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.
I attended a video round table last week courtesy of our friends at Valhalla Partners, and the first topic of conversation was about how Netflix is changing the content industry. Netflix is an amazing company and, for those who don’t follow it, they have 23.6mm subscribers today. That number grew 69% in the last year. If you believe Reed […]
Our second fund at Greycroft is just over a year old, and we have already invested in two local marketing companies. One is called Matchbin, which provides digital marketing services for newspapers, and the other is called Netsertive, which provides digital marketing services for retailers. Over the past year I have had a chance to look […]
The last two weeks have been incredibly busy at Greycroft – we had our annual CEO Summit at the Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara, we closed two new investments, and I was invited to go on Bloomberg television twice to discuss the IPO market (links here and here).
A few weeks ago I wrote about the different models behind software-as-a-service (saas) companies. That post covered the basic features of software models, but it didn’t include the economics behind the different businesses. If you are an entrepreneur looking to launch a software company, or sell any subscription product into the enterprise, I have a few […]
Every great idea starts with an observation, and the most creative people I know have this wonderful ability to look around and see things that could be improved upon everywhere. We aren’t inventing cold-fusion over here at Greycroft, but we started the firm in 2006 because we saw a disturbing trend in the venture capital […]
Buddy Media made their first acquisition today – a NY-based start-up called Spinback. I am excited about the acquisition for many reasons: I like the Spinback team, their analytics are a good fit with Buddy Media’s product, and the combination extends Facebook’s social graph into retail and ecommerce. The acquisition ultimately got me thinking about […]
[Editors note – I was in Ohio last weekend and got feedback that my blog can be hard reading for folks without a prior knowledge of advertising, so I included an introductory paragraph before jumping into the main topic. If you already know the advertising industry just skip to paragraph two.] Since the emergence of […]
When VCs get together one of the topics that invariably surfaces is a discussion of the big one that got away. Every VC has a story about the 100x investment they didn’t make for some reason or another. Bessemer even has an “anti-portfolio” on their website with funny commentary about it. We all know that dwelling […]
A lot of entrepreneurs have come to me recently looking for advice about their seed round, mostly because they are oversubscribed and need to choose between VCs and angel investors. Given that I am a VC, you would assume that I would side with other VCs, but I am actually somewhat negative on VC participation at […]
What is the thread that connects the great media companies of the last 20 years? I think the answer will surprise you. In 1995, Yahoo was founded as a personal project of two Stanford PhD’s. The project aggregated links from around the web, creating an index of third party content in one place. It was a brilliant […]