I’m fond of saying that I look for entrepreneurs that have a chip on their shoulder. That they have something to prove. That they’re not afraid to stick their noses up to the establishment.
I have always felt this way. It’s something I kind of seek out. I guess my thoughts are that if you’re part of the country club you have a vested interest in protecting the existing order and that disruption happens more from those that are on the outside wanting to change the rules.
The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week down 5%, the NASDAQ was down 5.3%, and the S&P 500 declined 4.3%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 7.9%, the NASDAQ is up 6.7%, and the S&P 500 is up 3%.
Dear Employer. If you think our Facebook passwords are necessary to review our job applications, you are welcome to them. In exchange, we would like to see your FICO score and the recent credit applications of key executives.
Is this the next step in job candidate-employer relations?
Recently employers have begun asking job applicants for Facebook passwords under the assumption the social networking site will reveal the real story of who they are. We are not convinced.
With all the talk of massive amounts of cash sloshing around the web/mobile startup ecosystem (including things I've said recently), you would think that nobody bootstraps anymore. But that is not true at all.
Last week my partner Albert blogged about our most recent investment in Behance. Behance was bootstrapped for its first five years. As Scott Belsky, Behance's founder and CEO, wrote on the Behance blog:
Twice in the last week I found myself coaching founders on how to build a financing plan around value creation milestones so I thought I would share what I said here.
The idea of thinking about value creation milestones comes from the observation that the value that investors put on a startup is generally moves in a step function, even when the company itself is making steady progress. There are certain types of events that investors look to as evidence that a company has overcome certain challenges and has therefore reduced risk in the business and become deserving of a higher valuation.
Behind every successful mobile startup is a handful of power players guiding the founders. Smart and savvy investors may give you a kick start, or a corporate strategic partner might chip in some expansion capital and join your board. In celebration of these key insiders, AlwaysOn is seeking nominations for your favorite Mobile Power Players.
The folks that have made the Mobile Power Players list so far are listed below.
This is what I see when I think about higher education in this country today:
Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.
I still remember reading this profound question on December 24, 2007 in BusinessWeek's cover article on Google and cloud computing like it was yesterday. It was an interview question, posed by then senior Google engineer Christophe Bisciglia (later founder of red-hot cloud software company, Cloudera and more recently WibiData) to job applicants.
For the first time, I began to think through the practical implications of what the advent of the information explosion (now commonly referred to as “Big Data”) really meant to both individuals and corporations. How would this onslaught of information effect decision-making across a range of industries, what were the practical implications to businesses and executives, and what were the resulting investment opportunities?
AlwaysOn has have officially launched its fifth annual AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies competition. The AO Global 250 is a competition for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in the global technology industries. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
This is a follow-on blog post on HP’s OpenFlow announcement (HP Takes a Shot at the Hardware-Centric Network) as it relates to the impact that OpenFlow and the subsequent commoditization of network hardware could have on overall data center demand.
Many of today’s production data centers are static by nature. They are filled with a myriad of specialized appliances that are all potential bottlenecks to the flow of data between ever powerful servers and devices.
Over the past year, I’ve been systematically trying to change the way the board meetings work for the companies that I’m on the boards of. I’ve done a bunch of experiments and continue to learn what works and what doesn’t work.
Ever since I started investing in the mid-1990′s I’ve been exposed to a concept called “board observer rights.” When we did investments at Mobius Venture Capital, in addition to a board seat, we always got board observer rights. This was a way for us to bring another person to the board meeting other than the board member (usually an associate or a principal but sometimes another partner), or have someone sit in for the board member if the board member wasn’t available.
The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week down 3.4%, the NASDAQ was down 0.8%, and the S&P 500 declined 1.1%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 13.6%, the NASDAQ is up 12.6%, and the S&P 500 is up 7.6%.
It’s Wednesday late afternoon. I’m aboard Delta flight 1833 from Cincinnati (actually, Northern Kentucky for what it’s worth) to Los Angeles.
I had a very enjoyable day in Cincinnati meeting many local entrepreneurs, angels and accelerators. I was here to see one of our LPs (limited partners are the people who invest money in VC funds) called Fort Washington. They’ve been a long-term investor in our fund – GRP Partners – and it was important to me to spend time with them in their home market and meet the people with whom they deal locally.
The sixth annual OnHollywood 100 competition has begun! Disruptive technology is forcing big changes in Hollywood: new contracts, new genres, new stars. As the behemoth industry steps into the digital era, entertainment execs will be paying even closer attention to the global Silicon Valley—especially the startups that are writing the rules and creating the tools for the digital entertainment age.
To help identify these startups, we'd like your help. We're looking for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in digital entertainment.
AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its sixth annual GoingGreen Global 200 Private Companies competition. We are looking for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in green technology. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
Yesterday I sent emails out passing on participating in two seed rounds for companies I really like. They had lots of investors trying to invest and each company was competitive with two other seed stage companies we’ve seen in the past 30 days. All are exciting, all are working on something that we like, and all of them are at the starting line with different strengths and weaknesses.
So far this year the number of high quality seed investments we are seeing in themes that are relevant to us is overwhelming.
AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
Yesterday, my partners and I invited Paul Romer over to USV for lunch. For those that don't know, Paul is a leading thinker in the world of economics and currently a Professor at NYU. It was a fascinating conversation. My favorite part of it was Paul's "lecture" on William Penn, early Pennsylvania, and the reaction to the growth of Pennsylvania from neighboring states.
William Penn was a Quaker and when King Charles II gave him a large piece of his land holdings in America, Penn created the colony of Pennsylvania and grounded it in the notions of tolerance and religious freedom.
Today, we’re announcing an investment in Schoology, a next generation collaborative learning platform that combines the elements of a learning management system, a social networking platform, and enterprise resource system all in one hyper-intuitive interface.
I’ve known the Schoology team for some time, having spent the last year getting to know them. It’s a testament to the power of building enduring relationships.
I think that one of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur is figuring out who to listen to and when to take feedback on board. At the earliest stages there may well be precious few people who understand what you do well enough to provide constructive criticism and there may well be hoards of people (particularly non-techie friends and family) who don’t get what you are doing and advise you to stop what you are doing or radically change course.
