Tom Tunguz
MARCH 27, 2013
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup pitches. Market timing risk - Is now the right time for the business? It’s often hard to evaluate this risk, but nevertheless, it’s an important consideration.
The Angel VC
MARCH 18, 2013
Here's another post in my series on DOs and DON'Ts for early-stage SaaS startups : 6th DO for SaaS startups Fill the funnel Or: Focus on inbound marketing, but try lots of things and double-down on what works In this post I'm going to write about lead generation for SaaS startups. When I edit the series later on I might merge it into my 4th DO ( Make your website your best marketing person ) to have one post on marketing.
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Chaotic Flow
MARCH 4, 2013
A few months back, Gartner placed big data at the peak of its hype cycle for cloud computing , meaning most big data products are solutions looking for a problem. I always find this bad entrepreneurial habit to be one of the most frustrating of our industry. Having recently joined Meltwater as head of marketing and product (BTW Meltwater is hiring marketing and product managers!
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MARCH 7, 2013
I just cancelled my subscription to the New York Times on my Nook. Not because I won't be reading the New York Times any longer. but I won't be reading it on my Nook. Why not? Because the service provider, Barnes & Noble, routinely breaks a fundamental SaaS rule: Communicate with your subscribers. What we have is a failure to communicate. Barnes & Noble is unable or unwilling to let me know when there's a problem with their delivery.
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Aber Law Firm
MARCH 6, 2013
Well it is a little of both, but let me explain. I learned something about the Salesforce.com agreement that totally changed my thinking about SaaS and PaaS agreements, and service level agreements (SLAs): there is no SLA in the Salesforce.com agreement. Yep, you read it right; there is no SLA in their agreement. What Salesforce.com realized–and you need to remember– is that you are first and foremost selling ‘ trust’.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 26, 2013
With the analytics tools today, it’s easy to measure hundreds if not thousands of different metrics for your business. Cutting through all the chaff to determine the most important or insightful metrics can be quite a challenge. Below are the ten metrics I’ve found to be most useful in board meetings. They answer the questions of how should a startup founder might measure the business at the highest level.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 22, 2013
We just launched a new feature to enable you to add a stream of your Close tasks into your calendar!
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 26, 2013
When deciding if to raise a venture round, it’s critical to ensure your venture investor shares the vision for the company: both the product roadmap and the financial goals of the company. Most founders never consider the impact on fund size on VC motivations. As long as there are enough reserves to invest as the company grows, a founder might think, that’s fine with me.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 19, 2013
An entrepreneur shared this quote with me a few weeks ago. The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003. I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 31, 2013
Once you have built your product and it’s in the market, there are only three things that matter: distribution (getting the product into users' hands), engagement (validating that you’ve built the right product and that users are using it), and monetization (making money from those engaged users). Some companies call this the 3 Rs: reach, retention and revenue.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 28, 2013
Some of our companies started financing processes in earlier this quarter. At a strategy session with one of our companies, the team and I crafted the outline of the pitch deck. They asked me what questions a venture investor might ask in the initial meeting. Distilling the investment analysis into a small number of general questions is challenging because of the diversity of businesses we see but, I gave it a try and came up with the following questions I might ask a startup to answer in an ini
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 21, 2013
Over the past few weeks, there has been a new refrain among consumer mobile startups that I’ve met with: we’re designing for normal people or normals as Chris Dixon would put it. There are a few reasons for this trend. First, there is a movement towards great design. Second, there is a wave to reinvent and reimagine core applications of the mobile phones.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 20, 2013
You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”. There is a land war being fought on the web and it’s for files and filesystems. Incumbents and startups alike are duking it out. And things are really starting to get interesting. The startups, Dropbox and Evernote, reinvented the file system as a synchronized, cross platform file system abstracting the hardware and the data.
Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage
When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 18, 2013
Steve Sinofsky, executive at Microsoft for 24 years penned an insightful post on the five data biases plaguing product decisions. It can be easy for any founder, product manager, marketer or engineer accept a data point at face value as the rationale behind a decision. But understanding the nuances and biases of the data, questioning the data, is often just as important as the result.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 17, 2013
In social media, like the real world, there’s quite a lot of gossip going on behind your back. At least on the Internet, you can measure it. Dubbed dark social, this “invisible” sharing brings 40% of the visitors to my blog and similar amounts of traffic to other content sites. The Atlantic Monthly, which receives 5M monthly uniques, reports 60% of traffic from dark social.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 14, 2013
During the life of a startup, the question of outsourcing can arise frequently whether for PR, marketing, product design, sales or engineering. Outsourcing can be very attractive: consultants bring new points of view, relevant experience and (potentially) immediate results. Of course, consultants charge high fees and after their contract expires they leave with their knowledge and insights in tow.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 13, 2013
In a world of socially curated news, there is no place for RSS. I wrote last year: Social streams solve the problem most RSS readers faced: the inbox with 1000+ items to read and no way to sift through them. Socially curated news syndicated through social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and content networks (LinkedIn, Quibb, HackerNews) solves the relevance problem that RSS never could address.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 12, 2013
How much is the most valuable brand in the world, Coca-Cola worth? $77.8B. That’s 45% of the company’s market cap. Often times, winners create advantages in a market through brands. These brands evoke emotions within consumers: feelings of trust (Visa), of aspiration (Nike), of adventure (RedBull). And if the brand is strong enough, it replaces the generic term: tissues/Kleenex, internet search/Google, glass cleaner/Windex.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 11, 2013
I believe machine learning will drive the next big wave of innovation in consumer web services. The very same technologies that power Google’s search and Netflix video recommendation engine will become far more common and useful, perhaps even predominant in the consumer web. Every great consumer product has a little bit of magic. Apple employs static software and hardware design to anticipate user needs - to create that magic.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 10, 2013
Among my friends in college, a frequent response to the question, “How’s it going?” was “Strikes and gutters.” In other words, really well and really poorly - at the same time. Five years into the venture business, I think that expression is much better suited to the day-to-day swings a startup experiences than the life of a college student. It’s hard to imagine these two diametric feelings at the same time, but for entrepreneurs it’s a daily occurrence.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 7, 2013
I often wonder about how to measure the success of this blog. While there are many tools to measure page views and visitors, the absolute number of readers is probably the worst measure because it’s a false idol. Feedburner subscribers, retweets, time on site aren’t much better because they don’t measure the true performance of a blog - what fraction of an audience the blog reaches.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 5, 2013
The three tier feature based pricing model is so common it’s almost a cliché. For some businesses it works well. But as Kenny van Zant explained to me, feature based pricing can slow growth in freemium businesses in two ways: first, feature based pricing creates incentives within a company to offer a subpar product and consequently creates unnecessary friction in the adoption process slowing growth.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 4, 2013
It’s been a little while since I traded code with anyone. But a few weeks ago, one of our entrepreneurs-in-residence, Javier , who joined Redpoint from VMWare, told me about a Ruby gem called Mechanize that makes it really easy to crawl websites, particularly those with username/password logins. In about 30 minutes I had a working LinkedIn crawler built, pulling the names of new followers, new LinkedIn connections and LinkedIn status updates.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 3, 2013
For over two years, Larry and Sergey met CEO candidates before deciding to hire Eric Schmidt. Hiring a CEO was a condition investors imposed as part of the Series A terms. After the investment closed, the founders wanted to renege on that part of the agreement , but the board asked the duo to meet some of the valley’s top CEOs. At which point, Larry and Sergey only wanted to hire Steve Jobs.
Aber Law Firm
MARCH 6, 2013
Well it is a little of both, but let me explain. I learned something about the Salesforce.com agreement that totally changed my thinking about SaaS and PaaS agreements, and service level agreements (SLAs): there is no SLA in the Salesforce.com agreement. Yep, you read it right; there is no SLA in their agreement. What Salesforce.com realized–and you need to remember– is that you are first and foremost selling ‘ trust’.
Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O'Neill Stoll
Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng
Aber Law Firm
MARCH 6, 2013
Well it is a little of both, but let me explain. I learned something about the Salesforce.com agreement that totally changed my thinking about SaaS and PaaS agreements, and service level agreements (SLAs): there is no SLA in the Salesforce.com agreement. Yep, you read it right; there is no SLA in their agreement. What Salesforce.com realized–and you need to remember– is that you are first and foremost selling ‘ trust’.
Aber Law Firm
MARCH 6, 2013
Well it is a little of both, but let me explain. I learned something about the Salesforce.com agreement that totally changed my thinking about SaaS and PaaS agreements, and service level agreements (SLAs): there is no SLA in the Salesforce.com agreement. Yep, you read it right; there is no SLA in their agreement. What Salesforce.com realized–and you need to remember– is that you are first and foremost selling ‘ trust’.
Aber Law Firm
MARCH 6, 2013
Well it is a little of both, but let me explain. I learned something about the Salesforce.com agreement that totally changed my thinking about SaaS and PaaS agreements, and service level agreements (SLAs): there is no SLA in the Salesforce.com agreement. Yep, you read it right; there is no SLA in their agreement. What Salesforce.com realized–and you need to remember– is that you are first and foremost selling ‘ trust’.
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