Is it time to rethink the healthcare marketplace model?

It’s been a year since we published our series on digital healthcare which I co-wrote with Jonathan Libov of Union Square Ventures. The reception was overwhelmingly positive (we’re thankful to all of you who gave us feedback) and opened up the floodgates to patients, medical professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors who still reach out to us with their pains, […]

Our Guide to Marketplaces, now summarized in a deck

Six months ago, we published A Guide to Marketplaces. Marketplace companies comprise an important part of our portfolio and investment thesis and we recognized the shortage of content out there specifically geared toward marketplace startups. We compiled a lot of the insights we learned from working with great marketplace companies and wrote a handbook. It […]

Our (refocused) investment thesis

Over the years, we have invested in almost every category out there: from ad tech and content, to gaming, hardware, marketplaces, e-commerce, and SaaS. We’re constantly revisiting the types of businesses we should be investing in and refining our investment thesis driven by three key questions: Which markets/business types do we understand the best? Where can […]

What’s your data strategy? Defining the data hierarchy

Over the past decade, startups and enterprises have devoted hefty resources to collecting and analyzing huge volumes of big data. For some, data is used to fine-tune a product; in other cases, data forms the foundation of the product itself. When it comes to building a startup around data, the more unique that data, the […]

Data, not algorithms, is key to machine learning success

There has been an explosion in machine learning activity, and Shivon Zilis recently mapped out the current machine intelligence ecosystem as we enter 2016. This is one of the key areas that we’ll be following this year. While the opportunities here are tremendous, the exuberance surrounding machine learning distracts startups from a key hurdle: it’s […]