Key investment themes
Every venture capital firm narrows its investment focus one way or another…perhaps by geography, sector, and/or stage. In some cases, it’s the result of conscious planning; in other cases it’s a natural evolution as a fund starts making investments. For example, at version one ventures, we’re focused on early-stage (seed and Series A) opportunities in […]
2012 Recap and Final Close at $19M
While crunching the data and reflecting on the past year, it’s clear that 2012 was busy. Version One Ventures made eleven investments, including three angel investments that rolled over into the fund. Here are some of the more interesting details to share about our activity in 2012: Version One invested more than $2.5M in 2012 […]
How to manage your inside sales team
For many SaaS companies, the effectiveness of the inside sales team is the key to scaling up. After all, other marketing channels often either hit a ceiling (i.e. inbound marketing, PPC, etc.) or simply aren’t efficient enough (i.e. all offline marketing activities). However, managing an inside sales team is tough and you need a well-oiled machine […]
Can enterprise SaaS products be viral?
“Going viral” is often the holy grail for Internet startups, who hope to quickly scale to hundreds of thousands of users (then hundreds of millions) with relatively low user acquisition costs. However, in a recent blog post and presentation, Andrew Chen argues that SaaS products aren’t viral: “For consumer internet entrepreneurs that are working on big markets, […]
The one barrier to entry startups should focus on
Creating effective barriers to entry can be the single most important driver defining the profit potential of a company. In today’s B2B and B2C web markets, barrier to entry boils down to one thing: demand-side benefits of scale. To be successful, every web start-up needs to be thinking about how it can build demand-side economies […]