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

Before Eric Ries, and even before Clay Christensen, there was Geoffrey Moore. Moore’s Crossing the Chasm was a seminal book at the time it was published in 1991, and should still be one of the very first book any entrepreneur reads. Back in those days, before the “internet” became an ubiquitous medium, the majority of

Was feeling a bit left out by all the smart and daring people putting forth their forecasts for the coming year, so I decided to join the party. While most people are afraid of being wrong; we, at MuckerLab, are not afraid of being right. In no particular order, here are MuckerLab’s fearless predictions for

Since the founding of Facebook and Twitter; pundits, VC’s and entrepreneurs have been predicting the second tidal wave innovation to transform the e-commerce business as we had known it. “Social Commerce” was supposed to be the biggest thing since Jeff Bezos turned the web from a replacement for brochures & collaterals into a virtual store

Below is an editorial I wrote for MediaPost a few weeks back.  It was published today. It may be premature to talk about the “second act” of a company that just went public a few weeks ago and is the “fastest growing company in history.” But the data supports the theory that Groupon’s core local

Mobile Payment is quickly becoming as useless of a term as Cloud Computing. Companies across a wide spectrum of use cases and industries are quickly re-positioning themselves as a player in “mobile payments” in order to (re)capture some pixie dust. What exactly is mobile payments? Is it payment using a phone? Is it payments without