Posts from January 2015

I’ve been working with our portfolio company Work Market for four years now. It’s been a real learning experience for me as enterprise and SAAS has never been my long suit. We were attracted to Work Market because, as their name implies, they use a marketplace model to help enterprises get work done. Specifically, they created and are the leader in the Freelance Management System market. We like software that has a network effect built in because it is harder to commoditize. A marketplace of freelance workers inside an enterprise software application seemed to us to be exactly that. And that has been true. But along the way we’ve learned quite a few other things:

1) Mobile matters, a lot. I mentioned in my What Just Happened post that mobile is starting to really impact the enterprise software business.

At Work Market, the freelancers want to get work, accept work, and close out work on their phones. So mobile app development has become a huge part of what the Work Market engineering team has to work on. At some point, the enterprise will likely want to issue work orders on their phones too.

2) Freemium and transactional business models work in the enterprise just as well as they work in consumer. Work Market has a free tier with a transactional revenue model for enterprises that want to try the system or plan to be an occasional user.

We know that “freemium SAAS” works well for horizontal enterprise applications like Dropbox, Slack, Google Apps, etc and I believe we will start seeing freemium SAAS models applied to vertical applications as well. We already are.

3) Enterprise applications must also be platforms if they want to scale into the largest enterprises. Salesforce is the poster child for this trend. They have become a very powerful platform and distribution partner for SAAS applications. But every SAAS application should have APIs that allow their users to plug enterprise software together. Work Market can talk to the other large applications that enterprises use for managing talent (HR, VMS, etc) and that is a requirement for the largest deals. It will soon be a requirement for all deals.

I am seeing a bunch of new SAAS companies get started whose entire value proposition is building on the open APIs that most enterprise SAAS products have released in the past few years. If you are in finance, or HR, or marketing, or sales, you are now using a host of SAAS applications to get your job done and a big trend in the market is new applications that tie all of those together (via APIs) so that you can have a single view into your workflows. This is the “platformization” of SAAS and it is upon us.

The big takeaway for me is that all the things we have seen happen in consumer web and mobile software are happening in the enterprise and the impact of that is already being felt. I am seeing it up close at Work Market and fortunately they got started recently enough that they have been able to take advantage of all of these trends (marketplaces, mobile, cloud, freemium, platform) as they go to market and build their business. That is, among many other reasons, why we recently led a growth round to help Work Market’s new CEO, Stephen DeWitt, scale into the freelance management system market opportunity that they created a few years ago.

My partner Albert gave this ten minute talk yesterday at DLD

I spent some time today on the new usv.com. We launched it on New Year’s Day and then pushed another rev of it last week. It’s pretty damn good, if I must say so myself.

Anyway, I read two posts back to back. Joi Ito’s post comparing the early days of the Internet to the early days of the Blockchain. And William and David Cohen’s post on The Trust Web.

Joi makes the point that interoperable email was the first killer app of the Internet and that Bitcoin is likely to the be the first killer app for the Blockchain. He talks about how we were able to send email on the proprietary online services like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL, but only to other users of those services. And then these services implemented connections to Internet email and all of a sudden we could talk to anyone. I remember that moment vividly. It was one of the many “aha moments” that I had in the mid 90s that led me to leave Euclid and start Flatiron with Jerry. I could see that something important was afoot and I needed to get in on it.

William and David talk in their post about SMS based banking and payment services in the developing world:

To peer into the future of decentralized banking for the masses, look no further than the success of easypaisa in Pakistan and M-Pesa in Kenya

It seems to me that easypaisa and M-Pesa are the equivalents to Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL. They are the proprietary closed networks that deliver on much of the value of Bitcoin but are not open and interconnected to everything else. Their very existence, however, is the tell that we are on the cusp of something similar that is open, global, and interconnected. I know that people are working to connect easypaisa and M-Pesa to Bitcoin and the Blockchain. That’s an obvious but important step to get to “decentralized banking for the masses” as William and David call it.

As Mark Twain supposedly said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I’m banking on that to be true.

So I’m on sitting on the couch waiting to go out to dinner with the Gotham Gal and friends last night, and wasting time by scrolling through Twitter and I came across this tweet:

New Blog Post: Mining a VC http://t.co/BKJr43xhzq | Topic Model Analysis on Fred Wilson’s blog posts over more than 11 years!

— Bugra Akyildiz (@bugraa) January 17, 2015

I didn’t have time to check it out, so I favorited it and made a note to come back to it. And I did that this morning.

Bugra is a Data Scientist @axialco; he likes machine learning, data, Python and NLP, not necessarily in that order. He did some data science on this blog, starting on September 23rd, 2003, which is when I wrote the first post here.

Here is his post. It’s worth a full read but I’m going to gank a few images from it to summarize his findings for those who don’t feel like clicking over to it (you should).

Bugra mined 22 topics based on things I wrote most about and then did some analysis on those topics. Here is a frequency graph of them:

But of course my interest in these things rises and wanes over time.

I mentioned at year end 2014 that I thought social media had become uninteresting. Well the data on what I write about proves that:

Sometimes it’s a lack of interest. But it could also be a conscious decision to stop writing about something. As the readership of AVC grew, it became a lot less personal. That was a conscious decision on my part.

