Posts from July 2015

We use a lot of document sharing applications at USV. We use Google Docs, Hackpad (which was bought by Dropbox), Quip, Dropbox’ new Notes service, and a number of other document sharing apps.

But as we have moved most of our internal and USV network communications to Slack, we wanted a document sharing app that people in a Slack channel could use.

So the hackers at USV, mostly Nick and Brittany, built one.

We call it Quackpad, although we’d prefer to call it Slackpad, and you can use it here.

Just sign in with your Slack credentials and you are good to go.

If you, like us, use a lot of Slack for internal and external communications, I think you will find Quackpad really useful.

Nick blogged a bit about the history of Quackpad and how they built it here.

My partner Albert blogged about solar yesterday and posted this chart:

I’d like to add another chart to this conversation, mortgage rates over the past thirty years:

The bear case for solar has been that the payback times are too long. But with cost declines (Albert’s chart) and carrying cost declines (my chart), solar makes more sense today than ever.

The other chart worth looking at is home energy prices over time. Your payback on solar depends a lot on how much you are paying for alternative sources of energy.

This part of the analysis is not as easy. It depends on what kind of energy you are consuming (coal, natural gas, oil) and where you live.

But my view is that the long term price of carbon energy will not decline as fast as the long term price of solar. Particularly if carrying costs (which are dominated by interest rates) continue to be low.

Cap rates (the yield an investor gets in real estate) are in the 5-6% range around the US these days. That means an investor is willing to wait for 15-20 years to get their money back on a real estate investment.

Solar payback times are half of that and going down fast.

The Gotham Gal and I are putting solar onto every building and home we construct these days. We are believers and bullish on solar.

This morning I citibiked down the west side of Manhattan along the Hudson to Pier 11, where I caught the East River Ferry to Dumbo. I took this picture on the ferry ride across the east river.

In Dumbo, I got on another Citibike which I rode to Clinton Hill, docked it, got an iced latte, and hopped on the subway for a few stops into Bed Stuy. If Citibike was available in Bed Stuy, as it soon will be, I would have biked all the way to my breakfast meeting. But the subway works fine too.

I have a friend who Citibikes every morning from Bed Stuy into downtown Brooklyn where be catches a subway to work.

Transportation options matter a lot in a dense urban environment like NYC. Transportation is one of about five or six things (safe streets, good schools, affordable housing, great parks, convenient transportation, etc) that makes for a great city and a good quality of life.

In NYC we’ve had a few new modes of transportation arrive in the past few years. Citibike has been amazing for me. Same with the east river ferry. Uber and Lyft have also made getting around NYC easier for those who can afford it. The green cabs in the outer boroughs have also made things a bit better.

But its multi modal transportation that really gets me excited. When all of these various modes are well connected and available via one subscription on your phone then we will really have something. We are close as my commute this morning proves.

Here’s a fun post by Henry Ward, founder and CEO of our portfolio company eShares, about raising money last year.

From Henry’s post:

We were 0 for 21 with Silicon Valley VCs. I never got close. Most of the big firms wouldn’t even meet. A few had an associate do a Skype call even though we were 20 minutes away.

After 21 meetings in SV, I took a Hail Mary trip to the east coast and met with 3 funds. All 3 invested.

Thank god Henry came east. We are hugely excited about the company he’s building.

Henry also makes some great observations about the fundraising process. I like this one a lot:

1. Fundraising is a filtering exercise, not a popularity contest.

I could tell within 5 minutes of meeting an investor whether they would invest. Investors who invested were excited about eShares before we met. They either saw the vision and liked it. Or they didn’t.

Most didn’t but met me anyway. They spent the entire meeting hoping I would convince them eShares was a good idea. I never did.

Excited investors (and the ones who invested) were different. They didn’t let me pitch. Instead, they asked questions to assess risk. They tried to find reasons not to invest. That is the pitch-paradox. The investors who won’tinvest will ask you why they should . The investors who will invest ask you why they shouldn’t. Your job is to make sure you don’t have reasons that they shouldn’t.

Fundraising is simple: find investors that get excited about your company. It is a filtering exercise. Too many founders believe they have the wrong pitch instead of realizing they have the wrong audience. On that note…

You’ve now read half the post here at AVC. To read the rest, go here.

Entrepreneurs always ask what the one number they should focus on for raising money. I always say “90 day retention numbers for your acquisition cohorts”. There’s a common view in silicon valley and around the tech sector that growth is the one thing you should focus on. But it’s hard to grow if you are churning your users. And if you are paying for user acquisition, as many startups do in search of growth, then retention/churn becomes even more important.

This issue was highlighted in a Forbes post on Homejoy, which apparently had a retention problem. A former employee said:

Retention was clearly bad, and that’s what killed us

This is a huge conundrum for entrepreneurs who want and need to grow in order to build confidence with investors (both existing and future) and to attract and retain talent.

This all comes back to stepping on the gas before finding product market fit. You might think you have product market fit and so you scale up your hiring, your marketing, your sales, and your capital raising and spending.

But if you can’t retain a healthy percentage of your users past ninety days, you don’t have product market fit yet and all the investment you make in your business is just money down the drain.

