Ben's Blog

APRIL 28, 2010

In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO. As we looked at the history of great technology companies, we discovered that founders ran an overwhelming majority of them for a very long time, including: Acer—Stan Shih. Siebel—Tom Siebel. Sony—Akio Morita. Sun—Scott McNeely.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 78

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

Paul Graham’s recent essay, Founder Mode , describes the mindset that founders need to adopt to navigate the early stages of building a startup, and how they’re different than ‘manager mode’ which is traditional management/corporate best practices.

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Management Technical Review Venture Capital Generative AI 103

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. It’s just taking some longer than others.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 1, 2020

In addition, UNI arrived and was probably one of the largest token distribution events ever with 15% of all tokens going to nearly 300K liquidity providers and users. No matter the vertical, geography, business model, macro or micro trends, entrepreneurs form the nucleus of a generational company. Stay tuned!!

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Portfolio Software Review Cofounder Canada 94

abovethecrowd.com

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Unfortunately, either information asymmetry or physical distances and the resulting distribution costs can both cut against the economic advantages that would otherwise arise for all. In many cases, a deeper focus on a particular category or vertical allows these marketplaces to distinguish themselves from broader marketplaces like eBay.

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Internet Matching Vertical Hosting 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This is great for something like a huge DHT or a distributed work queue.

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San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

The LexSet Co-Founders (left to right) CEO Francis Bitonti , President Leslie Oliver Karpas , and COO Azam Khan won $250,000 in Verizon’s Built on 5G Challenge The Forrest Four-Cast: March 3, 2020 LexSet serves AI engineers, especially those with limited resources, with a better way to annotate photos.

Technical Review 63

Technical Review Los Angeles Cofounder Silicon Valley 63

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 25, 2023

We were founded by a gentleman named Bob Young, who was the original co-founder of Red Hat, which is a massive software company. So that's the quick and dirty of our origin story is that, and Bob Young, by the way, is still the sole owner and founder of the company, and very much and involved in what we do on a day-to-day basis.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) After that you’ve become a battle-hardened realist.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

Some businesses can service all four cities with a single distribution hub in one of the cities, making it a unique market for launching new businesses. Partnerships with innovative global companies in major industry verticals provide unique opportunities for customer validation, pilot programs and strategic investment.

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Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 97

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

As Jerry Chu , CEO and one of the Lofty AI Founders, explains, “our results speak for themselves. We’re actually a distributed team, so we’re in both SF and LA. But my personal favorite part about San Francisco is the energy of the startup founders and the investor network. If you had bought one of our A.I.’s

Technical Review 65

Technical Review San Francisco Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 65

Version One Ventures

DECEMBER 3, 2019

We loved the founders, but didn’t have much conviction around the scalability of a browser plug-in and the fact that this was a bridge round. Ryan and his co-founders proved us wrong big time and built one of the largest social media management companies. We met Sonder’s founder Francis Davidson many times between 2014 and 2016.

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Portfolio Cap Table Early Stage Valuation 201

Transformify

APRIL 21, 2017

I spoke with Toptal Co-founder and CEO Taso Du Val to find out more about how Toptal got started and his predictions for the future of the talent economy. We have arguably the largest distributed workforce in the world. And we’ll be expanding into more business verticals soon. Where are you located?

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Technical Review Silicon Valley Software Review Cofounder 40

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 23, 2020

Prior to joining Syndio, Colacurcio co-founded Smartsheet.com , a work collaboration tool for companies of all sizes. The pay gap speaks to the distribution of women and minorities in a company. She is passionate about issues surrounding equal pay, employee wellness, and equity at work. What is your top goal for Syndio for 2020?

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Seattle Elevator Pitch Equity 62

Genuine VC

AUGUST 3, 2012

The company’s familiarity is along what we consider to be the three most important criteria for an investment in a seed-stage startup – team, market, and product: Team – Two of the co-founders were well-known to the NextView partnership years before a line of code was even written.

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Cofounder Seed Stage Portfolio Curation 199

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

One of Qless’s core verticals is the retail industry. The brand might do this by distributing the content via email to half of their audience, tracking engagement metrics, and measuring the influence on CLV. Subsequent growth marketing tests could focus on identifying the best geographies to target.

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Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

Eric Friedman

JANUARY 1, 2023

I still want this to happen, but as I love to tell founders Hope isn’t a strategy. I am still a huge fan of this co and use mine (mainly for the screen!) Your entire experience and process will be governed by a authentication. Identities can be real or not, but if if you don’t have an auth you don’t have an experience. -1:

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Balance Sheet Technical Review ChatGPT Software Review 60

Eric Friedman

DECEMBER 10, 2022

I still want this to happen, but as I love to tell founders Hope isn’t a strategy. I am still a huge fan of this co and use mine (mainly for the screen!) Your entire experience and process will be governed by a authentication. Identities can be real or not, but if if you don’t have an auth you don’t have an experience. -1:

Balance Sheet 60

Balance Sheet Technical Review ChatGPT Software Review 60

VC Cafe

OCTOBER 20, 2024

Iuri Struta , S& P Global ( source ) I was listening to Bret Taylor , the founder and CEO of Sierra, former co-CEO of Salesforce, ex CTO of Facebook and current chairman of OpenAI on the 20VC podcast. Durable distribution advantages. Efficient AI models: Smaller, more scalable models that are less resource-intensive.

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Generative AI Vertical Cofounder Sales Cycle 158

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 21, 2013

It is the innate power of a good founder’s network that will turn napkins into products and products into successful businesses. Recently, I was honored to attend StartUp Health ’s Healthcare Transformer Summit, co-located with Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation Summit. That founder’s goal is to run a large successful business.

