16 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. If you’re VC funded, then you “need” to spend the money you raised in 18–24 months, and grow 3–5X in that time, which means a base rate of 10+% MoM
  2. Jun 2022
  3. Feb 2022
    1. Paul Graham argued in 2005 (just before starting YCombinator) why venture capital is traditionally unfriendly to founders, and how it sets itself bad incentives.

  4. Dec 2020
    1. The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way: When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
    2. And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly. This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail.

      Marc Andressen on what's important to start-up success

    3. In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup

      Marc Andressen on biggest drivers of start-up success

  5. Oct 2020
    1. We’ve certainly dabbled in the debate of “what is a tech company” but what we never addressed was why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company.
    1. The lessons of Twitter and Facebook, other Internet-scale basic service layers that most of us use, are instructive here. After the honeymoon period is over, and disruptive returns need to be generated to pay off limited partners or satisfy public shareholders, the tensions that these monetization efforts create ultimately seem to separate the motivations of management from those of users and the broader ecosystem. How will Rap Genius–and Marc Andreessen–navigate these questions?

      This is probably the question of the past two decades which many companies are only beginning to realize.

  6. May 2020
    1. Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance.
  7. Mar 2017
    1. What are the risks in assuming that we start from a place of shared values and goals?

      Having worked myself in all the roles Joshua talks about here, I'll start out by agreeing with his main point: a lot of people in forprofit edtech are great folks and are personally motivated by many of the same things as educators. Yet I hope this isn't really the issue: I think humans share a lot of values regardless of who they work for. I locate the primary friction between EDU and forprofit edtech at a structural level: education as a public good and forprofit companies motivated primarily by revenue are not naturally aligned, regardless of how well-aligned people on all sides may be. What we need most is not to put more trust and faith in people working in forprofit edtech (we should have some already), but to work for models to develop and provide edtech that are fully aligned with the public good interests of education.

    1. When VC firms prize time on site over truth, a lucky few may profit, but civil society suffers.

      connecting venture capital motivations with ill effects on the common good

  8. Jan 2017
    1. AI will be the new mobile. Investors will ask management what their “AI strategy” is before investing and will be wary of companies that don’t have one.

      (I've been having this conversation with more and more with founders in our portfolio and those who we are considering for investment. The question is, what is a good AI strategy? Just having any? or is there an optimal AI strategy depending on the type of company? Anywhere this is debated our where best practices are being shared? )

  9. Dec 2016
    1. Would also like to see margin discussion of the forces that led to the creation of the form of the 'conference' and how the new force of virtual connection (whatever that might be) amplifies or dampens the old force. How might all virtual conferences be adapted to F2F ones? Are we seeing a fork in the road here where we are trying to 'shoehorn' the virtual into the real when we should be putting our efforts into all virtual?

  10. Mar 2016
    1. I'm talking about optimizing the economy for the velocity of money rather than for the conversion of money into capital. It's going from a growth model to a flow model. Why are we, for instance, taxing capital gains at almost nothing but taxing dividends and earnings so high? That's a tax policy that is meant to favor the extraction of capital and to punish the exchange of things.