Pattern Recognition is a journal of thoughts and strategies on venture capital investments.
One of my entrepreneurs came to me a few months ago with a dilemma. He found a strong COO candidate, but this person was a long time family friend. They see each other every week at church, their kids are friends, and their wives sit together on the school board. If he hired this person and it didn’t work […]
I was in London for a few days last week. It was a great trip it, but it was also a reminder of how lucky I am to be investing in the United States. London has a lot going for it. It is an easy city to navigate, it has the best Indian food in the […]
Over the last 10 years I have accumulated a few “rules of thumb” about the new media businesses. I use these tips to screen investments, and I figured that they might be useful for entrepreneurs before they launch a new company: 1.) Avoid research teams at agencies and publishers. The research department is purgatory for start-up companies – it is where good ideas go to […]
The old economy. I started in the venture capital business ten years ago, on June 8, 2001. That day the NASDAQ closed at 2,215. A lot has happened in the interim: Google went public. Netflix went public. Apple invented the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Microsoft launched the first XBOX. LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, and Zynga were founded. Blu-ray was invented. And there were […]
[Editor’s Note: This post was written in response to recent conversations I have had with entrepreneurs. I have heard entrepreneurs say that the more money you raise the higher price you get from VCs, as if they have “cracked the code” on the venture capital market. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur this post may save you some headaches and […]
For the last 15 years venture capital firms have focused on advancements in paid media. Paid media is the ~$200BN in advertising spent every year in the US across TV, print, radio, and online, and VCs have funded this industry because the Internet created new opportunities to measure and deliver scalable advertising. There is a […]
Last year I bought a refrigerator from Sears – it was a Kenmore and had excellent reviews on the Sears website. I came home a few weeks ago to find that it wasn’t working. I had a repairman out who inspected the unit and told me that it was leaking freon, and there was nothing he could […]
In 2007 we made our first ad tech investment, which was a company in New York called Collective Media. Since then we have been one of the leading groups in the country for funding ad tech companies, with a portfolio that at one point contained 16 active investments in the sector. I wrote this blog post to explain what […]
Fred Wilson wrote a great post about start-up valuations on Business Insider earlier today. It is good to hear his take because over the last few months I have been wringing my hands about the insanity going on with early stage valuations. For those who aren’t sitting in VC meetings all day, there is a […]
I was in San Francisco last week for a few days of meetings, and while I was there I heard more than the usual amount of grumbling from entrepreneurs about the engineering talent shortage in the city. Hiring software engineers is always hard, but there is an environment now where almost any engineer can raise angel […]