As an investor, I love marketplace businesses — from craigslist and eBay to Etsy and Kickstarter, digital platforms that empower individual seller / entrepreneurs are one of the opportunities I love most. But last week’s Padmapper brouhaha — and Amanda Peyton’s dead-on analysis — were an important reminder of just how hard functional marketplaces are continue…
I’ve hugely enjoyed Blake Masters‘ transcripts of Peter Thiel’s Stanford CS183 lecture series (if you haven’t read them I can’t recommend them highly enough). Two of Theil’s most powerful ideas — secrets and monopoly-seeking — came together for me this morning in a conversation with a local entrepreneur. This post is a quick recap of continue…
As part of my ongoing research into the making of high-performance entrepreneurial ecosystems, I’ve begun spending more time with folks at the intersection of the private + public sectors: city and state economic development professionals, university commercialization offices, public finance experts and the like. My first lesson from these conversations is the how critical public-private continue…
Earlier today I spent a fruitless half-hour trying to convince a solo founder that he would a be lot better off if he recruited a co-founder *before* he tried to raise money, not after. (Side note — the Startup Genome report makes this case much better than I ever will). The founder’s counter-argument was that continue…
Founders create culture, indelibly. Even at 50,000+ employees you can see Jeff Bezos’ personality and values at work in every corner of Amazon; similar stories can be told about Apple, Oracle, Bloomberg, and any other founder-led company. Knowing that every early hire will have a lasting impact on your company culture can be scary for continue…
Harry Houdini was an illusionist and escape artist who died almost 100 years ago. But what he *did* and what successful startup founders do are more alike than they may seem. A few days ago I tweeted out a phrase that stuck in my head as I was driving my kids to school (the kids continue…
This is another one of those ideas that seem obvious to me now, but didn’t always — and I keep hearing from entrepreneurs that it’s new information to them, which tells me I should write it down. Chris Dixon is one of the most articulate entrepreneur / investors I know of on the many risks continue…