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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 27, 2012
Yesterday, I showed the increasing share of venture capital investments consumer companies represent. But examining the trends at a category level may mask patterns by consumer category and also by stage. So, I’ve created two charts: the first is a bar chart of consumer investment by segment and the second is a heatmap of of sector and stage. I categorized the consumer investments by 10 leading firms over the past 18 months into six buckets of my choosing.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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