Posts from April 2015

One of the best things about being back on Android is widgets. And my favorite of them all is the Swarm Widget. You can see it on my home screen all the way to the right second row down.

I started checking in on Foursquare sometime in 2009. And I’ve been checking into the places I go every day since then. I don’t know exactly how many checkins that is (probably around 5000), but it’s an incredible database of where I’ve been and when that I value very much. When checking in was part of Foursquare it would take two or three clicks to checkin. When they moved the checkin to Swarm it still took a few clicks. You had to open the app and hit the checkin button and then confirm it.

With the Swarm widget, it’s one click, plus a confirm. It works great. I love it.

I was at an event the Gotham Gal had last night for her portfolio. I was asked a number of times “when is the best time to raise money?”. In general, I believe the best time to take money is when it is being offered. To some extent, VCs are gas stations and you should fill up when it is convenient.

I don’t drive that often, and when I do mostly drive electric cars, so gas stations are not a common place for me. But when I do drive a gas powered car, I tend to fill up my car when it gets below half a tank and I use stations I like and are convenient for me.

I think this analogy works to a point for VC fundraising. You should raise money when you still have a fair bit of cash in the bank. Driving around on fumes frantically trying to find a gas station is not a great idea. Raising a round when you have a month of cash left isn’t either.

I don’t shop around for and drive out of my way to the best priced gas station. I am happy to fill up at a fair price at a place that I like and is convenient to me. I would apply the same rule to raising money. Don’t shop for the very best deal, particularly if it means an elongated fundraising process and time away from the business. If a fair deal is being offered by a firm you like and trust, shake hands, close the deal, and get back to the business.

The place the gas station analogy breaks down is that for the most part the gas is same from gas station to gas station. That’s not true with VCs. You can buy really bad gas and you can buy really good gas from VCs. Some VCs can kill your company. Some VCs can propel your business forward. And some VCs will leave you alone.

So choose your gas wisely when shopping for the VC variety. And fill up when you’ve got a half tank and you are passing by one of your favorite stations.

Some friends of mine are organizing a video hack day in NYC on Saturday May 9th. If you like to hack on video and have been looking for an excuse to spend some time on that thing you’ve been wanting to build, this is your opportunity.

Here are the details:

Video Hack Day is on May 9th, 2015. Sponsored by Google and organized by Ziggeo, it will take place at General Assembly in the Flatiron District of NYC.

Video Hack Day is a time to play with all things video. You’ll learn about new video APIs, develop fun video projects, and get feedback from judges at Google Ventures and Union Square Ventures.

Ziggeo is organizing the event, and it’s sponsored by: Google, Amazon Web Services, YouTube, Clarifai, Firebase, Dropbox, Oovoo and Vimeo. If you’re also interested in sponsoring Video Hack Day, please contact us here.

If you’d like to participate in Video Hack Day, please sign up here. You can also follow Video Hack Day on Twitter, #VideoHackDay.

Last September, after spending a month on sabbatical in Europe, I decided to try the iPhone after being on Android for many years. My plan was to start switching back and forth between iOS and Android every six months. So I got an iPhone 6 and used it as my only mobile device from early October 2014 until this past weekend. I continued to use a bunch of Nexus7s we have in our homes but the iPhone was the only thing I took with me when I left home each morning.

After a few days on iOS I wrote a post about what I liked and did not like about iOS. Reading it now after six months on iOS, it is still pretty accurate. But now that I am back on Android, the two things I really miss about he iPhone are TouchID and iMessage. If Android had both of those two things, I wouldn’t miss anything. I don’t totally understand why Apple doesn’t make an iMessage client for Android. They have the most popular messenger in the US (maybe the world) and they aren’t taking advantage of it. They are doing the same thing with iMessage that Blackberry did with BBM.

I will also miss the apps that are iOS only. I am keeping my iPhone6 and will use it on wifi in my home and office to stay connected to five or six apps that I use that are iOS only. Hopefully this will make it easier when I switch back to iOS in six months.

