When building a company, acquiring a user or closing a customer one at a time can seem like competing in a marathon while knee deep in mud — making progress in inches, barely able to catch a breath, all the while unable to comprehend exactly how far you are from the finish line. For entrepreneurs, […]

There is no word more sacred and yet over-used than “term sheet” in the entrepreneurial circle. The pursuit of the mythical VC term sheet has blinded entrepreneurs from the real goal of building a business: revenue, customers, users, engagement and retention. Securing a term sheet is about more than money — more than survival. It’s

Even before Sequoia Capital made $3.5 billion on a $60 million investment in WhatsApp, the seed- and early-stage funding landscape had already changed significantly. Most major VC firms have significantly scaled back their seed-stage investment programs. Furthermore, many Series A funds will openly admit that the traction needed to raise a Series A today as

What does Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Larry Page, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel have in common with me? We’ve all guest lectured at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.  Here is me doing my best to not embarrass my fellow esteemed lecturers. . .

As techies and nerds, we tend to believe in the utopians promise of technology enabling, at the very least, automation, and at the very best, intelligence. As consumers we have come to expect the “social contract” we have with the internet services we consume as arms-length “users” rather than as white-glove “customers.” As a result,

Market VC’s accelerate investments in “internet of things” except sometime in Q4, wake up and realize it’s no different than “consumer electronics” – and that we still need to innovate around the manufacturing infrastructure, distribution economics, and consumer liability  of the consumer goods business to really make this a venture fundable category. VC’s start investing

Making fun of myself and the bullshit I spew on a daily basis . . . It’s almost been two years since I co-founded LA-based accelerator MuckerLab and since then, I’ve gotten pretty good at lying. Not the “pants on fire” kinds of lies, but more like “Pretty Little Liars” ones. These are the types

-The main competitor used to have the word “telegraph” in its name -The incumbents in the industry were funded in 1910, 1934, and 1976 -The industry is an oligopoly -Customer satisfaction is low but have no other alternatives -Competitor’s partners have message boards dedicated to bitching about their monopolistic practices -Green screens are the state-of-art

  We’ve all seen or even put together a presentation that included some version of the following slide:   (FYI, I found these slides on slideshare, I’m not commenting at all on the quality of the overall pitch or the company itself . . .  I’m just using them as an example) Evidently, entrepreneurs love

Creating a liquid and vibrant marketplace is already hard enough; fine tuning a business model, and eventually getting paid for the value that has been created by the marketplace is just as complicated and perilous. There has been a lot of talk on the “take rate” a marketplace business can eventually sustain and justify. In