Funding goes global: location is no longer your financing destiny
If we look back ten years, the venture world was quite different. Investors weren’t too keen on investing out of town. And given the fact that the majority of top investors were congregated around Silicon Valley, many entrepreneurs felt compelled to move to the valley to start their business. It was much harder for a “remote” […]
How to really learn from your experiments
At any stage of a start-up’s life, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different directions to take. In the early phases, you need to pick the right product direction and find your product-market fit. Later, you may wonder which marketing channels will work at scale and which ones won’t. Since you never want to […]
How to stay nimble as you scale
I recently spoke with a founder and CEO of a start-up that had just crossed the 200-employee milestone. Like so many others lucky enough to reach that level, he was complaining about how progress was coming to a halt as the organization grew and became more complex. I myself experienced this as COO at AbeBooks. […]
The truth about onboarding costs
Conventional wisdom says that web-based companies must be scalable on all levels. Start-ups should avoid any kind of manual intervention or heavy lifting to acquire, onboard or retain users… after all, users automatically flock to, sign-up to and stay with great products. However, as we’ve seen time and time again, conventional wisdom doesn’t always know […]
Selling to the enterprise: “Sell to few” vs. “sell to many”?
A key investment thesis here at Version One is that we like to invest in companies that “sell to many” over companies that “sell to few.” This preference isn’t necessarily due to market size, but rather the structure of the market: are there only a few dozen customers that might buy your product or are […]