That quote jumped out at me in an announcement this week from Ireland-based NewBay that they’ve decided to set up their US headquarters here in Seattle. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of NewBay before this news found its way into my feed reader, and I can’t vouch for the quality of their “digital lifestyle continue…
If you’ve been paying attention to the massive disruption underway in the mobile ecosystem (think iPhone, iPad, Android, app stores + platform wars) you’ve probably gotten the message that carriers aren’t what moves the market any longer. Operating systems (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, etc) and the app ecosystems they support are where continue…
One of Andy’s favorite expression around Founders Co-op is “GFA” (Get Fucking Aggressive). Here’s a mini-case study on that from the past 24 hours: Yesterday afternoon FC portfolio company AppStoreHQ reached out to Jolie O’Dell at Mashable to get her take on AppESP, an on-device personalized app discovery engine for Android they’d just released to public continue…
Almost 15 years ago I headed up the effort to build outdoor retailer Patagonia’s first online retail store. About 20 minutes ago the company released its first native iPhone app, offering a full branded retail experience on the world’s coolest smartphone. Best of all, the app was built by the rockstars at Sprella, a mobile continue…
I was out for the past two weeks so TechCrunch beat me to the punch, but just before I left town we closed an investment in SPARQCode (the company has been operating as MSKYNET but is rebranding to match their flagship product name). I think of SPARQCode as “Bit.ly for the real world” – a drop-dead easy way continue…
I’ve been spending a ton of time in the mobile world lately, mostly on behalf of Founders Co-op portfolio companies AppStoreHQ and Urban Airship, and the deeper I get in the mobile ecosystem, the more perplexed I am by Apple and Google’s behavior toward the iPhone and Android developer communities. With iPhone (the high-end pioneer) and Android continue…
Before all you fanboys out there get your backs up, let me start by saying that Apple gets full credit for blowing up the mobile software business and creating an entirely new market for software entrepreneurs. The iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad / iTunes juggernaut is one of the most awesome technology ecosystems ever continue…
Web analytics provider Quantcast has just released their 2009 Mobile Web Trends Report, a fascinating snapshot of the explosive growth in smartphone adoption and use worldwide. The Apple iPhone phenomenon isn’t exactly news, but the report will help you visualize just how mind-blowing their 30-month rise from zero to 60% global share of mobile web continue…
This idea now feels so obvious to me that I almost didn’t bother to write it down. But I keep having conversations with entrepreneurs who aren’t yet using the pattern and their eyes always light up when they see a way to apply it to their own business, so if this post turns on the continue…
Sean Ellis has a great post up called “The Startup Pyramid” riffing on Marc Andreesen’s excellent and widely-circulated post on Product-Market Fit. Sean frames achieving Product-Market Fit as the foundation of startup success, and argues convincingly that it doesn’t make sense to try to scale or monetize until a minimum level of fit is achieved: continue…