The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 8, 2012

Point Nine not only loves animals , we also love dog food. After all, some months ago we invested in ePetWorld , which runs hundeland.de , a fast-growing online shop for dog food and supplies. Today I'm going to talk about a different type of dog food though. If you know us a bit you'll know that we talk a lot about the Cloud. In our opinion, the move of software from the desktop or local servers to the Cloud, along with the consumerization of enterprise software and other developments that go h

Cloud 140

Cloud Outsourced Development Startup Investment 140

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

NOVEMBER 8, 2012

Most companies offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution can't afford to sell it. I'm talking here about "selling" in the traditional sense: finding prospects and convincing them to buy a product or service. In some cases that's done with experienced sales executives working their Rolodex (or its electronic equivalent). Or it might be sold by a team of inside sales reps making cold calls from a purchased list.

SaaS 124

SaaS Acquisition Travel Subscription 124

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 19, 2012

When building a freemium SaaS company or an ecommerce company or any product that requires users to move through a funnel towards an objective, it’s important to track this funnel to understand where the funnel can be improved. But tracking one funnel may not be enough. The aggregated funnel may be masking conversion differences across customers segments.

Interviewing 101

Interviewing Acquisition Metrics Data 101

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 24, 2012

With some delay I'd like to continue my little series: 3rd DO for SaaS startups Create an awesome product This one is a little tricky. Firstly because it feels like I'm just stating the obvious – who doesn't want to create an awesome product? Secondly because it's hard to offer a lot of useful advice in a blog post on a topic which shelves of books have been written about.

Startup 136

Startup Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Enterprise 136

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Payment Solutions

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

Call it what you like. The Series A Crunch or Silicon Valley’s Financial Cliff, there’s a lot of talk about the challenge seed stage companies facing insurmountable odds raising Series A investment - PandoDaily’s analysis pegs the odds at 20% based on anecdotal data. The three horsemen of the seedpocalypse. In the past 3 years, the three major trends influencing the seed market are: The decreasing cost of starting a company is balanced by growing labor costs.

Data 100

Data Entrepreneurship Investment Trends 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

Fred Wilson’s perspectives on trends in consumer web investment created a big brouhaha over the weekend. Commenting on a WSJ article , Wilson offered his confirmatory observations that follow-on investments in the consumer web have become more challenging as momentum investors have shifted toward enterprise. Over the past 18 months, valuations of later stage consumer internet companies have ballooned into the hundreds of millions propelled by enormous user growth.

Trends 100

Trends Investment Healthcare Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

Department stores. Computer software. And even education. Products and services are being broken into their atomic units and optimized for price, selection, features and, most importantly, customer satisfaction. This is an inexorable trend that cannot and should not be stopped. Roger Ehrenberg in a post called “The Great Unbundling”. This unbundling is happening.

Education 100

Education Trends Pricing Branding 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 25, 2012

Last week I wrote about the importance of a financial plan for startups at every stage. It’s a challenge to balance the predictability the board requests and the ambition the company wants. Often, as startups grow, they adopt two plans: a board plan and a company plan. By creating two plans and presenting each to the right audience, founders can communicate and motivate their teams effectively.

Startup 100

Startup Communication Management Business 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

Over lunch last week, I asked a Redpoint entrepreneur, who had recently sold his company, how his board could have been more helpful to him. His answer surprised me. He wished the company had built a financial/operational plan sooner. Building an financial plan is challenging and it is often perceived as a waste of time because the plan can be so inaccurate.

Startup 100

Startup Sales Hiring Finance Banking 100

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ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.

Payments

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2012

Great products are like ducks. They are calm above the water but paddling furiously below the water. An entrepreneur told me this quip last week and I think it had great wisdom in it. In other words great products are graceful. They make something complex look effortless. Great athletes are the same. So are great dancers. And even great entrepreneurs.

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Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 14, 2012

Vinod Khosla penned a great overview of the three phases of a company this weekend. He identifies the hub and spoke phase, the organized chaos phase, the functional management phase. Once a founder has experienced each of these phases, it’s easy to identify the them in retrospect. But companies don’t transition from one phase to another in discrete steps.

