Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member
Techcrunch has posted an excellent interview with Fred Wilson, one of the most important and influential consumer Web investors out there.
Topics covered:
It's well worth watching!
Om Malik recently did an excellent interview with one of my favourite investors, Brad Feld of Foundry Group.
They cover a lot of interesting ground, including why Brad feels early stage investors don't need to be proximate to the early stage companies that they invest in. This is contrary to the typical perspective that many early stage VCs now have.
Absolutely worth watching in my opinion ...
Mark Suster, who writes the VC blog Both Sides of the Table brought my attention to an excellent interview with Dana Settle of Greycroft on This Week in Venture Capital.
Greycroft is an early-stage VC. Their first fund was a $75 million fund raised in 2006 and they very recently announced a brand new $130 million fund. Closing a VC fund in 2009/10 is a major achievement in and of itself.
In the intro section of the show we talked a lot about why VC funds are becoming smaller again and where Greycroft fits. We also discussed the fact that you have evolving stages of VC broadly defined as “super angel” funds of $20-40m (Founder Collective, Felicity Ventures, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier with SoftTech, Mike Maples, Rincon Ventures & Crosscut in SoCal), early-stage VCs (Greycroft, First Round Capital, True Ventures), A Round investors (Foundry Group, Union Square Ventures, GRP Partners), B Round investors (DAG, Matrix, Polaris, Lightspeed, Battery) and growth equity players (General Atlantic, Insight Venture Partners, Summit, Francisco Partners).
For more on Mark's summary, click here.
Interesting post today on Google's Blog announcing their new Gmail APIs. These new services allow Gmail to be extended by means of content-aware Contextual Gadgets (such as the preview capability we have already seen demonstrated with embedded YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa content before).
Excerpted from the Google Blog.
Starting today, third party developers can build Gmail contextual gadgets and distribute them in the Google Apps Marketplace. These gadgets can display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and users can interact with that data right within Gmail. Contextual gadgets are yet another example how the power of the web can outpace traditional business technology.
Several new contextual gadget integrations for Gmail are available to Google Apps customers in the Apps Marketplace today:
- AwayFind lets you mark certain contacts or message topics as ‘Urgent’ and then alerts you via phone, SMS or IM when relevant messages arrive.
- Kwaga displays social network profiles and lists recent email exchanges with people you correspond with.
- Gist brings together information from across the web about people you’re corresponding with, providing rich person and company profiles, news and updates.
- Pixetell detects email links to video messages created with Pixetell’s video software and lets you preview, comment on, and share those videos without leaving your inbox.
- Smartsheet lets you access and update entries in Smartsheet’s sales pipeline and project management tool.
- Xobni, Rapportive, Manymoon, Newmind Group, and BillFLO have also launched their own contextual gadget integrations
Like any other applications in the Google Apps Marketplace, a Google Apps domain administrator can install a contextual gadget from the Marketplace with just a few clicks. Both before and during the install process, administrators can review the portions of an email the gadget will have access to, and can revoke that permission at any time from their control panel. For more information on the Google Apps marketplace, watch the overview video.To learn more about the new contextual gadget applications available in Gmail, head to the Google Apps Marketplace and browse for apps that have ‘Mail Integration’.
Google is working hard to demonstrate the power of the open web, not only to provide compelling differentiation for its apps, but also to evangelize the concept in general. At its heart, this is really an example of the power of the App as a platform vs. the App as a closed ecosystem. It's also part of Google's relentless march towards demonstrating that the web is a credible (in fact preferred) vehicle for the delivery of application functionality.
It remains to be seen how quickly enterprises will Google's apps and the Open Cloud however, with security and other issues being a natural drag on early adoption. Google is betting however that the ingenuity of the developer ecosystem will eventually create such an array of value/ROI that it will be hard to resist.
Hugh MacLeod, also known as @GapingVoid, is one of may favourite cartoonists. In his wonderful "cut to the chase" manner, he's now required Wall Art for all my friends who are entrepreneurs.
You can check out his Gallery here.
In this article, Brian digests Morgan Stanley's latest series of reports on the Mobile Internet and pulls out some important conclusions.
