Cryptocurrencies have strong network effects, built around the concept of mining. The more miners participate,…
Entrepreneurship
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 […]
Cryptocurrencies have strong network effects, built around the concept of mining. The more miners participate,…
It is really great to see how Vancouver's tech community has developed over the past…
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 even worse if growth rates drop dramatically (and even turn negative) – whether it’s due to changes in the marketplace, executives dropping the ball, or a loss in product leadership. This downturn leads to a lot of disenchanted employees who thought they were joining a rocket ship with rocket ship-like options. Employees end up jumping ship at the exact time you need a committed team to execute like hell. This makes a turnaround virtually impossible.
However, conventional wisdom is not always right. We have seen many cases in our own portfolio where the management team was able to turn around a dire situation and reaccelerate growth. How? Here are three factors that can contribute to a turnaround:
The bottom line is that reacceleration of growth is possible if you have the right team and the right focus. The only exception might be with network effect companies (examples: Friendster and MySpace). For as much as we love networks effects at Version One, we know that once a company’s network effects turn negative, it’s pretty much impossible to change the trajectory.
Data / AI / ML
This November marks three years since the launch of ChatGPT. That moment brought AI into the mainstream, with large language models (LLMs) seen as the breakthrough technology powering it. Since then, innovation in AI has been relentless — perhaps one of the fastest cycles we’ve ever witnessed in tech. It’s worth pausing to reflect on […]
It’s hard to believe that it has been three years since my first day at…
“It takes 10 years and $30m to become a great investor.” This quote has stuck…