Pattern Recognition is a journal of thoughts and strategies on venture capital investments.
Ian is a co-founder and partner at Greycroft Partners in New York City. He has been a venture capitalist since 2001.
Over the past decade Greycroft has funded some of the most recognizable names in the emerging grocery and retail sector, including Shipt, Plated, Boxed, and Thrive Market as well as many innovative D2C companies like Candid, Hubble, Billie, Keeps, and Penrose Hill. In early 2018 our portfolio caught the eye of Albertsons Companies and they […]
Like many New Yorkers I wasn’t born and raised in New York. I grew up in Akron, Ohio. My parents still live in my childhood home, which happens to be down the street from where LeBron James lived up until a few days ago. I moved out east 21 years ago and haven’t lived in […]
Two weeks ago, FTSE Russell banned companies that issue non-voting shares from joining its index, claiming that the two class structure hurts shareholder rights. This week the S&P 500 followed suit. The S&P 500 notably grandfathered in three companies that use non-voting shares, Alphabet (aka Google), Berkshire Hathaway, and Facebook, because without those stocks the […]
Hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask me some version of the question above. Many people don’t think of VC funds as a “business” – we get put in a different group called “investors” – but just like all the companies we invest in, Greycroft has a business plan, too. Every now and […]
From time to time entrepreneurs ask us questions, not so much about their own operations, but more about outside forces that are putting pressure on their numbers. Here, I’m keeping it simple by answering the top three questions we get asked most often about the markets these days, explaining how they may have affected your […]
(Plus a few helpful hints) For one reason or another, many good companies have a hard time gaining traction with investors—their meetings fall flat, their messages go unanswered, or they get the “Let’s check back in a few quarters” routine. Of course, some of this is simply out of an entrepreneur’s control. Public stock prices […]
Back in college I interned at DLJ, an investment bank enshrined in the book Monkey Business. If you haven’t read Monkey Business it was one of the great exposes about life on Wall Street, including all-nighters, binge drinking, and every other good/bad thing that can be idealized. At DLJ I was a summer analyst, the […]
Since the dawn of venture capital, VCs have funded ideas that seemed downright absurd at the time. The first cable company competed against free, over-the-air television. FedEx competed with the US postal service. Wireless carriers sunk billions of dollars into towers and spectrum before they could sign up a single subscriber. But each of these […]
In 1972, Bobby Fisher played Boris Spassky for the title of world chess champion. Game 6 of that series is arguably the greatest chess match of all time – Fisher played an unusual opening and later made a series of brilliant tactical moves that left Spassky with no choice but to resign. At the end […]
Back in 2011, my friend Geoff Judge introduced me to a start-up called Longtail Video. At the time Longtail had a popular video player with 500K free users, and a smaller number of customers who had paid a one-time license fee. It took a year of discussion before we finally invested behind a plan to […]