vision, that you can imagine working with and can help isn’t an easy task even in the best of times.
And once you make this decision, the company hires lawyers and the investor hires lawyers, documents get drawn up and legal fees start building.
We would rather these startups spend less time and money in the documents and contracts and more time focused on building their business.
And we want our own actions to be consistent with this objective.
In recent years our firm and several others have taken efforts to simplify our seed and Series A legal documents. It has been a good thing and improved efficiency.
But we would like to do more to align our interests with founders.
For as long as I can recall, both as an entrepreneur and a vc, startups have been asked to pay their investors legal expenses related to their investment. Whether the company raises $500k or $5MM it has become “standard” that the company foots the investors legal bill.
I didn’t understand it then and I still don’t get it now.
Starting today we would like to change that.
My partners and I at Spark Capitalare going to pay our own legal fees at the earliest days of the company up to a cap of $25k going forward. If this cap lasts a few rounds even better. The only fine print we can think of is if there are multiple co investors we would ask them to pay their own way as well. If not than we wil just pay our pro rata.
We would rather see this money go towards better uses and continue our efforts to align ourselves with the founders that risk it all every single day.
Some thoughts about Foursquare
It’s no secret that I love Foursquare. I signed up for the service quite early and I use the product every day. I’m also a fan of the founders, the people at the company and how the product is evolving and growing.
And I put my money where my heart is and we invested in the company a few years ago.
Earlier this morning Businessweek wrote about Foursquare – it’s challenges, it’s plans and a new round of funding.
I’m frequently asked what is the exit strategy for many of our portfolio companies. For example after our initial investment in Twitter in 2008, I have been asked in almost every interview since that time about our exit strategy, when it is going public, will they sell out, etc. This was even before the company generated revenue!
And I’m asked that about Foursquare as well. What is their exit strategy. Do you want them to get sold one day or go public? When will they go public?
It’s hard to predict these things and I try to avoid making predictions. My objective is that our firm invests in the best people building valuable important companies. I believe Foursquare is one of those.
The Businessweek story quotes me as saying that they will go public one day. Like I said earlier, it’s hard to predict these things. I’m guessing I actually said something like “I believe they can go public one day” or “I hope they can go public one day” but perhaps I mispoke or the writer misquoted me. Regardless of the error, I’m hoping you all understand my sentiment, hope and outlook.
I’ll bring this post home by linking to the latest Foursquare update as described on their blog here. Give it a try if you haven’t already. And I hope you love it as much as I do.
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Update: I just exchanged emails with the writer at Businessweek. It turns out I did say “I think the company will go public one day”. But the words “I think” was dropped because of space constraints for the print version of the story. It was an honest miscommunication because their editor thought “I think” was redundant. But my intention was to make it clear this wasn’t an explicit promise for the future but more of my desired outcome.
Why Richard Price created Academia.edu
I’ve been getting some nice feedback from folks that are enjoying this series of guest posts about the “why” founders create their companies. So I’m going to keep going with them. Here are earlier posts about Skillshare, Runkeeper and thePlatform)
Today, I’m going to introduce you to Richard Price who is the ceo and founder at Academia.edu. Richard’s interest and dedication to building his company is all about scratching his own itch. He built it because he wanted it to exist. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Richard and I thoroughly believe in his cause behind the Open Sciencemovement.
Here is Richard’s own words about why he created his company.
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I had the idea for Academia.edu when I was on the phone with a friend towards the end of my PhD at Oxford.
I was telling him that I needed to create a website to share the research papers I had written, and that it was a pain because I’d have to learn HTML and some design skills.
I have an ingrained response to notice when I am experiencing mental anguish about something, and to see if there is an opportunity there. It occurred to me one or two seconds after articulating the pain point that other academics probably experienced the same pain in sharing their work online.
I spent the next few evenings fleshing out the idea. It was clear to me that the site should make it really easy to create a profile and share your papers. It was also clear that you should be able to use the network to find people in similar research areas to you, and keep up with their work.
That latter discovery aspect of the idea was validated for me a couple of months later when I was giving a talk at a philosophy conference. My PhD had been on a very specific area of the philosophy of mind. I knew of 4-5 other people in the world working on the exact same problem.
There was a chair of my talk, someone who was going to introduce me. I was chatting to this person, and together we realized that we had been working in the exact same area for the last 3-4 years without being aware of each other. It was clear to me that the internet could provide a better way for academics to be aware of each other.
