One of the best parts of being an early-stage investor is having a regular excuse to meet with entrepreneurs and learn about what they’re up to. I also love reconnecting with teams I’ve met with previously to hear how things have changed (which they always have). This afternoon I sat down with a very smart 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…
I really enjoyed Mark Suster’s post earlier this week, What’s it Like Being a VC?, in which he details the pluses (many) and minuses (few) of “crossing over to the dark side” from entrepreneur to VC. Having made the same switch – albeit on a <cough> somewhat smaller scale* – his description of both the continue…
John Cook broke the news earlier this week about our investment in Untitled Startup. Andy led the deal for us and has been closely working with Damon and Aviel for several months now, but I wanted to take a minute to publicly welcome Untitled Startup to the Founder’s Co-op family and share some of the continue…
I’m excited to announce that Founder’s Co-op just completed an investment in Urban Airship, a new mobile infrastructure company that’s making it radically easier for smartphone developers to implement core features like push messaging and in-app transactions. The deal is is a first for us in several ways: it’s our first significant investment outside Seattle continue…
As regular readers know I’m fascinated with behavioral psychology – especially as manifested in software development and user experience design (related posts here, here and here). The most successful web + mobile applications (from biggies like Facebook + Twitter to up-and-comers like Foursquare) are masters at exploiting behavioral triggers and game mechanics to drive customer continue…
Last September we announced our investment in Nearlyweds!, a two-year-old provider of beautifully-designed wedding websites. At the time, we hinted that they were working on some “secret sauce” that would bring some exciting new ideas to the wedding services ecosystem (a $71 billion marketplace, per this snazzy infographic from BridePop). The Nearlyweds team still has continue…
I had the opportunity last week to speak at a Seattle Tech Startups meetup. The topic of the meeting was: “Where’s the Money in 2010?”, and I put together some slides describing how Founders’ Co-op is thinking about the early-stage landscape here in the Pacific Northwest. John Cook, a friend and local tech journalist, was continue…
Twitter is a mind-blowingly huge platform for sharing personal opinion. John Borthwick recently shared some stats about the Twitter ecosystem that give a rough sense for the sheer velocity: Twitter: Jan 11th was the highest usage day ever (source: @ev via techcrunch) Tweetdeck: did 4,143,687 updates on Jan 8, yep 4m. Or, 48 per second continue…
I just wasted 15 minutes of my day talking to Craig (Greg?) Malloy, who represented himself as an Associate Producer at Going Green Television. His appointment setter had called one of our portfolio companies – Cooler Planet – asking for me, claiming he wanted to talk about doing a feature on the company’s work in continue…