At some point in the life cycle of any successful company, it will have to abandon what made it successful in the first place. In the search for growth, the original customer, the initial wedge entry point, the early adopter will, by definition, will have to be left behind for the larger and more mainstream […]

1994 – “Consumers are fickle and unpredictable. Consumer products and services are hit driven, it’s really hard to build a scalable consumer company” (Internet) 1996 – “It’s impossible to get to build a billion dollar company selling widgets at $15 and taking $1 commission one at a time” (eBay) 1998 – “There is no room

A little more than one year ago, Marc Andreessen wrote a seminal piece which has defined venture investing and entrepreneurship since. The global trend for software powered innovations to permanently impacting every part of our lives and every part of our work is unstoppable and just at the beginning. Three generations into the birth of

This is a guest post from my partner, erik rannala thats originally published on Techcrunch. Much has been written about the Series A crunch that is facing entrepreneurs and their investors. Those who believe the crunch is upon us contend that a significant number of seed-funded startups will not be able to raise follow-on financing.

A better edited version was posted by Michael Carney (thanks Michael!) @ pando daily. Go read that one instead! ************ In the past 30 days I’ve had sad and unfortunate conversations with around 5 entrepreneurs about the reality that their venture funded companies are headed toward their eventual end . . .  some are indignant,

I love the lean startup ethos and methodology. It is by far the best thing that has happened to the startup community since the onset of the internet-fuel renaissance in entrepreneurship. These days at MuckerLab, we try to utter the basic concepts (mvp, iteration, hypothesis testing, customer development, etc) as much as possible to help

Sometimes, the quickest way to lose credibility is to tell people who are a lot smarter, accomplished and experienced than you are what they should be doing instead with their time. This is one of those times. But sometimes I just can’t help myself. Besides, I don’t have too much (credibility or fame or money)

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