What type of market are you operating in?
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 […]
The future of education: the distributed school and customized learning
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). […]
The programmable web and the future of platforms
Virtually every start-up dreams of becoming a platform at some stage. After all, it is the most powerful position in the ecosystem. What has been the one rule to becoming a platform? Develop a killer app that gets you to scale: and then open up the platform once your reach is attractive enough for other developers […]
The investor’s role in a founder’s three key priorities
It’s often said that a CEO should focus on three key things: Do I have the right people on the team? Are those people working on the right thing? And is there enough cash in the bank to keep the lights on? The right investor should help a founder with all three of those questions: […]
Does free/freemium work in the enterprise?
When developing a business model, every software and app start-up eventually faces the same core question: Should we focus on monetizing customers or driving usage? For consumer apps, this question has been answered (or mostly answered): the best approach is to offer a free service to help attract and retain users. As Fred Wilson put […]