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If you met me for AngelList advice

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:03:47 -0800

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...."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:25:17 -0800

“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.

So, are you going after 'Lean Startup' now?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:04:00 -0800

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

As someone who did a startup w/ Scott (& another rockstar David Cancel) and lived to tell the tale (even if our startup Lookery was a failure) - I’ve seen Scott’s PITA-ness first hand. His PITA-ness is that he refuses to accept orthodoxy without critically thinking it through for himself. Scott pushes those he works with and those who seek his advice in a similar fashion.

To some that’s someone being a PITA, to others that’s a valuable way to get feedback and think things through. The lesson, and it’s an important one, from Scott is - think critically about what you believe - personally, in how you run your business etc. I’m not dissimilar in my constant probing of ideas (just ask my team at Cheezburger) and it’s one reason why Scott and I get along.

(via Congressional Budget Office - Comparing the Compensation of...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:44:46 -0800

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

"Note to [Larry] Page: When you make Apple look like the easy and reasonable vendor to deal with,..."

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:11:21 -0800

“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

"The speaker for the last 10 years has been an influence peddler in Washington,” New Jersey Governor..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:17:59 -0800

““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)

"Most interesting to me, Yonatan Zunger, Chief Architect of Google says: “We thought this..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:54:27 -0800

“

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!

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..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:51:15 -0800

“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

Tumblr: 15B pageviews per month by 120M people

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:09:43 -0800

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..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:55:28 -0800

“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)

"Less than 2% of the beginners and 9% of the experienced snowboarders wore helmets. But this had..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:39:13 -0800

“Less than 2% of the beginners and 9% of the experienced snowboarders wore helmets. But this had little effect on severe intracranial injuries, which affected 3% of helmeted snowboarders and 2% of those without helmets. Helmets lead to more risk-taking and may not provide effective head protection, the report said.”

- The Research Report: A New Weapon in the Fight Against Superbugs - WSJ.com

The key point - the supposed safety equipment doesn’t actually make you more safe. Kinda sounds like the TSA.

"Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like..."

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:25:51 -0800

“

Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists’ language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.

This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday’s Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money.

Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers.

Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center.

Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.

You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.

Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?

In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run. Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.

Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years. If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.

If Democrats can’t restore Americans’ trust in government, it really doesn’t matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.

”

- Where Are the Liberals? - NYTimes.com

This captures my politics in many ways. Call it the fight against rent-seekers. I call it the fight against cronyism. It’s a fight against those seeking to rig the system in their favor against the merits of ideas, work and fairness.

And these ideas outlined by Brook really are shared by OWS and the Tea Party. At the heart of both are groups sick of the system being rigged against them.

In a battle for today, SOPA is a great example. It’s protectionism for old-line companies who are trying to rig the system against upstart largely digital companies who are doing things differently. Hopefully we all can stand up and fight cronyism for once.

"Since rejoining the Company in 1997, Mr. Jobs had not sold any of his shares of the Company’s stock...."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:52:45 -0800

“Since rejoining the Company in 1997, Mr. Jobs had not sold any of his shares of the Company’s stock. Mr. Jobs held no unvested equity awards. The Company recognized that Mr. Jobs’s level of stock ownership significantly aligned his interests with shareholders’ interests.”

- Apple’s 2012 Proxy Statement

In a world where the likes of Steve Ballmer and many others routinely sell huge portions of their shares, Jobs kept all of his. $2,319,515,000 worth, as Dustin Curtis points out.

That’s dedication and loyalty. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.
(via parislemon) tedr: I’ve been thinking more and more about the incredible strength of being all in. (via tedr) It’s easy to be all in when you made billions from Pixar. Steve was a great businessman but neither perfect or a saint.

rafer: wintercheck: dapantz: greyscaleinferno: Jupiter is...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:45:37 -0800

rafer:

wintercheck:

dapantz:

greyscaleinferno:

Jupiter is the motherfucking badass of the entire goddamn solar system. Think it’s just some giant, useless gas planet with a dopey red spot? Fuck that noise. Jupiter is the reason you’re alive right now. Show some respect.

