Twenty fucking five to one My gambling days are done I bet on a horse called the Bottle of Smoke And my horse won – The Pogues I have decided to angel invest. Any advice? I spent some time decades ago in the horse-racing world, as a guest of someone who was actually in the […]
The Lewis and Clark Business Plan Competition
Jefferson sat in his office, looking out the window towards the Potomac. In the distance he imagined he could see Alexandria, though the heavy swamp air on a hot day (they were all hot in this swamp!) certainly made that impossible. It was a pleasant house, though it sat forlornly in a vast empty field. […]
Automated Ad Buying is Already Mainstream, Whether Most Marketers Understand it or Not
The Wall Street Journal has the startling news that “Most Marketers Don’t Understand Automated Ad Buying.” Ten years into the programmatic revolution and most marketers don’t understand it! ANA Chief Executive Bob Liodice is quoted, saying “confusion about how the technology works might be slowing its adoption.” Are we failing? It’s almost certainly true, as […]
Midas List Feeder Angels
Like the feeder firms, but with angels. I used AngelList’s API to figure out which angels invested in the companies that the Midas List firms invested in. The list is ranked by what percentage of the firms these angels reported to AngelList are also Midas List investments. Some caveats on this list. The data was […]
Midas List Feeder Firms, 2014 Edition
It’s that time of year again. Midas List time of year. I bet you’re out right now, buying drinks for your nine favorite Sequoia partners (and the two who got away.) Cheers! Wait, what? You don’t know any of the nine Sequoia partners that made the list? You don’t know any of the Midas List […]
The Immediate Future for Adtech Startups
I spoke at the AppNexus Summit a couple of weeks ago. Brian O’Kelley read my post on adtech investing trends and asked if I could expand during the session. The video is online (my part at 1:48), but I thought I’d write it up also. I figured in the AppNexus audience of 600 that there […]
The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous
I was preparing to teach my entrepreneurship class about marketing last week and ran across an old blog post of Fred Wilson’s*. A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. At the end of his pitch he showed us some numbers. Normally for a raw […]
Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation, MTI Class Two
This is the second post about the class on technological entrepreneurship I’m teaching up at Columbia. Class one was an introduction to the why of entrepreneurship, as well as an outline of what the course will be. Class two dives right into innovation theory. The main goal is to start them thinking about innovation in […]
In Praise of the Business Plan
I’m all lean startup, just like you. I love being efficient and building things and MVPing them and getting out of the building. I love setting up analytics and iterating and learning and experimenting. All of that stuff is awesome. I recommend it to the founders I work with, I teach it in the class […]
Teaching Entrepreneurship, class one
This semester is the third time I’m teaching a class at Columbia University’s engineering school. It’s called Managing Technological Innovation, but it’s part of the entrepreneurship minor so I’m teaching it as a class on how to start an innovation driven enterprise. I’m learning a lot. Not least that I don’t really know how to […]