How to combat negative investor sentiment? Use your customer references

Sometimes there’s a disconnect between investor sentiment and the product’s value. The same thing happens in the market: good companies can have a lower stock price due to public sentiment and market factors outside of their control. Not every start-up can play in a vertical that’s an investor darling. For example, you may be in […]

Announcing our next meetup: Data-Driven Marketplaces, San Francisco, May 16

Back in October, we hosted our first marketplace-themed meetup on the topic of The Holy Grail of the Marketplace: The Virtuous Cycle. More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended and made it a great evening. In case you missed it, you can read some of the key takeaways from the evening’s talks, including a fireside chat […]

Can a sinking start-up reaccelerate growth?

Conventional wisdom, at least in VC land, is that no start-up sees a reacceleration of growth. Once the growth curve starts heading down, it only sees a downward slope. This is partly due to the law of big numbers: a bigger denominator makes it harder and harder to keep up year-over-year growth rates. Things get […]

Q1 2017 Round-up: Portfolio News and Activities

Another quarter has flown by and we’re quickly moving into spring. Q1 was a busy time for our firm and portfolio companies, and here’s a brief recap of some of the various news clippings, fundraising announcements, and other happenings across the V1 community. As we’ve said before, we’re just writing about the things that have […]

Bringing Transparency to Startup Data: Our Data Repository Project

Two months ago, I first introduced my vision to create a startup data repository. Since then, I’ve chatted with many of you who share the desire to democratize access to information on startups and bring transparency to what’s been a traditionally private ecosystem. I’ve been blown away by the response and appreciate every like, share, tweet, […]