Not surprisingly, some of the key forces driving the accelerated growth of the mobile internet include location based services, social networking (Facebook in particular) and the rapid rise of the iPhone/iPod Touch ecosystem.
He goes on to point out that "Morgan Stanley views Facebook and Apple driving independent yet overlapping platforms that are forcing innovation in social and mobile connectivity and communications. Essentially, they are driving growth and ingenuity for one another while setting the stage for a new era of social networking."
Not only will the velocity of this market expansion dwarf that of the Desktop Internet, it will open new opportunities for wealth creation. According to Solis, one of the other key takeaways from the Morgan Stanley report is that ...
"Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter."
Exciting times to be in mobile methinks.
I think this is a very interesting idea ...
First Round Capital is letting its entrepreneurs swap part of their equity for equity in the fund, thereby allowing them to diversify their risk a bit, and participate in the overall success of the fund.
Beyond the diversification strategy, this is potentially powerful stuff, especially for funds with synergistic investments ... i.e. where the entrepreneurs can benefit from supporting and/or cross-leveraging each others products.
Could this be the start of a trend? Dare I say, Venture 2.0?
Read the original TechCrunch article here
In the spirit of Open Source, a number of VC funding documents are popping up around the web. Here are four worth looking at (courtesy of @fredwilson):
I'm not sure that the concept of "open source" funding documents will ever take off, but I have seen some pretty convoluted and arcane docs in my time, so at a minimum, I do like the idea of a repository of "best practice" or even "sample" documents being readily available, transparent and subject to open debate.
I do hope that better visibility and open discourse lead to improvements in the clarity and simplicity of these types of documents. Sometimes I am stunned at how poorly written funding documents are, as the institutional memory of all things that have gone bump in the night before gets cobbled together into the text like some sort of Dr. Seuss contraption.
I love this image of new life, and can't help but be reminded of how fragile and yet full of promise early stage startups can be.
This Scots Pine seedling might be a huge tree one day ... or, then again, it might not survive ... nonetheless, it's still going for it.
Reminds me of that great line from Lord of the Rings "Almost certain death, small chance of success ... what are we waiting for"!
Carpe Diem
Experienced international CEO with three exits and over 20 years of experience at the helm of VC-backed technology and fintech startups. I've founded companies and come in as a later-stage CEO to help existing companies scale. My experience spans multi-country online financial services, mission-critical enterprise software and consumer-focused mobile applications.
Currently CEO of Kontent.ai, the industry's first CMS with native AI capabilities, kontent.ai helps the world's leading organizations generate an unparalleled return on their content by enabling them to create, manage, distribute, and optimize their content at scale with unprecedented speed oversight, and security.
Before that, I was CEO of Nuula (formerly known as BFS Capital), which Nav acquired. At Nuula, we believed there was a better way to help run your small business — so we built it. Nuula is a mobile application that gives small business owners instant access to critical business metrics and innovative financial products anytime, anywhere. It provides small business owners with the tools, content, and capital they need to be successful in a modern, competitive market.
Prior to that interim CEO of 4finance. Agreed to take on an interim role to help clarify strategy, accelerate the critical transformation of the business and set the company on a course for the next growth phase.
Before that, I was Managing Director, International at Wonga, responsible for overseeing all businesses outside of the UK, including consumer lending businesses in Canada, Spain, Poland and South Africa and our eCommerce and product financing business BillPay in Germany. Prior to that was CEO of Wonga Canada.
Prior to that, I was EO Viigo. When Viigo was acquired by Blackberry in 2010, the company had hundreds of partners, won numerous awards, including “PC Magazine’s Editors Choice“, the “Most Promising New Company of the Year” from the CNMA, and the “Wireless Leadership Award” from RIM, signed marquee enterprise customers such as Oppenheimer, UBS, BAT and Scotts and been downloaded over 3MM times, becoming one of the most popular BlackBerry apps of all time.
I started my career as the Founder and CEO of INEA. A software company that was a strategic partner to many of the world's leading financial institutions, INEA had deployments in over 44 countries. Backed by RBC, Ventures West, APAX and Edgestone, the company was acquired in June 2005 by Cartesis. Cartesis was subsequently acquired by Business Objects in 2007, which was later acquired by SAP.
AFINEA | 136 Arundel Ave, Toronto
