I am currently an independent consultant working on mobile, growth, and operations with a small handful of early-stage, venture-backed companies. Previously, I spent six (6) months as an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm investing in software startups for consumers and the enterprise, as well as in cloud technologies and infrastructure. Prior to this, I’ve held operational roles at Votizen and Rexly (acquired by Live Nation) and have also been an Official Columnist at TechCrunch since January 2011, where I write a weekly column on Sundays (“Iterations”) and run a weekly television show on Thursdays (“In the Studio),” where I host founders, operators, and seed-stage and venture capital investors in the TechCrunch TV Studios. I have written extensively on the forces changing high-technology venture capital, how the industry is transforming, and consumer-facing and enterprise IT technologies. For more information, please visit: blog.semilshah.com
“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a young founder, originally from Europe, who started tinkering with computers a decade ago, taught himself programming languages, began working and consulting while in high school, dropped out of college, bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley, and now, at the ripe age of 23, is the co-founder and CEO of a venture-backed startup.
There’s no shortage of blog posts, message threads, and Coupa- & Creamery-inspired banter around the topic of fundraising for early-stage startups. And, as nearly every founder knows all too well, the mantra is “always be fundraising.” And yet, at the same time, something doesn’t feel quite right with respect to the manner in which investors and founders court each other today, what with… → Read More
“In the Studio” rolls into the fall months by hosting a jack of all startup trades, someone who has founded a company (and is CEO), but who also is extremely generous with his time as an advisor, coach, and storyteller to startups.
Micah Baldwin, CEO and founder of Graphicly, not only knows a lot about books, but also where books are headed. At Graphicly, Baldwin and his team focus on building… → Read More
The topic of this week’s column is time-honored when it comes to business, perhaps even overused in many cases, and in the startup world, sometimes mocked, and at others, romanticized, but usually only in hindsight: The Pivot. This is a loaded word, so I should be clear that its more to describe a business decision on a spectrum, with “slight shift” on one end and “complete reinvention”… → Read More
“In the Studio” enters Q4 by welcoming someone who picked up computer science because he was bored in college, went on to build products and bootstrapped businesses before eventually packing his bags and heading out west, where he landed at one of the Valley’s most talented startups and eventually met his future co-founder for his next business.
Courtney Guertin, the founder and CTO of Kiip… → Read More
Consumer and enterprise. Software and hardware. Infrastructure operations and user experience. Products and services. No matter the focus, innovation in technology, and especially around Silicon Valley, has ebbed and flowed across these areas. Some new companies focus on building solutions for the enterprise, and perhaps nowadays it’s too easy to take the consumer route. The purpose of this… → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes this week a seasoned operational executive, a board member at some of the Valley’s largest companies, and long-time angel investor who, upon leaving behind his work in industry became so interested in early-stage startups, he not only started his own seed-stage technology fund, but also elected to put his own personal twist on his model.
Maynard Webb wears many hats. → Read More
Most Apple fans become slightly uncomfortable at the sight of Apple’s latest television commercials featuring celebrities talking aimlessly to their iPhones. A subtle message in these ads is that consumer technologies can now place virtual assistants in the palms of our hands. The advertising logic is as follows: get a new iPhone, ask it for information or to run tasks, and it will oblige. In… → Read More
“In the Studio” continues after last week’s Disrupt conference by hosting a guest who, after various stints in finance, venture capital, and at one of the Valley’s storied Internet companies, joined a small but scrappy early-stage venture firm that, in the past few years, has grown into its successes and pioneered new approaches to investing in young technology companies.
Kent Goldman, now a… → Read More
As a long-time contributor to TechCrunch, I again had the privilege of hanging out backstage and seeing the TechCrunch team put on what was, in my mind, the best Disrupt conference I’ve been to. In addition to having a really good time, the content generated both on stage, during the battlefield, and backstage with TCTV was astounding, a great place to reconnect with friends, and a special… → Read More
“In the Studio” taped a special segment this weekend during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, welcoming backstage an engineer, PhD dropout, entrepreneur, founder, and long-time investor in enterprise IT to talk about current trends in the space.
Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, has amassed an impressive career in the enterprise field, helping found VitalSigns and investing in companies… → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes this week a first-time entrepreneur who, after years of academic research at two of the world’s finest universities, years of industrial research at some of America’s most storied technology companies, and years of applied research at one of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, has finally broken through on his own, co-founding a high-growth company that recently emerged from… → Read More
In less than 20 years, the feats accomplished by Seattle’s Amazon are simply astounding and, curiously, often taken for granted. It is the world’s largest online retailer, a master of logistics, an oracle of computing power, a wrangler of digital content, a beacon of customer service and reviews, and even innovative when it comes to conceiving handheld electronic devices. In terms of what can… → Read More
“In the Studio” kicks off the fall season by hosting a data scientist who, originally trained in mathematics and physics, worked his way through the Valley through a variety of analytics and research engineering positions before landing a spot in one of the consumer web’s most data-driven companies.
