Editor’s note: Jeff Jordan is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and is on the boards of Airbnb, Belly, Fab, Circle, Crowdtilt, Lookout and Pinterest, as well as Wealthfront and Zoosk.
The venture industry is awash with talk of the “Series A Crunch.” In my short two-year tenure as a full-time investor, I’ve seen this crunch hit very hard at a number of quality, early-stage consumer… → Read More
TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler and Benchmark Capital general partner Mitch Lasky recently wrote two insightful pieces on venture investment in games (here and here) – both expressing some degree of skepticism of venture capital models for funding game startups. I agree venture funding is not for every game startup, and certainly not every game startup makes for a great venture investment. → Read More
Editor’s note: Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School and author of the New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
Why do some companies, products and services get more word of mouth than others? It’s not luck. There’s a science behind it. Social media gurus always preach that no one talks about boring products or boring ideas. So you would think that… → Read More
Editor’s note: Chris Moore is a partner at Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on making investments in consumer Internet, online marketing and SaaS companies.
This year alone, there is an $11.4 billion mobile advertising opportunity, which means there is tremendous upside for nimble and innovative startups with disruptive mobile-first models. As we saw from Facebook last year, the company… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Wellman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering.
At 1:07 p.m. on April 23, a hijacked AP Twitter account falsely reported an attack on the White House. Seconds later, major US stock indexes started to fall. They were down 1 percent by the time the tweet was publicly identified as bogus three minutes… → Read More
BuzzTable seems to be progressing in its noble quest to make getting seated at a restaurant as quick and painless as possible. With its newly launched ControlCenter, BuzzTable’s guest communication platform now comprises three parts: WaitList+ for hosts, the BuzzTable app for guests, and ControlCenter, a web app that delivers to operators information gathered by the first two. That includes… → Read More
Editor’s note: Kevin Marks is VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce.com, and a host and co-founder of TummelVision.tv.
As someone who uses both Android and iOS regularly, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by fragmentation. However it’s not on my Android devices I see this, but rather on the iOS ones. I install a popular, well-funded application like Instagram, Flickr, or Circa on my iPad… → Read More
Editor’s note: Ted Summe is the founder of Discoverly, an enterprise tool that puts social data to work. Earlier in his career, he worked with enterprise software companies at Morgan Stanley and bought them at Salesforce.com.
Having slung enterprise software companies at Morgan Stanley and bought them at Salesforce.com, I’ve got some perspective on what it takes to sell an enterprise… → Read More
This week, CrunchBase released the May Excel Export Sheet, which includes charts and graphs that illustrate recent U.S. investments, acquisitions, IPOs and more. Though the charts and graphs focus on May’s data, the spreadsheet includes historical data on all U.S.-based companies that have received funding. → Read More
In Silicon Valley, it’s easy to find lots of advice on what I call the “external” how-tos of startups, including: structuring your company, building a minimum viable product, negotiating a term sheet with investors, selling your company, and on and on!
This post, on the other hand, is about the less publicized “inner side” of the entrepreneurial journey. → Read More
Editor’s note: Aaron Levie is CEO and co-founder of Box.
Next week, thousands of developers will converge on WWDC, the vast majority representing companies and products that didn’t exist before the creation of Apple’s iPhone and app store. They’ll talk about the future of mobile gaming, photo sharing, and, of course, Snapchat. But what likely won’t be center stage is how… → Read More
Editor’s note: Caroline McCarthy is a writer and branded content consultant living in New York. Previously, she worked at Google and before that as a tech reporter for CNET.
When I worked as a marketer at Google and learned of an upcoming comedy called “The Internship,” which was to reunite “Wedding Crashers” duo Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as unemployed 40-year-old salesmen who luck… → Read More
For this week’s Founder Stories, I sat down with David Friedberg of The Climate Corporation to talk about building a business around big data and machine learning. The Climate Corporation collects data and tracks weather patterns on a field by field level to aid farmers in better planning agricultural operations. The company uses this data to offer insurance policies to individual farmers and… → Read More
Editor’s note: Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark and was the lead investor in Asana, Instagram and Quora among others.
Throw a dart at a map. There’s a pretty good chance it’ll hit near someplace hoping to become the “next Silicon Valley.” I’d bet on Berlin. I believe Berlin has the best shot in the Western world outside of Silicon Valley at becoming a place with a true tech… → Read More
Editor’s note: Joshua Seims is an angel investor and entrepreneur based in San Francisco. He is currently building a company that provides secure storage of Bitcoins.
