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Feb 02

If you met me for AngelList advice

caterpillarcowboy:

Here’s what I’ll tell you:

- AL is for finishing your round. Don’t bother until you have 25-50% of your raise already committed. Since you shouldn’t raise less than $500k*, $200k should be minimum. Except in rare cases, you should also be launched with meaningful # of users or customers. My rule of thumb is 1000 users or 100 customers but that can vary.

- AL is an exercise in social proof, so get the biggest names you can committed before driving a lot of attention.

- Use AL’s search tools to find investors you want to target and get warm intros through their portfolio companies.

- Make sure your product description paragraph clearly and concisely says what you do. This is your elevator pitch.

- Your traction section should be in bullet point form filled with data: users, transactions, revenue. Show growth stats if meaningful. Make sure to include at least one graph (made with good contrasting colors so the graph is legible even as a thumbnail).

- When you are ready, get your investors to share your profile with all of their followers. It doesn’t really matter what day of week or time of day, other than midday is slightly worse for response rates.

- Unfortunately, AL is no substitute for old-fashioned networking and hustle. Many of the investors there are part-time angels; they’ll put in $25-50k if you have so many other committed investors that it feels “safe” to them. The guy/gal who has the conviction and pockets to be your lead investor isn’t sourcing deals from AL. They are using their network, like they always have been.

Hope that helps.

Dave

*The only exception is trying to pull off the more advanced “advisory round” maneuver, where you raise less than $200k from really well-known investors at less than $2M valuation to position you with great social proof for your “real” seed round 3-6 months later. Only do this if those guys will invest again.

“Sales > R&D. It is somewhat surprising that sales expense is greater than R&D expense. The ad units clearly are not self-serve. Interestingly, this ratio is very similar for Google.” —

Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10X Revenue Club « abovethecrowd.com by Bill Gurley

The comment on how Facebook’s ad business isn’t really that self serve is very interesting to me.

Feb 01

So, are you going after ‘Lean Startup’ now?

rafer:

I gave a talk last evening at the JFDI Bootcamp in which I pushed on how people were applying the Lean Startup ethos. Because I’m a known PITA, a couple people asked me if I was attacking the ethos itself. I’m not. Blank’s work (and by extension Ries’s) are great, should be followed at the beginning of most Internet ventures, will save lots of founders years of grief, etc. I’m all in. 

However, two things bug me pretty consistently when faced with a dozen lean startups being incubated:

• Far too many founders think that Customer Discovery conversations take the place of background research. They want to be told everything via Discovery without doing the reading that makes discovery valuable. 
• People seem to forget that being a Lean Startup is a means to an end. The point is to be a big, profitable company. The minute you can STOP being a lean startup, do so. 

At Lumatic, we have the problem that we have to stop. A couple of city maps don’t get us where we need to go. We need at hundred or two in short order. Before real revenue. Fun Fun.

Image by betsyweber via Flickr

Jan 31

(via Congressional Budget Office - Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees)

Jan 27

“Note to [Larry] Page: When you make Apple look like the easy and reasonable vendor to deal with, you’ve done something dramatically wrong.” — Page Rage Escalates As Google Cancels Twitter Android Meeting | PandoDaily

Jan 25

“The speaker for the last 10 years has been an influence peddler in Washington,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told reporters in Trenton on Jan. 23. “If the speaker’s uncomfortable with that, I understand why he would be. It’s not necessarily a normal qualification for the president of the United States.” — Freddie Hired Gingrich for Business Goals - Bloomberg (via tedr)

(via tedr)

“

Most interesting to me, Yonatan Zunger, Chief Architect of Google says:

“We thought this was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently when they were and weren’t going by their real names. After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case. (And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.) We’re focusing right now on identifying bad behaviors themselves, rather than on using names as a proxy for behavior.”

That’s gotta hurt.

The key takeaway: Google spent a huge amount of goodwill on an attractive, but untested idea, which Yonatan summarizes as “Bastards won’t be bastards under their real name.” (As an aside, there’s a lean startup lesson there, but Google has yet to pivot.) You shouldn’t make the same mistake.

Google Failed Because of Real Names « Emergent Chaos

OMG an untested idea turns out to be false? That never happens! Ever! <sarcasm off>

Moral of the story? Always assume your hypothesis are hypothesis and more often then not will be wrong in the face of real world testing.

“Mr. Gotlieb’s apparent belief that he and other advertising agency leaders can “ensure that technology develops in a manner that doesn’t shake up the supply-and-demand equation of our business” is futile in the long run but perhaps more pernicious is the implicit arrogance of thinking the market force of the web can be channeled into their bank accounts by sheer force of will.” — Wither the Giants? The Arrogance of Aging Incumbents | Disruption: David Pakman’s Blog

Jan 24

Tumblr: 15B pageviews per month by 120M people -

caterpillarcowboy:

125 pageviews per person per month, or 4 page views a day. That’s actually less than I would have thought. I probably contribute 30-50 pageviews a day, just refreshing the dashboard or loading the next page. How many times a day do you refresh?

Huh? Tumblr which runs the Quantcast tag shows ~50 page views per person per day.  And it shows 100M people a month who do 150 PV/person/month.

“But the message Dodd most seemed to want to get across was that “the white noise has
made it impossible to have a conversation about this,” he said. “We’ve gotta find a better way to have that conversation than we have in the last two weeks.” —

Sundance 2012: MPAA’s Chris Dodd Calls Piracy Defeat a ‘Watershed Event’ - Hollywood Reporter

Rafer sez:
If you start the negotiation at a reasonable place, it may well end at a reasonable place. If you start by proposing to end Free Speech as we know it, you are asking for an out of control screaming match. #schmuck

(via rafer) #doubleschmuck #retirealready (via tedr)

(via tedr)