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Networking Cleveland Cofounder Angel Investor 225

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

Reportedly, Softbank and Zynga have discussed jointly distributing games through Softbank’s mobile-phone service in Japan and other countries. Founded in April/May 2010 by Diego Berdakin (Ex-Slingshot Labs) and Josh Berman (Ex-Slingshot Labs, MySpace Co-founder) in Santa Monica, CA. DST invested $180mm last fall.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

Lightspeed Venture Partners

OCTOBER 5, 2013

Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir, Addepar and Formation8) kicked off a meaningful conversation with us on building multi-billion dollar businesses in big data at one of our recent Lightspeed Dinner Series events this week. Lightspeed Dinner Series on Big Data with Joe Lonsdale from Formation 8.

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Cofounder Vertical Algorithm Government 167

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

To learn more about this space, I suggest join an online community I co-founded, PEVCTech. . Tim Friedman, Founder, PE Stack , said, “If I could offer one piece of advice to today’s managers, it would be to take the time to understand the demands of the modern institutional LP. The 11 Steps of Investing in Private Companies.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

We’ve seen new foundational models, open source LLMs and all sorts of new companies building the co-pilots for every category. For example, Munch , providing automated vertical video clips from long form content or KwaKwa , the latest product by Piggy, powering communities.

Generative AI 88

Generative AI Israel Artificial Inteligence Vertical 88

The Next Web

DECEMBER 3, 2013

Mat Ellis is the CEO and founder of Cloudability. Defrag and Gluecon founder Eric Norlin believes there are three defining characteristics of this integration shift. Enterprises that have gotten past this reflexive response are struggling with how to integrate all of this new, distributed stuff with their existing stuff.

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Cloud API Vertical Cofounder 128

The Next Web

DECEMBER 8, 2013

William Hsu is the co-founder and managing partner of MuckerLab. Today, Airbnb, oDesk and multiple second-hand fashion marketplace startups show that there are tons of untapped verticals where horizontal product platform cannot serve properly or where consumer simply prefer a more tailored brand.

B2C 136

B2C B2B Demand Vertical 136

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

My co-founder, head of business development and I were in Japan raising money. In the end, the CEO couldn’t get his board to give us the cash in exchange for the Japanese distribution rights and some equity. I used it in all presentations and gave it at industry conferences. Are those my initials on the slide?

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 171

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 20, 2020

the Connectors, Angels, Venture Capitalists, Founders, Professors, Hackers, Press… and the Legends. Find the Connectors , the Angels , the Venture Capitalists , the Founders , the Professors , the Hackers , and the Legends you need to meet and get some hints about the best ways to meet them. Here is your COVID-friendly cheat sheet.

Austin 110

Austin Texas Cofounder Los Angeles 110

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Richard Ma , CEO and Co-Founder at Quantstamp , says, “We focus on helping our customers stay safe and succeed because our philosophy is that technology is only a tool to solve people’s problems.” The Governor of Colorado was there promoting Colorado as a hub for blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

San Francisco 97

San Francisco Cofounder Colorado Security 97

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 16, 2020

Maria Tanjala and Irina Albita , the co-founders of FilmChain. The Forrest Four-Cast: February 16, 2020 Maria Tanjala , co-founder of FilmChain , is passionate about tech solutions that bring transparency and automation to creative industries. If you weren’t working for FilmChain, what would you be doing? film and tech?—?and

Cofounder 88

Cofounder Vertical Austin Revenue 88

The Next Web

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Interestingly enough, CooTek’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Wong , who was formerly from Microsoft’s R&D unit, took an unconventional route by launching in the Western market first. Distribution and cashflow pose challenges in China. Lee notes that this makes payment a lot more complicated than it is in Western markets.

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China Developer Intellectual Property Mobile 122

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

As David Sacks from All in put it: On aggregate, a lot of funding was also deployed to startups in the application layer – investing in founders leveraging generative AI to either solve narrow tasks, or bring automation to tasks to reduce costs, increase accuracy, speed etc.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 78

pandodaily.com

JULY 18, 2012

Co-founder and CEO Jason Goldberg said this was the first of several companies he’s started that was so intensely personal, he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything else. Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. That aesthetic took decades to develop. “This one is just so much fun.”

Entrepreneur 45

Entrepreneur San Francisco Silicon Valley Technical Review 45

Hearpreneur

AUGUST 19, 2015

I am founder on an unconventional online gallery, The Art and Craft Gallery. So we opened the goFlow platform from surfing-only to 10 new verticals: Paddle-boarding, Diving, Fishing, Skateboarding, Cycling, Golfing, Snow sports, Boating, Kitesurfing and more to come. Thanks to Alexi Venneri, Digital Air Strike ! #6)

Entrepreneur 48

Entrepreneur Australia Technical Review Community 48

VC Cafe

JULY 6, 2010

To learn more about the product and the founder’s ambitious vision, I interviewed Erez Pilosof, founder and CEO of Libox who also founded and ran Walla! It’s all based on growth and on opening the capabilities of the Libox distribution platform to the community. VC Cafe: So, you’re not worried about distribution?

Media 84

Media Management API HTML 84

Austin Startup

OCTOBER 13, 2010

StoredIQ has rapidly gained traction with customers across several vertical industries, including financial services, healthcare and oil and gas. Phil is a co-founder and general manager at PerformanceEdge Partners. The company also announced that it has appointed Phil Myers as the new CEO and H.E. CrunchBase Information.

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Vertical Cofounder Early Stage Channel 59

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

Last summer, Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates’ national carrier, joined the many airlines and hotels that have partnered with Switzerland-based Winding Tree to bypass intermediaries using distributed ledger technology. Winding Tree Co-Founders: CEO Maksim Izmaylov (left) and COO Pedro Anderson (right).

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United Arab Emirates Switzerland Cofounder France 63