Moving from the niche to the masses
If you’re building a software/social/ecommerce startup, then at one point or another, you have been advised to start in a niche market and expand into the masses. This is solid advice: when your product is focused on a slice of the market, it’s much easier to customize your solution for the specific needs of those […]
Introducing an earlier investment: Volley, a friendly place for helping others
Last October, we made our first investment out of Fund II and are excited to announce this news today as the company launches publicly out of beta. Volley is a friendly place for helping others solve problems online. Volley members can post requests in response to the question, “What are you looking for?” You can sift through […]
How to keep founders around after an acquisition
Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Twitter…all the top players in Silicon Valley want to get their hands on the best talent around. That’s why we’ve seen example after example of “acqui-hires” in the past few years as well as some very large acquisitions where a big driver was the talent behind a start-up (e.g. Nest, Beats). However, only a […]
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 […]
Jelly app: the challenge of immediate primetime
When Jelly launched a week ago, it was amazing to see how quickly the app got traction – over 100K questions were asked during the first week. Certainly, Jelly’s high profile team (co-founder Biz Stone, and individual investors like Jack Dorsey, Bono, and Al Gore) helped spark widespread speculation and buzz leading up to the […]