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.
Later this month I am speaking at AdWeek with my friend Shelley Zalis on the topic “Top 10 Mistakes that CMOs Make.” Leading up to AdWeek I am going to publish a handful of items for friends who can’t make the conference. This post is about online video, and specifically YouTube. As a consumer I […]
If you haven’t already read Edward Snowden’s interview with the Guardian I suggest you take a few minutes and dig in. For the uninitiated I will summarize it in two sentences. 1.) The US government is collecting a surprising amount of information on its own citizens. 2.) We should be concerned about the use of […]
Have you ever wondered why a cable box, Roku, and PC are not embedded into your television set? On the surface it seems like a logical next step – hardware is cheap, devices are small, and convergence has been a buzzword for a decade. Apple has even been rumored to have an iTV in the […]
I have decided in the past few days that I am going to create a new currency. It is going to be called “Ian Bucks”, or just “IB” for short. If you are interested in purchasing some IBs please write below in the comments and I will contact you about it. Here is how it […]
In the musical “How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying”, JP Finch finds himself in a predicament. In a span of just a few days he ascends from the mail room to the corner office, but in the process he accidentally becomes the Vice President of Advertising (against the advice of his trusty manual). […]
In the past few months we have seen five or six start-ups going after the virtual assistant category. The idea is kind of like Apple’s Siri, but super charged with people who do stuff for you on the other end of the line. This is a future where we all use on-demand assistants to help […]
When was the last time you added a new friend on Facebook? I still go to Facebook every day to browse links and baby pictures, but like many people I know, I am not adding many new friends. The problem is that my personal information on the site has built up over the past few […]
For the past decade we have all benefited from cloud computing. You may not realize it, but most Internet companies use some component of the cloud behind the scenes. Cloud computing cuts down on the cost of launching applications, and as a result we get free services like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Dropbox that come […]
In the last few months we have seen a number of companies attempting to transform the Human Resources space. The big opportunity exists with large companies that are straining under the weight of hiring and on-boarding so many new employees. For instance, a company like Accenture hires seventy thousand people per year. In the process they screen […]
I am very proud to announce Greycroft’s recent funding of Longtail Video. Longtail owns the JW Player, which is the world’s most popular video player, and the company is a key part of our overall thesis in the online video space. According to Comscore, there were approximately 40bn online video views in the US last […]