So focus first on your 90 day retention numbers and make sure to nail them and prove you have product market fit. Then scale.

Anxiety is something all investors feel at one point or another. Investing is a mix of greed and fear. When things aren’t going great, anxiety sets in.

In public equity when you get nervous about a stock, you can usually sell the position and move on.

In private equity, you are stuck with the investment. So anxiety sets in.

Entrepreneurs might mis-diagnose anxiety as something else. If your investors are all of a sudden meddling in the business, you might be seeing anxiety. If your investors are asking for endless amounts of data, you might be seeing anxiety. If your board meetings have become tense and difficult, you might be seeing anxiety.

You can’t just suggest they take a pill and chill out. Though I’ve seen entrepreneurs do that before.

Here are a few suggestions for managing anxious investors

1) Increase the frequency and duration of the communication. There is nothing that amplifies anxiety like a lack of communication. So do the opposite. Overcommunicate.

2) Have a frank and candid conversation with your investors about the source of their anxiety.  Getting them to articulate what they are worried about will help a lot. Then you can address the issues directly.

3) Get more face time with the rest of an investor’s firm. Often the anxiety comes from the investor’s relationship with and place inside of their firm. This is particularly true of junior partners or associates. Offer to come talk at the weekly team meeting. Or suggest that an investor bring one of their colleagues to a meeting. This one can backfire because if things are truly messed up you might amplify and multiply the anxiety inside the firm. But if you believe the anxiety is misplaced, this approach can be helpful.

4) Get some independent directors on your board. If your board is full of investors and you don’t have any independents, you are setting yourself for an anxious board. Get investors on your board who are less susceptible to get anxious when things go wrong and the dynamic of your entire board will improve.

5) Fix the problems in your business. Nothing helps to reduce the anxiety level in an investor than strong performance.

I am an anxious investor myself. I was worse when I was younger and everything was riding on my performance. I’ve eased up over the years. But I still wake up in the middle of the night anxious about a particular company/investment. It’s how I’m wired up. And I think its part of what makes me a good investor. It is also what makes me potentially a problem. I try to be self aware of the anxiety and manage it so it doesn’t impact our portfolio companies. But I know it can and it does.

Entrepreneurs need to learn how to manage anxious investors. It’s an important skill that will come in handy many times.

There were a number of interesting and relevant discussions at the Cities For Tomorrow conference last week. This one, between Michael Barbaro of the New York Times, Dan Doctoroff of Sidewalk Labs, and Alicia Glen, Deputy Mayor of NYC, about economic development in NYC was particularly relevant to entrepreneurs looking to build companies in NYC.

The best features are the ones that you discover on your own and say “wow, that’s amazing.”

That happened to me last weekend.

We were coming back from dinner at night and the Gotham Gal was driving our Tesla.

She had the brights on and as another car came into view coming toward us, the Tesla automatically switched the brights to normal.

Then as the car passed, the Tesla switched back to bright.

I don’t know how long Tesla has had this feature on its cars. But I noticed it for the first time last weekend.

It’s such a simple thing. It’s not that hard to swap the brights on and off as you drive at night.

But having your car do it for you is better.

It is a great feature.

Last night my son drove me out to the east end of long island where we have a packed day of meetings on some family business today.

As we hit the long island expressway, I got on my phone and started DJing and we got into a zone.

As the traffic thinned out, we started making great time.

At one point I looked over and Josh had his phone in his lap. I was about to go off on him about on not texting and driving (something I constantly harp on with our kids), but before the words left my mouth I realized he had Waze open in his lap.

Let’s just say Josh is not a fan of the speed limits on the LIE. And I know that on his last trip he got pulled over for going 70 mph.

I realized he was looking to avoid getting another speeding ticket. So instead of lacing into him about texting and driving, I asked where the radar detector was.

He said “its coming up in about a quarter mile.”

For the rest of the way out, we watched the traffic speed up and slow down as we passed various speed traps.

It seemed like everyone on the LIE last night was on Waze. Which would not surprise me.

Today Waze is mostly used for getting traffic and driving directions. That’s a use case most everyone who drives needs and wants.

But the original use case for Waze is the one Josh had landed on last night in his effort to avoid another speeding ticket on the LIE.

Which takes me to the point of this post.

If you want to bootstrap a peer to peer network, you can’t start with the mainstream use case. You need to start with the highest value use case, even if it is a much smaller niche.

Not everyone likes to drive 80mph in a 65mph zone. But the ones who do will take extra measures to avoid getting pulled over. They report the speed traps to everyone else in real time. Which is what the first users of Waze did.

That led to more people using Waze to avoid speed traps.

And eventually that led to enough critical mass that the mainstream use case of a peer to peer traffic monitoring/avoidance application was possible.

The same is true of Snapchat. People made fun of Snapchat in its early days for being a “sexting” app. That was the “high value niche use case” that bootstrapped the network. And once critical mass was reached, the broader use case of a network for ephemeral photo/video sharing could emerge.

So if you want to build a peer to peer network, you have to find the use case that is high enough value that some people will do things (like put content into your application) that most people won’t. If you nail that, and win the hearts and minds and activity of that small high value user base, then you will have to opportunity to go mainstream. If you aim for the mainstream users first, you are setting yourself up for failure.