Now a Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn, Peter Skomoroch (pronounced “Ska-ma-rock”) has some… → Read More
Back in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with movable type, laying a foundation for a new printing press to spread ideas faster. Fast forward a few hundred years, and the comparisons made between the Internet and Gutenberg were predictable. Specifically with respect to the written word, the web made any literate person with access to a computer into a writer. Today, most… → Read More
“In the Studio” closes out the summer months by hosting a repeat entrepreneur who started his first two companies right after college, both of which grew to modest sizes before imploding, and after moving to the Valley about five years ago to work as a product manager at a small venture-backed company, had an insight about the e-commerce potential of Facebook that led to his current company.
“In the Studio” continues this week by hosting a venture capitalist who, after earning degrees in electrical engineering and management science, went on to assume a number of engineering roles in industry, such as designing, marketing, and selling software, before he ended up on the other side of the table, scouring the earth for and investing in tools and services he wish he had at his disposal… → Read More
“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a computer science student from UT-Austin, originally from India, who began his career in industry at Trilogy and then, upon moving to Silicon Valley after the first bubble, took on roles at Oracle and Aster Data (where he was VP Engineering) before reuniting with a former colleague to cofound his first company, which could be one of the… → Read More
There was a time in the United States when federal and local governments could initiate and orchestrate big, sweeping infrastructure projects. One of the most notable was the establishment of the interstate highway system during the Eisenhower administration, a post-war public works project to connect an enormous nation and bolster its defenses. It also helped unlock a new era of interstate… → Read More
“In the Studio” rolls into the dog days of summer by welcoming a guest who, originally trained in computer science, went on to found a large consumer website, worked in venture capital on Sand Hill Road, and after helping out his would-be business partner learn the ropes of “hacking” the fundraising process, set out on a journey to build what a platform for startup investing and other related… → Read More
The consumer technology startup world is largely insulated from most happenings in public financial markets. That seemed to change this week. Facebook’s stock has taken a real beating on the NASDAQ after its $100b IPO just a few months ago. At the same time, the second-most popular network, Twitter, continues on a path to lock-in users with new features as it primes itself to increase revenue. → Read More
“In the Studio” opens its doors this week to an entrepreneur who once founded a nonprofit charter management organization for schools in California, spent a summer in management consulting, and eventually stumbled upon a case study experiment in school that gave rise to founding his current startup.
James Reinhart and I met a few years ago in school, and I remember him talking about his new… → Read More
A few weeks ago, Craigslist penned a “Cease and Desist” letter aimed at Padmapper, the popular apartment listings site, to stop its use of Craigslist data for the third-party service. While Craigslist has behaved this way before, the startup community does not particularly like these types of letters. It was not too long ago that the City of San Francisco sent a “Cease and Desist” letter to a… → Read More
“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a technologist, entrepreneur, and investor who has, over the years, leveraged his work in core imaging and computer vision to discover, help create, and eventually commercialize a range of technologies, many of which have focused around the camera, especially on mobile phones.
Manu Kumar, the self-proclaimed “Chief Firestarter” of his seed-stage… → Read More
“In the Studio” this week features someone who has taken on early product roles at many of the web’s definition social networking companies in the Valley, honing his craft for the last decade before packing his bags for the journey to Sand Hill Road, where he and his colleagues invest in the types of companies he’s helped build.
Now an investor with Greylock Partners, Josh Elman’s LinkedIn… → Read More
“In the Studio” this week welcomes a guest who has started and built both bootstrapped and ventured-backed businesses, who has tirelessly helped and coached hundreds of founders and early-stage teams on everything from fundraising to marketing to customer acquisition (and more) all the while he builds his own business as a co-founder of a company many startups and web companies rely on for… → Read More
“In the Studio” barrels through the summer months by welcoming a hacker from the rustbelt, a former mobile lead at a company acquired by the world’s largest social network, and now, having relocated to the Bay Area, leads mobile and design efforts for one of the Valley’s great web development platforms.
Mattt Thompson (yes, there are three T’s in Mattt) is currently focusing on mobile and… → Read More
Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil
“In the Studio” enters the summer months by inviting a former YouTube and Google product engineer, who then spent a “gap year” with Kleiner Perkins meeting with business leaders, entrepreneurs, and cooking up his own next move in the Valley.
PrimaTable’s Jamie Davidson came to the… → Read More
“In the Studio” opens its doors this week to an entrepreneur who co-founded, built, and sold his two startups to large technology companies, then teamed up with his co-founding partner to invest their own capital in startups, which provided the basis for their current institutional angel fund and an impressive, diverse array of seed stage investments in consumer technology and… → Read More
“In the Studio” this week features a guest who had the presence of mind to invest in a new mapping technology about a decade ago, eventually joined the company as a senior executive, and oversaw that company’s sale to Google, where he spent four years managing enterprise products for Google Earth and Maps before becoming a full-time early-stage investor.
Noah Doyle, now a managing director at … → Read More
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