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.
Welcome to the first installment of Greycroft Science, a blog post prepared in conjunction with Earnest Research. I would like to thank Lucy Wang, Masters candidate from NYU Courant, for her assistance in analysis and data science. There is no more familiar topic than grocery shopping. Literally everyone has done it. You probably haven’t spent […]
I had a visit from an entrepreneur yesterday who was deliberating about whether to take on a CEO job at a venture-backed company or start a new company from scratch. The only problem was that the VC deal had some hair on it… $15MM of paid-in capital, nominal revenues, and just a few customers. I […]
Humans have always been farsighted, but few knew it until 1450. In 1450 Gutenberg invented the printing press and soon afterwards the masses were reading. Then people suddenly realized that they couldn’t read small print, which created a huge market for reading glasses. Reading glasses led to microscopes, which led to telescopes, which led to […]
“When a venture-backed company breaks through the $1BN valuation mark, we call it a Unicorn. When the same company falls back below the $1BN threshold, it becomes an Undercorn.” -Dan Primack In 1974 Wilshire Associates launched an index with the aim of tracking every public company headquartered in the US. They called it the Wilshire […]
I just arrived in Shenzhen for my first trip to China in a decade. It is Saturday night and the streets outside my hotel are crowded with revelers wearing party hats and waving balloons. I am not exactly sure what everyone is celebrating, but it has snarled traffic for miles. Shenzhen is an unbelievable place. […]
In 1999, the Wachowski Brothers released The Matrix, set in a dystopian future where software governs the world and humans are bred into captivity. I recently watched the movie again, fifteen years later, and a new thought came to mind. In the movie, humans ended up in a predicament after losing a war to the […]
Did you know that 50 years ago there were no Thai or Japanese restaurants in the United States? When I first heard that factoid I didn’t believe it. From my apartment on the Upper East Side, I have delivery options from 6 Thai restaurants and 18 sushi restaurants, each within a short walk. But that […]
This piece was originally published on Business Insider. Dark pools on Wall Street were once heralded as a way for clients to get better deals on stock trades, but now they are associated with fraud and market manipulation. In the latest dark pool scandal, Barclay’s was accused by the New York Attorney General of misleading […]
Back in 2006, when my partners and I set up Greycroft, every VC we knew insisted on 20% ownership, board seats, and being a “lead investor”. We built Greycroft on the premise that there was a better way to do venture capital that didn’t require arbitrary rules for entrepreneurs. Venture capital is a long term […]
In the past year we have looked at over 100 companies claiming to do native advertising. If you haven’t heard of native advertising you will soon, because it is the hottest trend in online advertising right now. I figured it would help to clarify what native advertising actually means. I wouldn’t normally do this, but […]