Not everything has gone down over time.

I’ve become a policy wonk (thanks to my partner Brad mostly):

And some topics just reflect the changing landscape we operate in, like this one:

And some topics reflect the changing patterns of my blogging, like the rise and fall of MBA Mondays:

Anyway, I found Burga’s post fascinating. I would like to see him add a few more topics, like bitcoin/blockchain, education, healthcare, and crowdfunding. Those are all things that I think a lot about and I’d be very curious to see how my interest in them has risen and/or fallen over the years.

In closing, I’d like to thank Burga for his work. It is valuable and revealing to me. Thank you Burga.

On the same day that Brad and I did our Berlin talk, I spent an hour with Seedcamp during their Berlin Seedcamp Week. I chatted on stage with Dave Haynes, who before Seedcamp was at our portfolio company SoundCloud. So we had a lot to talk about.

My colleague Joel told me he doesn’t own any bitcoin right now. Instead he has a “USD Wallet” on Coinbase and when he needs to spend or send bitcoin, he just does that out of his USD wallet.

So I decided to set one up myself. I now have three accounts on Coinbase. A bitcoin denominated wallet, a USD denominated wallet, and the vault where I keep most of my bitcoin (I don’t own much, around 30 bitcoin in total).

The recent slump in price for Bitcoin revives the issue for many of the price volatility of owning bitcoin. Some want that. They are speculators who think the price of Bitcoin will increase substantially as the technology is broadly adopted. That may well happen. But others, like me, hold bitcoin so that I can use to it spend money and send money. For them, having their bitcoin denominated in dollars makes a lot of sense. Joel is one of those people. I could become one, but for now I’m happy to do it both ways.

Coinbase has had a USD wallet since October 2014, but it has not been available in many states as a result of regulatory issues. Coinbase recently added New York State customers to the USD wallet which is why I was able to add it to my account.

If you own a lot of bitcoin and are concerned about price volatility, you might consider putting it in a dollar denominated account on Coinbase. You can still do everything with your bitcoin you want to do, but you can now do it in dollars. If you have stayed away from bitcoin because of the price issues, you now have a way to “pay with bitcoin” without taking price risk.

If you want to try it you visit your account or set up an account at Coinbase.

Our portfolio company Canvas made the decision to shutter operations early last year. But there is a bit more to entirely dissolve a company. Chris Poole, the founder of Canvas, describes the remaining work he had to do to entirely wind things down in this post.

Chris is a special person. Working with him has been such a pleasure. You get some great things from failure. One of them is my relationship with Chris.

A few weeks ago Jerry Colonna and I got on Skype and had a 40min chat about startups and what goes on in them. As most of you know, Jerry and I started a venture capital business together in the mid 90s and have been close friends since then. So this is a public conversation between friends, which is usually a recipe for a good discussion.

The first five minutes is some stuff about Jerry’s new business, Reboot.io. It’s worth listening to, but if you want to skip it, click on the soundwave at 5mins in and you will get to the start of our conversation.

I am a bad delegator and very much a do it yourselfer (DIY). It’s one of the many reasons I am certain I’d make a terrible CEO.

CEOs must delegate. At scale, they should only do three things; set the vision and strategy and continuously communicate it, recruit and retain the very best people, and keep the company funded. Everything else has to be delegated at scale.

But when you start a company, you (and your cofounders) have to do everything yourself. There is nobody to delegate things to. And hiring a bunch of people to do things like schedule your meetings, answer the phones, keep the books, review contracts, interview candidates, etc is a bad idea because it uses up money which is always in short supply at the early stage of a startup. You can, and should, see if there are service providers who are inexpensive who can help. Bookkeeping is one area where that is certainly true. Reviewing contracts and recruiting is harder to hand off to an inexpensive third party. I wish it were not.

I like it when I see a founder team that is resourceful, has range, and can do a lot of this stuff themselves. I like to see them running lean and mean and spending money on the things that really matter (product!!!!!).

But at some point they need to start delegating this stuff. And first time founders often make the mistake of waiting too long to take things off their plates. For one, they like the control and insights they get from doing things themselves. For another, they are often lean to a fault (penny wise and pound foolish).

Knowing when it is the right time to start handing things off and hiring is an art not a science. It has something to do with the availability of resources. And it has something to do with the scale of the organization. When the CEO is still scheduling her own meetings when there are over fifty employees, something is wrong. Investors can help a lot. We have pattern recognition. We can see two very similar companies (size, stage, etc) and compare how much delegation is happening in one vs the other. We can make suggestions.

One suggestion I frequently make is to find a “utility infielder” for your first business hire. This is someone who can do a lot of things well but nothing spectacularly well. This is often someone who has done this role before in a startup and likes working in companies that are between five and fifty employees. There are people who make a career out of this job. It is lucrative if you value equity over cash compensation. You can build a nice portfolio of early stage equity grants doing the “first business hire” gig for two or three years at a time and then doing it again and again.

Doing a startup is an evolution from DIY to Delegate. And timing the evolution is important. If you haven’t done it before, ask people who have for advice on this. Allocating your time (your most precious resource) is critical to the success of your business.