But now I’m back on Android and happy to be back. I am using a Nexus6. I am not sure I love the 6″ form factor but I’m getting use to it. The switchover is a pain in the butt. Getting the google apps working on the phone is a breeze. I just sign into the Android device with my Google login and they are all working. That part is really sweet and way better than what I have to do on iPhone. But getting the rest of the apps I want on my phone is a pain and then logging into all of them is a real chore. I use strong passwords and 2-factor wherever possible and so that process for close to 100 apps takes hours. I spent a fair bit of time this weekend getting the phone set up the way I want it.

So what are the things I missed about Android? Here’s my list:

1) gmail with offline sync. this is a huge one for me. i’m on the subway, planes, places with no public wifi and bad cell service a lot. gmail on iOS doesn’t do offline email very well. gmail on android does it beautifully

2) google calendar. there is no google calendar app for iOS. the google calendar app for Android works perfectly for me. i missed it.

3) notifications. i thought that iOS had caught up to Android in terms of the way notifications work. but it hasn’t. android still does notifications way better. and certain apps, like twitter, work way better with notifications on Android than iOS.

4) widgets and launcher – i didn’t realize how much I would miss the ability to customize my home screen with third party launchers and widgets. Android does this way better than iOS.

5) google maps and chrome as defaults – i never was able to figure out how to direct all my apps to use chrome and google maps as defaults. so i found myself using two browsers and two maps apps on iOS. on Android I only have one and all the android apps use them as defaults. this works way better for me.

But, as I said last October, these two mobile operating systems are pretty similar to each other. There are differences for sure, as I’ve outlined, but they are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Switching back and forth is pretty easy except for the part about downloading all the apps onto a new phone and logging into into them and customizing the screens. Once you do that, it’s more or less the same experience on both devices.

Yesterday in the comments Elia said:

I sure wish we wouldn’t call non-VC fundable opportunities lifestyle businesses. It sounds like the person working on that business spends his days on a beach somewhere in the sun and collects the checks that come in. Just because it makes less money than a VC invested business doesn’t mean it isn’t still a business that takes lots of work.

We don’t have a good term for these types of businesses yet. Independent or indie is the best I’ve heard so far. Maybe, Fred, a post here and this community can come up with a great name we can all use?

I had never thought that the using the word “lifestyle” to describe a business that was too small to be interesting to an investor was derogatory. But I can see Elia’s point.

There is, however, a difference between what we’ve been calling “lifestyle” businesses, and “indie” businesses. My friend Bryce has launched an effort to fund “indie” businesses. As I’ve understood it, an “indie” business is one that might be large enough to support a significant investment but the founder wants to remain independent and therefore has no desire to exit and thus taking VC investment doesn’t work.

I touched on all of this is my ten ways to be an entrepreneur presentation (video, deck). Most of the entrepreneurial ventures I describe in that presentation are not backable by VCs. Only the last three (the startup, the breakout, and the company) are.

So I would define things this way:

Lifestyle – too small for VC, but will generate enough annual cashflow to be a great business to own and operate

Indie – might be large enough to justify and provide a return on a VC investment, but the desire to retain control and remain independent makes VC untenable for the entrepreneur

VC Fundable – large enough to justify and provide a return on a VC investment and the founder is willing to exit at some point and provide a capital gain to the investors

So with all of that in mind, I would like to ask a final question and then take this discussion into the comments. Is the term “lifestyle business” derogatory or dismissive in any way and do we need to find a better term for that kind of business? And if so, what should we call them instead?

The other day I found myself on a VC website. I went to the portfolio page, looked at all of their investments and from that inferred what that firm’s investment strategy was by sector, stage & geography.

This is not a simple thing to do, but it can be done. It helps that I’ve been working in the VC sector a long time and understand a fair bit about VC firms and how they invest. But honestly anyone can do this if they spend enough time distilling the key facts about each and every investment and then looking at these facts across the entire portfolio across time.

Venture capital firms don’t do a great job on their websites of explaining what they invest in and what they do not invest in. Some of that is most VC websites aren’t particularly great to begin with. Some of that is investment strategies change and evolve over time. Some of that is VC firms tell themselves they do one thing but actually do another.

This is frustrating for entrepreneurs. They send me an email thinking their investment is a perfect fit for USV and then they quickly get an email back from me saying “this is not a fit for USV”. It drives them crazy.

The very best way to know what VC firms invest in is to look at what they have invested in, particularly recently (the past few years).