A big question that’s debated in the Bitcoin community is “How much will Bitcoins be worth in the long term.” Here’s how I approach this question. First, I agree with the common sentiment that in 10 years, bitcoins will… → Read More
The campus of Washington State University in Southeast Washington’s agricultural region looks like a typical land-grant university. The connected mix of art-deco, modern and post-modern buildings that collectively house the College of Engineering and Architecture hide a strange and incredible secret: that the researchers inside are close to making human-compatible ceramic bone grafts and… → Read More
Editor’s note: Matt Turck is a managing director of FirstMark Capital.
The emerging Internet of Things is experiencing a burst of activity and creativity that is getting entrepreneurs, VCs and the press equally excited. The space looks like a boisterous hodgepodge of smart hobbyists, new startups and large corporations that are eager to be a part of what could be a huge market, and all sorts of… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, co-founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor.
Being one of the first cyborgs in the world has meant that I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences. Experiences that lead to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology. → Read More
For this week’s episode of Founder Stories, I sat down with Ilya Sukhar, co-founder and CEO of Parse. The interview was taped days before Parse was acquired by Facebook last month. Parse is a cloud app platform that provides a set of SDKs that enable developers to focus on the execution of their application instead of rebuilding backend functionality for every mobile platform. Sukhar shares his… → Read More
Editor’s note: Kakul Srivastava is CEO and co-founder of Tomfoolery, Inc. She was General Manager for Flickr from 2004 – 2009 and helped the product grow from 37,000 users to over 60 million. Simon Batistoni is VP of Platform and co-founder of Tomfoolery, Inc. He joined Flickr in 2006 as the engineering lead for internationalization. → Read More
Editor’s note: Glenn Solomon is a partner with GGV Capital. Some of his recent investments include Pandora, Successfactors, Isilon, Domo, Square, Zendesk, Quinstreet, and Nimble Storage.
Stanford-born and Seattle-based Tableau Software (DATA) enjoyed a tremendous debut on the public markets on Friday, closing on its first day of trading at over $50/share, up over 60 percent from its $31/share… → Read More
Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.”
We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold… → Read More
Editor’s note: Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch.
This was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile., and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am due to my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed. → Read More
Editor’s note: Tolga Ozuygur is the co-founder of Overdose Caffeine, an indie game-development company from Turkey that develops cross-platform, real-time multiplayer games. Follow him on Twitter @tolgaozuygur.
We at Overdose Caffeine had previously announced that Pocket Fleet, a real-time multiplayer space dogfight game developed for mobile devices, would be available soon on OUYA. Our… → Read More
The following is an excerpt from my new book Don’t Go Back to School: a handbook for learning anything.
To someone who has never tried, it’s not obvious how to learn the things you want to learn outside of school. I’m on a mission to show you how. To do that, I became obsessed with how other people learn best, and how they do it without going to school. → Read More
Editor’s note: Anthony J. Lombardi practices patent litigation and patent prosecution at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP. He also provides counseling to clients on prelitigation strategy, portfolio development, patent monetization, and licensing activities.
A clear legal standard for determining patent-eligible subject matter remains elusive. On Friday, the Federal… → Read More
Editor’s note: Sid Venkatesan is an IP partner specializing in high stakes IP disputes and IP counseling for technology companies in the Silicon Valley office of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. James Freedman is an associate in Orrick’s IP group and a recent Stanford Law School graduate.
A New York appellate court has recently ruled in UMG Recordings v. Escape Media Group that… → Read More
Last week at Disrupt NY, I took the stage with Gentry Underwood, Founder and CEO of Mailbox, to talk about the challenges of being a first time founder. I first met Gentry a month after he started Orchestra which became Mailbox, recently acquired by Dropbox. Mailbox is a mobile inbox where you can easily scan and quickly swipe to organize emails. Available for iPhone and Gmail, Mailbox also has a… → Read More
Editor’s note: Marco Rubio is a United States Senator from Florida. Follow him on Twitter @marcorubio.
Today, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation will examine the role of immigrants in America’s innovation economy. More specifically, the committee will look at how our broken immigration system is holding back American innovation and job creation, and how the… → Read More
Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan.
There are several metrics that game developers keep an eye on when tracking the performance of their games. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of an analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as… → Read More
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