BeyondVC

JUNE 24, 2004

Like any active, early stage venture investor, I have spent a fair amount of time helping my portfolio companies build a management team. And like any venture investor, I wish I could boil hiring down to a more scientific method to make sure that each person we bring on to a company is better than the next. However, that does not always happen. The one constant in hiring, however, is the “A-Player Domino Effect” which basically says that when you hire an A-Player, they bring lots of

Detroit 79

Detroit Portfolio Early Stage New York 79

BeyondVC

JUNE 13, 2004

Jeff Jarvis has an updated post on a “place for my stuff” furthering the “stuff as a service” paradigm. On my thought about having a personal server in the home, Jeff goes on to say: I still don’t agree because: (1) Consumers won’t understand why they should make a capital investment and it will be a hard sell — witness the trouble TiVo has had getting going. (2) Consumers hate installing anything. (3) A service is more efficient — it can offer you

Cloud 60

Cloud IP Distribution Networking 60

BeyondVC

JUNE 12, 2004

Jeff Jarvis writes about having a place for all of his digital stuff. He goes on to say: : I want a place on the Internet where I can store all my stuff so I can get to it from anywhere on any device to consume, modify, store, or share. This stuff could be anything — my movies, music, to-do lists, shopping lists (for the family to update), contacts, documents, search history, bookmarks, photos, preferences, voicemail, anything, everything.

IP 60

IP Hosting Internet Networking 60

BeyondVC

JUNE 8, 2004

I have always been a big believer of the hosted software or ASP (application service provider) model since we made our first investment in LivePerson in January 1999. One of our main competitors of that era was Kana, which at that time, did way better than LivePerson in terms of customers, revenue, and market capitalization. I wrote a post months ago showing how far Kana had fallen, and how LivePerson stuck with its hosted software model and finally hit profitability.

Demand 60

Demand Bandwidth Hosting IPO 60

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

Startup

BeyondVC

JUNE 2, 2004

I met with Dave Panos and Andrew Busey of Pluck yesterday to learn more about their product and their company. Rather than go into the software (which I really like btw, combination RSS reader, bookmark manager, and simple collaboration tool), I wanted to share some of our thoughts about consumer-based web businesses circa 2004. We had a nice discussion about why it was different to launch a web-based business in today’s world versus the bubble period.

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