So an automated tool that crawls VC websites, pulls the links to each and every portfolio company, categorizes these investments by stage, sector, geography, and ideally a host of other things, would be incredibly useful.

There are a few things that will be tricky about doing this. Figuring out when the VC made the initial investment is one of them. You look at Etsy on the USV portfolio page and you might think “USV invests in late stage marketplace businesses” but the fact is that we made that investment in early 2006 when Etsy was less than a year old. The correct determination would be “USV invests in seed stage marketplaces that have launched and are getting good traction.” A good way to solve this issue is to also crawl other websites, like Crunchbase, where you can triangulate to figure out when the initial investment was made.

It is also important to look at the data across time to see how the VC firm’s strategy is evolving. Starting in 2010, USV raised an Opportunity Fund and we will now occasionally make late stage/growth stage investments. We don’t do it very often, but we do it. Picking that up will be tricky unless you time sequence the data.

If such a tool existed, then an entrepreneur could point the tool at his/her website, generate some data about stage, geography, and sector, and then generate a list of VC firms that are good targets. The list could also generate a list of firms that have made competitive investments and should be avoided.

I honestly don’t think this would be that hard to build. And I think entrepreneurs who are going out to raise capital would find it incredibly valuable. There isn’t a huge market for such a product, but there is a market. The PWC Money Tree report says that 4,356 startup investments were made in 2014. So I imagine that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 entrepreneurs are going out to raise VC money on an annual basis right now. If we take the middle of that range (7,500) and assume that an entrepreneur would pay $100 for such a report (probably a lot more but I’m being conservative), then the total available annual market for a service like this would be $750,000 a year. If you could reach 20% of that market, then you have $150,000 a year of income. This is the perfect lifestyle business for someone. Hopefully they are reading this blog.

This is an oldie but goodie. I’ve posted it here before but not since I delivered this talk almost seven years ago. This is my history of the NYC Internet community from 1995 to 2008. It’s about 25mins long.

For those who are on to the theme of my posts this week, Dedication will seem like an obvious choice to finish with.

I am dedicated to my family, my work, our portfolio, this blog, the Knicks, Mets, Jets, and a host of other things that require daily dedication. This week I was dedicated to the notion that all posts would start with D and end with tion. And I followed through and finished it off.

That’s what dedication is.

Dedication is also a testimony of affection or respect. At the start of many yoga classes, you are asked to dedicate your practice to something or someone. I mostly pick my kids, whichever I think needs the dedication that day, and sometimes the Gotham Gal too. I’m dedicating this blog post to my entire family on the eve of Passover.

Happy Pesach Everyone.

I was just doing some work on a personal finance thing. I completed one part of the job and went to my email to finish it and saw another email at the top of my inbox about something else, I clicked on that email, started dealing with that, and almost forgot to finish off the personal finance thing. This happens all the time to me. I am so easily distracted.

I got rid of my desk phone in my USV office several years ago because I cannot sit in front of my computer when I am on a call in my office. I have to do my calls on my cell phone and walk around my office, look out the window, or something else or else I will get distracted.

I struggle with distraction big time. It’s not just the attention deficit kind of distraction I just talked about. Distraction crops up in other parts of my life. The Gotham Gal is constantly on me about being distracted in conversations with her. And she’s right to be on my case about that. If she was not, I would be even worse.

I’ve been working on this for much of my adult life. I’ve made progress but the distraction urge still is very much front and center in my psyche and my unconscious. I suspect this is something I will work on all my life.

Some things that have helped me are the aforementioned coaching by the Gotham Gal, yoga, meditation (which I have not yet made a staple in my life but I’m working on that), and a general self awareness of the problem and the need to take as many distractions away from me as possible when focus is required.

I know that I will get a lot of suggestions in the comments for software tools, workflow routines, and other self improvement techniques that have helped others deal with this problem. I will thank everyone in advance for those, but I will also say that I’ve tried all of that before. And tools and techniques haven’t really worked for me. I have found getting into the root causes and developing self awareness and more serenity in my life has worked a lot better.

But I’m still pretty bad. If you find yourself on the phone with me and I sound distracted, I probably am. And please feel free to call me out on it. I would appreciate that.