This is not an article I wrote – its an interview I gave and eventually published in Inc Magazine. BUT – since I had no idea I sounded so cogent and witty on the phone I thought I excerpt it here and link over If you’re taking time to carefully perfect a business plan to […]

(This post is published  @ Forbes.com I am just excerpting the first couple paragraphs on the blog) It has taken a long time for the dust to settle from the battle for first generation e-commerce supremacy (Amazon.com and select smart brick and mortar guys won).  Fifteen years later, a confluence of macro trends on and

Mobile is broken. Mobile commerce is broken. Mobile advertising is broken. Mobile lead gen is broken. Mobile app discovery is broken. Mobile app pricing is broken. Mobile subscription is broken. There is no doubt that mobile is going to be more than 50% of internet usage within the next 18 month. The problem is that

I was planning to blame it on demo day, but in reality, I am simply having writer’s block. (Another possibility, I just ran out of interesting things to say – which is very likely given how much I’ve spouted off in the past.) There is a cure; however, for writer’s/blogger’s block – its called top

I don’t mean to imply that we are in the business of investing in the next generation of . . . quick service restaurants. We are not . . . at least not yet 🙂 But almost 20 years since the Internet changed everything, in every industry we are seeing, the conversation has changed from

Back in October of 2008 (only a few weeks after the world blew up and a few months before the startup I was working at also exploded) I wrote a cryptic note on my personal blog comparing the hype cycle/startup life cycle curve versus the valuation “J-Curve.” By layering the two curves on top of

There is one class I never missed in high school, Drivers Ed. I had been eyeing my sister’s red 1986 Honda Prelude for years – it was going to be my ticket to the teen age nirvana – ownership, freedom, status . . . and girls. Ro (Formsprings, RockYou) and Zhao (Betterworks, Farmville) were here

I’m not a VC. I’m barely an investor. I’m a wanna be. I fall in love easily. I believe too naively. I don’t see hurdles I see a fun rubrik’s cube. I like taking the leap of faith because that’s what we are taught to do – go “change the world,” they all told me

Once in a while, a seminal startup (let’s call them “category busters”) would appear to magically birth a whole new market category while engendering a legion of copycats and derivatives companies across multiple adjacent markets. The category busters often do so with some form of meteoric rise – some do so with incredible adoption metrics

Patrick Vlaskovits (Go Falcons!) was over at MuckerLab the other day talking to our companies about customer development which reminded me of the most important (only?) skill I took away in business school – segmentation. While “strategy” is the most over used word in business, “segmentation” is probably the most underutilized. It’s certainly not as