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Recent Posts
Entrepreneurship
I have been very impressed with what Mark MacLeod has done for numerous Montreal and Toronto startups as their part-time CFO. A former CFO for numerous startups himself, he started StartupCFO Enterprises a few years ago in order provide financial and strategic guidance as well as back office admin services (so everything from help in […]
Entrepreneurship
I am spending the month of May working with Albert Wenger out of the Union Square Ventures offices and had the chance to dive deep into the New York Consumer Internet scene in the past few weeks. What I am seeing leads me to believe that this city is developing into a serious challenger of […]
Version One
Last week’s W Media Ventures CEO summit provided a good opportunity for me to reflect on where W Media Ventures stands today and where I want it to be in the near future. Over the last 2 years, W Media has evolved into one of the leading early-stage consumer Internet investors in the Pacific Northwest […]
Version One
There has been quite some discussion about recent announcements over at BootUp Labs, including the unfortunate downsizing of the portfolio of the current cohort, but I think that people need to keep in mind that BootUp Labs is a start-up like the start-ups they are financing. Start-ups sometimes don’t get the financing they were hoping […]
Entrepreneurship
Both Josh Kopelman and Fred Wilson have lately been pointing out that it is time for e-commerce 2.0 after we have seen a lack of innovation in this space for almost a decade. I have been thinking about concrete opportunities in the e-commerce vertical for some time now and wanted to share them – here […]
Entrepreneurship
…AbeBooks, W Media Ventures, entrepreneurship and investing. Enjoy! (And thanks to Andrew!)
Entrepreneurship
Since starting W Media Ventures two years ago, I had to realize that the Pacific Northwest lacks a good network of angel investors with active angels like Geoff Entress out of Seattle being the exception rather then the norm. This is certainly not because of a lack of successful tech entrepreneur in this region but […]
Version One
Vancouver-based W Media Ventures is one of the premier early-stage Consumer Internet investors in the Pacific Northwest and is looking for an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) for (all or parts of) 2010. If you are an individual with an outstanding entrepreneurial spirit and mind, who is looking to create the next best thing in consumer internet, would […]
Version One
It is the time of the year for predictions – here is what I think will happen in 2010 in consumer Internet: Facebook will lock down on its dominance of the social graph: Facebook Connect will become the standard for the social web with every major website implementing it. Other social networks like MySpace, Hi5, […]
Entrepreneurship
Michael Arrington’s post about search optimized content creation (“The end of hand crafted content“) started an interesting discussion about the role of social media in differentiating good content from bad content (check out Fred Wilson’s “Why social beats search” and the counterargument by Chris Dixon arguing that passed links will be critical inputs to better […]
Entrepreneurship, Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
While the past 10 years have seen a big focus on marketplaces for physical goods (eBay, AbeBooks, etsy, et al.), there have been a few success stories of marketplaces for creative services in the past couple of years and it feels that this sector is poised to really take off. The most important success factor […]
Version One
VC funds go through challenging times world-wide but the situation in Canada is probably worse than in many other places. Most VC’s in this country have been focused on the domestic market, both for raising funds as well as investing their money. Turns out that this created returns that were about 10% below the returns […]
Entrepreneurship
I often get asked what governments can do to help build a tech sector so I wanted to put together a few thoughts on this blog what I think works and what doesn’t: Have a vision and speak with one voice: one of the largest problems I have seen in the past is that governments […]
Entrepreneurship
The past week has been an interesting one for the online content space. First, Wired published a detailed profile on Demand Media and their “answer factory”. Then, Techcrunch reported that AOL is following suit trying to turn AOL into a low cost content production machine. Other existing players in this space consist of About.com, AccociatedContent […]
Entrepreneurship
Our portfolio company Suite101.com announced today that it has launched French and Spanish versions of their site after successfully expanding to Germany a year ago. Expanding an Internet company to international markets should be part of every business plan but is often easier said than done. At AbeBooks (which has localized sites for Germany, the […]
Entrepreneurship
It’s Friday and time for summing up the lessons learned this week: Yahoo’s (newish) CEO Carol Bartz clearly failed as a leader this week when it became public that she apparently sold Yahoo stock cashing in close to $2 million. 2 days later she declared that the sale was purely for tax reasons and that […]
Entrepreneurship
Friday is a good day to reflect and I usually try to come up with the 3 lessons that I learned in the past week – so going forward I will share these on the blog here. So here is what I learned last week: The value of Facebook applications: the sale of iLike to […]
Entrepreneurship
On the day that Boo.com died in March 2001, not only did the Internet bubble burst but selling fashion and apparel over the Internet seemed dead for forever. So it is exciting to see that fashion and apparel is now one of the most exciting e-commerce categories where tons of innovation is happening. Think the […]
Version One
A few weeks ago I published my thoughts about application studios on this blog and today I am happy to announce the launch of new app studio, Vancouver-based Social Crowd Ventures. Social Crowd Ventures is a joint project between W Media and Adarsh Pallian, the very talented developer behind chart.ly and Tweetizen, and plans to […]
Entrepreneurship
2 years after its launch the Facebook platform can almost be considered mature and the new belle in application town is Twitter (with apparently already over 11K applications). Due to the very low barriers to entry both platforms have become very crowded in a short period of time so it is time to ask the […]