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Recent Posts
Portfolio
August seems to be “funding announcement month” so after Empire Avenue and Barcode Hero, here comes a 3rd new investment: Summify is a social news reader that addresses the information overflow we all are experiencing with the explosion of social media. What that exactly means is best described by the Summify team on their blog: […]
Version One
Fred Wilson’s blog post on Dave McClure’s investment thesis a few weeks ago reminded me that I needed to do a better job on spelling out my own. I had done some preliminary work when I started W Media Ventures almost 3 years ago but it was very high-level only addressing the sector (consumer Internet), […]
Entrepreneurship
The GROW conference has brought dozens of high-profile VC’s and super-angels to Vancouver which presents a wonderful opportunity for many local start-ups to get exposure to out-of-town investors. So today is “pitching day” jointly organized by W Media Ventures and Bootup Labs. 7 companies will take the stage: CompassEngine (location-based gaming platform), EmpireAvenue (influence stock […]
Portfolio
Image via Wikipedia After the investment in Empire Avenue last week I am very excited to announce another investment today: Barcode Hero‘s mission is to help shoppers in physical stores, through breakthrough mobile technology. Simply put, it is like a “Foursquare for shopping”: Barcode Hero users scan products at home or in a store, build […]
Entrepreneurship
For the next 3 days the Valley descends on Vancouver for the GROW conference and you can feel a real excitement in the local tech community about hosting entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh (Zappos) or Andrew Mason (Groupon) as well as investors like Rob Hayes (First Round Capital), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Jeff Clavier (Softtech) or […]
Portfolio
Image via CrunchBase With the explosion of social media in the past few years, we now have millions of people broadcasting and curating information on a daily basis, making personal recommendations and endorsements to their friends and followers and creating personal brands on the Internet. But with that explosion of small “media outlets” it is […]
Entrepreneurship
Image via CrunchBase With Demand Media filing for their long-expected IPO last week, the discussion around scalable content generation platforms (or “content farms” as critics of those models prefer to call them) is back in full swing. As an investor in Suite101 (the third-largest platform behind Demand Media and Yahoo‘s Associated Content), I have been […]
Entrepreneurship
Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBase I finally got around reading Dave McClure’s investment thesis and agree with almost all he says. There is one especially interesting paragraph when Dave talks about the “market stage” which caught my attention as it has been the topic of discussion with a few of my portfolio companies as of […]
Portfolio
Some exciting job opportunities that came up in our portfolio companies in recent weeks – please consider applying (and spread the word to your friends) SEO expert This position leads Suite101‘s initiatives to generate traffic and improve monetization for online content: http://www.techvibes.com/job/head-of-seo-and-keyword-research Online Marketing whiz kids Smart, analytical, numbers-driven? Indochino (http://www.techvibes.com/job/pay-per-click-and-search-manager-at-vancouvers-hottest-startup) and Weddingful (http://www.techvibes.com/job/online-marketing-specialist-for-web-20-start-up-in-vancouver) are […]
Entrepreneurship
Image via Wikipedia One of the best talks I heard at CasualConnect last week was “Building communities, not just hits” by Max Levchin (founder and CEO of Slide) and Philip Rosedale (founder and CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life). Creating an online community is extremely hard to do and I have seen […]
Entrepreneurship
Yesterday I spent a day at CasualConnect in Seattle, one of the largest casual gaming conferences in North-America and took away some interesting thoughts on where social gaming is headed: Social gaming is about to go mainstream as big media / entertainment companies are entering the arena and game principles are being integrated in more […]
Entrepreneurship
I often get asked by investors and entrepreneurs alike how building a startup outside of Silicon Valley is possible and I always answer that it depends on what kind of company you are trying to build. So if you are trying to create the next Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, or Foursquare and your company requires […]
Entrepreneurship
Image via CrunchBase As the iPhone 4 antenna problem is slowly spiraling out of control (some people even start discussing a recall) I thought it would be a good time to review a few key points how to react to (serious) product problems as a company. I learned my share back in the AbeBooks days […]
Entrepreneurship
I met with 10 early-stage startups in Seattle yesterday and it was a good reminder for me what some of the most important messages are that you want to bring across to an investor when you have a limited amount of time to present your company. Here are the 4 key points that I very […]
Entrepreneurship
As the Soccer World Cup tournament in South Africa is down to 4 remaining teams (Spain, Uruguay, the Netherlands and my native Germany) it is interesting to analyze why these teams did so well and other (much more favorited or traditionally strong) teams likes Argentina, Brazil, Italy and France did not. As I see it, […]
Entrepreneurship
Call it the Fred Wilson school of thought but hanging at the Union Square Ventures offices in the past month has really convinced me that I should blog more. And I have already started to do so in the past weeks (here, here, or here). Why? It is a great way of connecting with your […]
Entrepreneurship
Facebook‘s success in building out the social graph is exciting and scary at the same time. Exciting as it has turned social into one of the key growth drivers of the web, scary as one company seems to control the “social infrastructure” that we all want to build companies on. I am pretty sure that […]
Entrepreneurship
Michael Arrington has argued at the occasion of the launch of his new Techcrunch Disrupt conference that a “third wave” in the evolution of technology is here. With personal computing being the first wave and the Internet the second, he claims that the growing importance of social, mobile and new forms of commerce is revolutionary […]
Entrepreneurship
There has been a lot of chatter about platforms as of late and their moves have mostly been to the detriment of platform developers (Facebook forcing Zynga to use their credit system; Twitter banning third-party apps from inserting in-stream ads or Apple changing their developer agreement to ban use of third-party analytics and services). As […]
Entrepreneurship
There has been a lot of development in the display advertising markets in the past 18-24 months and there is no better place than New York City to dive into this vertical. Terence Kawaja did an excellent job at his IAB keynote address a few weeks ago to show how complex the display advertising technology […]