Turns out, there’s a hell of a lot more space debris out there that should be hitting us: asteroids that would wipe out life on Earth if given half a chance. The reason they’re not vaporizing us is because Jupiter. Without it, the rate of impacts on Earth would be something like 1000 times higher than it is now. It’s so large, with such a massive gravitational field, that as it sweeps through its orbit it guards us like a protective big brother. It sends most space rocks that even look at the inner solar system funny flying out into the void of space. Jupiter has our fucking back.

Recently, within our lifetimes, an asteroid started to enter the inner solar system that was big enough to repave the surface of the Earth in fire and death if it had hit us. Jupiter caught it, tore it to pieces, and then ate the pieces.

Jupiter X Earth: BroTP.

luv u jupiter

best description of a planet i’ve ever read.

henrytheworst: Dap Bros. 50 - Jeff “The Dude”...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:44:46 -0800

henrytheworst:

Dap Bros. 50 - Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski and Walter Sobchak

Got a lot of request for the Dude and Walter. I even threw Donny in there for good measure.

whitneymcn: Pincushion cupcakes, plated (Taken with...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:22:59 -0800

whitneymcn:

Pincushion cupcakes, plated (Taken with picplz.)

My knitting wife (she’s a professional knitter in fact) thinks these cupcakes are AWESOME.

"Drumming is a physical release for me. When I was a kid I’d have fights with my parents, then go up..."

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:19:21 -0800

“Drumming is a physical release for me. When I was a kid I’d have fights with my parents, then go up to my room and beat the shit out of my drums for hours. You’ve got to have that kind of attitude. Ginger Baker’s like that. I heard he used to tear up his hotel rooms. I’m a bit like that. Kind of an adult vandal.”

- Bill Kreutzmann, adult vandal in 1972 (via fuckyesgratefuldead)

this is an interesting quote. A few weeks ago we had an argument with our 9 year old over something inane, and it ended with him going over to practice his guitar and pounding the crap out of it

(via newspeedwayboogie)

Andy - what is an argument like with you? You are one of the most mellow, positive minded people I know. Seems like arguing with you would be like arguing with the Dali Lama or Confucius. As a kid I would just get mad at how zen you were trying to make me feel.

Amazingly funny (and gorgeous) photo tributes to...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:36:43 -0800

Amazingly funny (and gorgeous) photo tributes to Seattle.

“Bellevue, our eastern suburb. Every single one of those buildings is a mall. People who have a Bellevue stamp in their passports aren’t allowed into Seattle.” (via My Hometown Is Better Than Yours « Rottin’ in Denmark)

"Yahoo has become the Sick Man of the Internet, akin to the Ottoman Empire’s role in the mid-19th..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:53:38 -0800

“Yahoo has become the Sick Man of the Internet, akin to the Ottoman Empire’s role in the mid-19th century. It didn’t end well for the Ottomans, of course, but with the market valuing Yahoo’s domestic media assets as virtually worthless it has little left to lose by being aggressive.”

- Digiday - Yahoo’s Choice: Double Down on Data

"But he finds the stagnation at the bottom alarming and warns that it will worsen. Most of the..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:08:32 -0800

“But he finds the stagnation at the bottom alarming and warns that it will worsen. Most of the studies end with people born before 1970, while wage gaps, single motherhood and incarceration increased later. Until more recent data arrives, he said, “we don’t know the half of it.””

- Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs - NYTimes.com

Not the twitter- or bloggesphere will notice this - but these studies are essentially limited to people born before 1970. So it is effectively a study on the policies of the past NOT the present. This could be a huge indictment of the Great Society nanny state or it might not. But it isn’t really a reflection on kids raised in the last 10-15 years.

Honestly given how misused this data will be, I am afraid for the political dogma that is now going to emerge. Bad knowledge is bad.