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Recent Posts
Portfolio
Shipping is a huge pain point for smaller e-commerce businesses of any size. They don’t process enough volume to grant them bulk discounts from the major providers. It’s costly and resource-intensive to work with shipping carriers, and the barrier to entry is extremely high. Prices aren’t transparent and negotiating as a small business is next […]
Entrepreneurship
How does your startup think about innovation? Is it a new feature that gets incorporated into the next release? Is it a new market breakthrough that’s years away? I recently held a mini Tweetstorm where I opened the conversation to innovation across three horizons: short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Here’s more dissection on the topic beyond […]
Entrepreneurship
With the influx of seed money, much has been written about the fact that start-ups that are taking far more funding than they need. For example, check out Fred Wilson’s post where he compares funding a start-up to walking up a flight of stairs. When building a company, it’s smarter to hit each step on […]
Version One
Today marks my first full year in VC at Version One. Over this time, I have grown so much and am happy to report that being an investor is still very much aligned with my core values. As I reflect on the past year, I want to share what I have discovered about these 3 core […]
Entrepreneurship
A community can make or break a marketplace. I owe much of the success of my former company, AbeBooks, to the passionate community of book lovers that came to our site. Considering more than 1/3 of Version One’s portfolio are marketplaces, I appreciate just how much a strong community can be one of the most […]
Entrepreneurship
Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Twitter…all the top players in Silicon Valley want to get their hands on the best talent around. That’s why we’ve seen example after example of “acqui-hires” in the past few years as well as some very large acquisitions where a big driver was the talent behind a start-up (e.g. Nest, Beats). However, only a […]
Entrepreneurship
Over the past few years, we have seen an explosion of start-up activity as the traditional barriers to entry have come down. The ability to raise money no longer determines one’s fate. With lowered costs to build and run websites, acquire and retain users, virtually anybody can pick up coding and start a tech company. […]
Portfolio
Lately, we have seen a growing number of entrepreneurs taking aim to solve the key issues facing our local and global communities. From improving transportation to optimizing neighborhood water usage and encouraging investments in municipal bonds, innovative start-ups are trying to make a difference. Along these lines, we are thrilled to announce our investment in HandUp, […]
Entrepreneurship
The big debate among tech circles has always been if it’s possible to build a “Silicon Valley” company outside of the Valley. Is Silicon Valley a physical place or a state of mind? Can upstart ecosystems in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, or Seattle churn out tomorrow’s billion dollar tech companies? Considering a large proportion of Version […]
Health / Biology
Last December, we published our thoughts on the healthcare market in a VentureBeat article: “The health-tech booster shot: bringing health care into the 21st century.” That was December 2013, and digital health funding for the year exceeded $19B with 195 venture deals (where over $2M was raised). These numbers were up 39% compared with 2012, and […]
Portfolio
Sometimes, you need to wait a long time for the chance to invest in an outstanding founder. I met Adam Doppelt five years ago. He’s the co-founder of Urbanspoon, the popular restaurant review site and app. He also co-founded Cubeduel, a site that lets you rank your co-workers and Strangeberry, a digital media startup that […]
Entrepreneurship
We’re all too familiar with the very real gender gap within the tech community. Women are underrepresented as engineers, management, investors, and founders. A commonly cited statistic is that only 7 percent of U.S. venture capital deals go to women founders and CEOs. Business Insider recently crunched the numbers behind 26 of the top venture […]
Entrepreneurship
As I’ve written before, I’m bullish on hardware. Yet even I was blown away by how far the hardware renaissance has come over the past year. Version One recently spent a few days at Solid, Tim O’Reilly’s new conference that focuses on the intersection of hardware and software, where I led a panel on scaling […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Entrepreneurship
There is not doubt that Bitcoin / the blockchain is a revolutionary technology. Once implemented, the blockchain might be able to disrupt many verticals that are built around managing the transfer of ownership by replacing a centralized approach with a decentralized (and hence usually more efficient) approach. While the blockchain can be applied to a […]
Data / AI / ML
I’m fascinated by the Open Data movement, particularly when it comes to government where the concept of open data hinges on the belief that data is a public asset – just like highways and parks – and should be made available to all. We’ve already seen compelling examples of people hacking into this available data […]
Entrepreneurship
When we look at investment opportunities, we need to consider the type of market that the potential investment is in. How much room is there for a market leader or leaders? Is it winner-takes-it-all or winner-takes-almost-all? Is there room for multiple potential winners? Winner takes all These markets are driven by network effects and only […]
Portfolio
Look across virtually any industry and you’ll see great examples where traditional spaces are being disrupted by software, access to data, and massive online communities. The net effect is powerful: it empowers all of us (no matter who we are or where we are) to learn more quickly, make better decisions, and operate more efficiently. […]
Entrepreneurship
Ever since my friend Albert and his wife Susan have started to homeschool their kids, I have been thinking about the best ways to make custom learning more accessible to kids, families, and adults alike. Albert and Susan have taken an innovative approach to homeschooling (if interested, you can read more about their experiences here). […]
Portfolio
At version one, we are big believers in the vertical SaaS opportunity. Small to mid-sized businesses have long been underusing technology. A mobile-first approach, combined with a laser-like focus on a specific vertical, can create the right toolset to help SMBs achieve huge productivity gains (I wrote about this nearly a year ago for TechCrunch). […]
Portfolio
Over the past few years, numerous innovations (Arduino, Raspberry Pi) have made it easier for anyone to develop hardware. Faster prototyping and cheaper manufacturing are empowering a new generation of hardware experts to gain hold in an industry once ruled by large corporations. We are at the beginning of a new hardware revolution, and at Version […]