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Entrepreneurship: Nature over nurture

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, September 30, 2010 | Comments (1)

Super angel investor Mike Maples of Floodgate on entrepreneurship

While there are many lessons entrepreneurs can learn to mitigate risk in the future and become better entrepreneurs, the true outliers are products of nature vs nurture. At least, that's what one prominent super angel believes. "I think entrepreneurs are more born than made," said Mike Maples, founder of Floodgate, a Silicon Valley super angel firm, with investments in some ...

Outsourcing vs Offshoring

by Fred Wilson, September 20, 2010 | Comments

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With considerable savings comes significant challenges when working with teams outside your country

A lot of the discussion about last week’s MBA Mondays post on Outsourcing was about the differences between outsourcing locally and outsourcing outside your home country. A popular term for the latter approach is offshoring. The advent of modern electronic communications has allowed companies to efficiently source and manage labor all around the globe. This is one of the megatrends, ...

Outsourcing

by Fred Wilson, September 14, 2010 | Comments

Startups are the most active outsourcers; but don't outsource the software

This MBA Mondays topic was suggested by Aviah Laor, a regular member of this community. I'll start this post by describing outsourcing and explain why companies do it. Then I'll talk about outsourcing in the context of startups. Outsourcing is when a company hires another company to perform certain functions. Wikipedia defines it as "contracting to third parties." The term ...

The VC seed investor signaling problem

by Brad Feld, September 12, 2010 | Comments

Addressing this problem from the venture capitalist standpoint

One of the most common criticisms of VC investors making seed investments is something that has become known as “the signaling problem.” The explanation of this problem is that VCs create a “negative perception” about a company if they make a seed investment but then don’t follow through and make a next round investment. Another way to say this is ...

What a CEO does

by Fred Wilson, August 31, 2010 | Comments

	If you cannot do these three things well, you will not be a great CEO I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I started in the venture capital ...
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The CEO mentor and coach

by Fred Wilson, August 26, 2010 | Comments

	It takes a lot of work and commitment to self-improvement. I've written about this topic before. I think many people with the ambition and the opportunity can become excellent CEOs. But it takes a lot of work and a commitment to self improvement. It is a very hard job. It is lonely. And it requires discipline and decisiveness. Most of these traits can be learned. But who do you learn ...
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What happened to Yahoo and Alta Vista?

by Don Dodge, August 17, 2010 | Comments

From innovator to imitator to forgotten

Paul Graham of Ycombinator wrote an excellent blog on "What happened to Yahoo?". (YHOO) It reminded me of what happened to AltaVista, the first and most popular search engine. Yahoo thought they were a media company, not a software company. Simple, yet deep implications. AltaVista was hatched inside DEC, a hardware company. They had no idea what to do with ...

Should you charge more for your product?

by Brad Feld, August 17, 2010 | Comments

Consider a relatively low price-point 'guess' and then move it up until you find a ceiling

My partner Seth Levine has an outstanding post up today about the freemium model. It’s titled Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough for your product and is worth going and reading right now. He covers a bunch of stuff, nicely divided into the following topics: Beware of too many pricing tiers. Have a clear ...

Freemium business models for the enterprise?

by Don Dodge, August 10, 2010 | Comments

It's commonplace for consumer applications, but can it work for enterprise software?

The Freemium business model is normal for consumer applications, but can it work for enterprise software? Freemium usually means a free service with an "up sell" to paid premium subscriptions. Examples include Skype, LinkedIn, Flickr, Ancestry.com, Typepad, Dropbox, and many others. Freemium differs from Free Trial in that a free trial is the fully functional product but only for a ...

How to estimate lifetime value

by Jeremy Liew, July 21, 2010 | Comments

Use cohort analysis; many social games use this on a daily or weekly basis

In many businesses, repeat purchase behavior is a key driver of value. Many companies track percent of repeat purchases as a key business metric. This is useful in steady state, but can sometimes be quite misleading if the company is showing substantial growth. By definition, growth implies many first time customers, and the mix of these new customers can distort ...

How can you improve LTV and CAC?

by Jeremy Liew, June 23, 2010 | Comments

Both lifetime value and customer acquisition cost metrics are key metrics to keep improving

A lot of the startups that have quickly reached millions in monthly revenue rely on the arbitrage of being able to acquire customers through paid marketing for less than the lifetime value of that customer. CAC < LTV As a reminder, lifetime value, or lifetime contribution as it should perhaps more accurately be named, is given by the formula: LTV ...

10 ways to be your own boss

by Fred Wilson, June 18, 2010 | Comments

	You don't have to be Twitter or Foursquare to be your own boss The folks at Behance and Cool Hunting asked me to talk at their 99% Conference a couple months ago. The 99% conference is aimed at creative professionals and is focused on Edison's "99% perspiration." And in the spirit of how to get your ideas to happen, they asked me to talk about entrepreneurship and the myriad ways you can "be ...
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Risk and return

by Fred Wilson, June 14, 2010 | Comments

	You can get to higher returns by taking on higher risk One of the most fundamental concepts in finance is that risk and return are correlated. We touched on this a tiny bit in one of the early MBA Mondays posts. But I'd like to dig a bit deeper on this concept today. Here's a chart I found on the Internet (where else?) that shows a bunch of portfolios of financial ...
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Ten years of venture capital

by David Hornik, June 7, 2010 | Comments (1)

	Just getting started Over this weekend, I celebrated my tenth anniversary as a venture capitalist. When I joined August Capital 10 years ago, things weren't so different than they are today. There had been a period of real exuberance in venture investing but it had come to an unceremonious end. The momentum in momentum investing had run out of steam. And it was ...
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