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 only 2 ways to build a $100 million business
With tens of thousands of new start-ups being created every year, the potential of a company to truly scale and become a large, stand-alone business is more crucial than ever before. A great product is always the foundation but a clear distribution strategy becomes essential to cut through the noise. So most early-stage VCs have […]
Where is social gaming headed? Thoughts from attending CasualConnect
Yesterday I spent a day at CasualConnect in Seattle, one of the largest casual gaming conferences in North-America and took away some interesting thoughts on where social gaming is headed: Social gaming is about to go mainstream as big media / entertainment companies are entering the arena and game principles are being integrated in more […]
Building a company on top of an existing platform – yes, no, maybe?
There has been a lot of chatter about platforms as of late and their moves have mostly been to the detriment of platform developers (Facebook forcing Zynga to use their credit system; Twitter banning third-party apps from inserting in-stream ads or Apple changing their developer agreement to ban use of third-party analytics and services). As […]