Startup 100

Startup Management 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Yesterday’s post on distribution partnerships for startups elicited a few comments and questions about other important elements startups should consider when contemplating partnerships. I’ve listed a few other major partnership elements below. Qualifying the Partnership. Quality of inbound traffic - As part of measuring the cost/benefit of a partnership, it’s critical to understand quality of traffic/customers from a distribution partnership, as @jamesreinhart pointed out.

Startup 100

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Scale Payment Services 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 12, 2012

When a startup is approached by an established company about partnership, it can be a very exciting time. Sometimes partnerships change the trajectory of a startup. Other times, the weight of partnerships can crush startups. Servicing a much larger partner’s needs with a small team can be a full time job and deprive the startup of any time to advance their independent projects.

Startup 100

Startup Technology Branding Marketing 100

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

Revenue

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 11, 2012

This morning NPR profiled an education researcher comparing and contrasting the way different cultures approach intelligence and learning in schools. Though the debate about education methodologies is fascinating, I found the one of the stories in the report reminded me of the importance of transparent cultures in startups. In 1979, Jim Stigler, a researcher from UMich went to study education in Japan.

Startup 100

Startup Education Marketing 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 11, 2012

This morning NPR profiled an education researcher comparing and contrasting the way different cultures approach intelligence and learning in schools. Though the debate about education methodologies is fascinating, I found the one of the stories in the report reminded me of the importance of transparent cultures in startups. In 1979, Jim Stigler, a researcher from UMich went to study education in Japan.

Startup 100

Startup Education Marketing 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2012

Yesterday, I watched as a friend of mine created an Expensify account for his startup. He was trying the product for the first time. I took notes without saying much. The experience reminded me of the hours I spent in Google’s usability labs watching people use our AdSense Demographic Targeting beta product. In those sessions, I remember feeling a sense of excitement followed by frustration - even disillusionment.

Education 100

Education Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

In a triumph of statistics, Nate Silver predicted the outcome of every state in the Presidential election correctly. What makes this story so noteworthy isn’t that it proves data enables superior decision-making to human intuition. We know the math works. Instead, Silver’s success highlights and challenges the prevailing culture, present in politics and in the workplace, that overvalues intuition and undervalues data.

Data 100

Data Startup Scaling 100

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Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

Enterprise

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

Must content platforms be reinvented every few years? Left to its own devices, the mob will augment, accessorize, spam, degrade and noisify whatever they have access to, until it loses beauty and function and becomes something else. Seth Godin. Given the noise and misinformation disseminated on Twitter both during the election and the Sandy disaster , I’ve been wondering how Godin’s thoughts apply to new information networks: blogs and feeds.

Government 100

Government Trends Metrics 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

This morning, I listened to an interview of Jon Gertner who has published. a chronicle of Bell Labs called the Idea Factory. In his book and the interview, Gertner highlighted points about the Bell Labs that relate to Clay Christensen’s recent New York Times editorial, the Capitalist’s Dilemma. Bell Labs was a house of magic - a place of prodigious invention and innovation.

Government 100

Government Innovation Interviewing Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2012

In May 2010, I bet a good friend of mine that Android would overtake iOS in total devices shipments in 12 months' time. My prediction was completely off the mark. In May 2011, iOS led cumulative shipments by more than 100%: 191M to 95M. It would take another 10 months for Android to equal Apple in March 2011 at about 325M each. Race to one billion devices.

Mobile 100

Mobile Trends Scale Forecasting 100

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 1, 2012

There’s a Pixar movie that captures the ethos of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurship culture which it summarizes this way: While not everyone can be a great chef, a great chef can come from anywhere. The magic of the valley is that there is no path, no formula, no stencil for how to be successful. There is no university one must attend, no incubator one must join, no technology one must master to be successful.

Entrepreneurship 100

Entrepreneurship Technology 100

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

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