What exactly is a managed marketplace?
Over the past few years, the term “managed marketplace” has become so widely used that Bill Gurley from Benchmark recently tweeted that it is not clear to him what the difference is between a “managed marketplace” and a “true marketplace.” I think this is an important discussion to have and I am trying to develop […]
How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality
Six weeks ago, we kicked off a new series where we profile an awesome operator in our network to learn about his/her work and contributions to his/her organization and community at large. Our inaugural guest was Bala Subramaniam and we asked him three questions on marketplaces. This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei […]
Announcing our investment in Celo — a monetary system to create conditions of prosperity for all
Over the past few days, you may have seen news about Celo cross your newsfeed. Today, we are thrilled to share that we were early backers in the company (since January 2018) as it announces it’s most recent $30M raise led by A16z and Polychain. What exactly is Celo? It’s an open and open-sourced crypto-powered […]
Q1 2019 Summary: Portfolio News and Activities
We’re already a full quarter into 2019, and as expected, it’s shaping up to be a busy year. The Version One portfolio is filled with great startups doing incredible things, and here’s a selection of what has been happening (that we can talk about publicly): Company news and product releases: Outreach launched Galaxy, the app […]
Where is the value in tokens?
Crypto / blockchain has always been as much of a business model innovation as a technical innovation… Technical innovation: running a decentralized ledger / platform at scale Business model innovation: issuing tokens to give users / participants in the platform a stake in the project By issuing crypto tokens, platforms gave early users an incentive […]