Three lessons from ten years of investing
“It takes 10 years and $30m to become a great investor.” This quote has stuck with me from the first time I saw it. I believe the legendary investor John Doerr said it at some point, but I can’t track down the original quote anymore. Of course, I thought it was a complete exaggeration when […]
Who will be the Stripe for insurance?
A few years ago, we began to see SaaS companies integrate payment processing into their software. This push to integrate payments was due to a couple of factors. First, it offers a better user experience – why send somebody off-platform to pay for a product or settle an invoice? Next, adding payments to a platform […]
The Redistribution of Network Effects in Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies have strong network effects, built around the concept of mining. The more miners participate, the cheaper mining gets and the more quickly transactions are validated. (On a side note, this has actually not be true as of late for Bitcoin as it ran into scaling issues which is driving up mining costs). In fact, […]
Three rules for VC-entrepreneur engagement
Recently, someone asked me about my principles for engaging with my portfolio entrepreneurs. The question was a good trigger to think about what drives my interactions with entrepreneurs and how my relationships have evolved over time. Three guiding principles provide the foundation for all my communications and engagement with entrepreneurs: 1. Listen and ask questions […]
Announcing our investment in Manifold
We are very happy to announce our investment in Manifold, the easiest way to find and manage essential developer services. Manifold’s value proposition is to give developers a better way to find and manage all the various cloud services that can help them build and scale their applications. Today, you don’t need racks of servers […]