After finishing my PhD, I raised $600k from some London investors and moved to San Francisco. We launched Academia.edu in September 2008. In 2011 we raised a further $4.5 million from Spark Capital and True Ventures. Today over 2.5 million academics have joined Academia.edu, and over 10,000 academics join each day.
Academics use Academia.edu for three main reasons:
- build an online presence where they can share their work
- view analytics about how many people are reading their papers, and from which countries
- keep up with new papers written by people they follow
There is a lot to improve on in the way that scientists communicate. Peer review is extremely slow and the process is not robust. There is an average time-lag of 12 months between submitting a paper to a journal and it being published.
There aren’t the right reputation metrics to incentivize scientists to share data-sets, code, comments on papers, and generally the full range of their scientific output. Papers generally end up behind very expensive paywalls, despite being authored and peer-reviewed for free, leading to the audience for the papers being than it might be.
Academia.edu is focused on building a new kind of reputation system in science, one that will incentivize academics to share their work openly and quickly, and to share the full range of their scientific output.
I wrote a guest post for TechCrunch a few weeks ago on the development of these new reputation metrics in science. Here is a link to that post if you are interested to read more Reputation Metrics Startups Aim to Disrupt the Scientific Journal Industry.
Why Ian Blaine created thePlatform
Founders create companies for many different reasons.
Last week, I shared the story about why Mike “Karnj” created Skillshare.
Today, I’m happy to share the story about why Ian Blaine created thePlatform.
Ian’s company has a special place in my heart and in our firm’s history. It was our very first investment and also our first exit. I remember it was a competitive round and Ian was trying to decide between us (a brand new firm without a track record at Spark) and a big established well regarded firm that has been around for decades.
I’m happy he chose us :)
The business was in the middle of the explosion of video and they built a fantastic SaaS company with meaningful network effects. I miss working with that team and I have a photograph of the founders in my office.
Okay, without any further ado, here’s Ian’s own words about why he started thePlatform
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When I started thePlatform with a small group of co-founders I had a few things on my mind. It was my second start-up. The first I started and sold very quickly during the first internet boom, only to watch it and the acquiring company crash on the rocks of the first bust. It was all fairly opportunistic and not very fulfilling, though quite a thrill ride. I learned some lessons the first time around, and I thankfully had the energy and desire to apply them in a second act.
Call it a shot at redemption. I wanted to prove to myself that I could make something that could scale and become a business – something built to last. I wanted to build a culture that took the best from the great places I had worked, but had its own personality grounded in hiring very smart, really nice people, who work well together. With that team, I wanted to make new stuff that could challenge and change a big industry.
I couldn’t boil the tipping point to starting thePlatform down to one driving force, but a confluence of the above occurring at the right time. I think that’s a big part of why I’m still with the company after all these years. Interests and passions naturally wax and wane (at least for me) so it’s been valuable to have a diverse set of motivators that keep me engaged and energetic in my approach to my work. It doesn’t hurt that we are playing in a very dynamic, competitive market (TV/Video) that demands rapid innovation and high reliability, which makes for an interesting balancing act.
I know that my next act will be about addressing something that makes the world better. I want to take what I have learned and apply it to a problem that matters to me. It’s a natural evolution, and when the time is right, I’m excited to jump in again.
We are both nuts
When an entrepreneur and an investor decide they want to get into business together there is magic in the air.
In the best of situations both the founder and the investor take the time to get to know each other, understand if they see the world the same way and have shared expectations about the future… and shared expectations about the uncertainty as well. They are both motivated to make it work and for the right reasons. That feeling is extraordinary.
The optimist in me says there is much more to this connection than a simple marriage of convenience where the founder needs capital and the investor has capital and is looking for talent.
Take a look at Fred’s post today. I’m writing this on my phone so can’t link but you can point your browser here.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/03/when-things-dont-work-out.html
Great post as usual.
And here’s the punchline. Most startups don’t work. The odds are against us right from the start.
So you gotta be a little crazy to start a company. And you gotta be a little crazy to invest money and time into a startup.
And that’s why we are drawn to each other.
We are both a little nuts
Why Michael Karnjanaprakorn created Skillshare
This is another installment of the “why” behind the founding of a startup.
Last week, I shared Jason Jacobs story about Runkeeper.
Today, I’m delighted to share Michael Karnjanaprakorn’s motivation in creating Skillshare.
Here’s a taste from his post from earlier today. Please read the whole thing here.
The why behind Skillshare started with a personal experience. But it lead me to asking why things were the way they were and why the world couldn’t be different. It’s a purpose that unites everyone on our team and why we come to work everyday. It’s a lifelong mission for us.
(disclosure: we are investors in Michael’s company) .