Superangel Ron Conway addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs, developers, and investors today at a Betaworks conference in New York. My takeaway? Conway is pumped about the future of ecommerce. Continue reading
People
Human Beings FTW: How Tech Companies Are Rediscovering the Power of Real People
On Monday I broke my third iPhone in the last six months. These slippery devils have now shimmed into puddles, toilets, and in this most recent case, off my lap and onto concrete. I know, I need a case. I bought two Monday, so stop with the lectures.
I am working in Vegas this week, so instead of my usual trip to the Union Square – Genius Bar (holla, guys!) I went to the Apple Store out by the Vegas airport. We didn’t have an appointment, and the service was tremendous. They worked us in and were incredibly nice.
And yet, there was someone standing behind me that was nit-picking about it not being even better. She said to another disgruntled customer the line something you hear a lot when you eavesdrop in Vegas, “Well, I work for the company that has the best customer service in the world so…” Continue reading
How 6 Unlikely Investors Snuck into that Monster Evernote $1 Billion Round
As was reported two weeks ago Evernote has raised a whopper of a new round of financing: $70 million at a $1 billion valuation. Evernote’s founder and CEO Phil Libin has never been one to maximize the valuation for the sake of bragging rights. The price was a nod to two things: Evernote has built a truly impressive business, and it was a round many investors were dying to get into.
What hasn’t been reported is that amid this wildly oversubscribed round, Libin decided to carve out a $7 million allocation for a handful of mentors who helped him out when he’d just arrived in Silicon Valley and was a relative nobody. Continue reading
PandoDaily’s First Ebook Is Out Now! Your Definitive Guide to Facebook’s IPO
We had a lot of luxuries when we started PandoDaily. One was knowing without a doubt what the biggest story of the year would be: Facebook’s IPO.
We knew we had to do something special for it, particularly because several members of our staff and contributors are among the world’s leading experts on the company. So rather than simply bang out a bunch of blog posts and live-Tweet how the stock trades on Friday, we decided to do something a little more in-depth.
The result is published today. It’s our first ever eBook “Buy This Book Before You Buy Facebook: A PandoDaily Expert Guide to the Internet’s Biggest IPO,” available on Amazon Kindle right now, and on other platforms very soon. Continue reading
Sick of Trying to Make Lame Companies Cool, Brad Garlinghouse Joins YouSendIt as CEO
YouSendIt is a legitimate player in the big, sexy storage and collaboration market, that encompasses everyone from Box.com, Yammer, Asana, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Jive, depending on how you define it.
It’s high time the company started to act like it. It’s starting by hiring Brad Garlinghouse as CEO. Continue reading
Dustin Moskovitz: “I Couldn’t Imagine Moving to Optimize for Taxes”
When Mark Zuckerberg decided to move to Silicon Valley for the summer to see how the start-up Mecca could help his fledgling company, Dustin Moskovitz came with him, Eduardo Saverin did not.
As Facebook continued to grow, Moskovitz stayed a part of the company; Saverin did not.
And next week when Facebook finally goes public, Moskovitz will become a very rich man because he spent every waking moment of those years helping build Facebook. Saverin will become a very rich man because he spent years in a court room. Continue reading
No More Breasts, Elephants, or SOPA: How Warren Adelman Is Saving Go Daddy’s Soul
I’m sure someone somewhere has had a worse first week on a job than Warren Adelman. But I am struggling to think of an example. Continue reading
Bill Gross: The Best Advice I Ever Received
Bill Gross, is an original gangsta of LA tech and entrepreneurship. Gross gave the keynote to today’s LA Demo Day entitled, “The Best Advice I’ve Ever Received.”
The first inaugural event was one that brought together more than 1,500 members of the Los Angeles startup and technology ecosystem and gave the stage to 16 startups to pitch investors and recruit employees and users. The 16 judges that rotated through four panels included a local who’s who of LA VCs, angels, and successful entrepreneurs (more on these companies in a later post).
In the last 40 years, Gross has founded and invested in more than 100 companies, the majority of which occurred within his Pasadena incubator, IdeaLab. Sixty of those companies were successful, with 35 IPOs or acquisitions and 25 more currently operating within IdeaLab. All told, Gross’s companies have raised more … Continue reading
The Costanza Proposal: Why Scott Thompson Should Start Doing the Opposite of His Instinct
For our younger readers — and Nathaniel and Trevor — there’s an episode of “Seinfeld” where the hapless George Costanza decides his life is going so horribly that he should start doing the opposite of every instinct.
His first act, if I remember correctly, is ordering the opposite of what he usually gets at the coffee shop, which leads to meeting a gorgeous girl who made the exact same order. Going against his instincts, he goes up to talk to her and tells her he doesn’t have a job and lives with his parents. In a reaction that could only be scripted by Larry David, she’s intrigued. No matter how crazy it seems, he continues in this fashion, eventually getting a job with the Yankees. It’s at this point he says something like, “This is no longer an experiment, Jerry. This is my religion.”
I don’t usually suggest that CEOs model their jobs after implausible sitcom plots, but I think it’s about time Yahoo’s Scott Thompson adopt “The Costanza Doctrine.” Continue reading
Dustin Moskovitz: Asana Could “Certainly” Be a $100 Billion Business
One-time success just isn’t enough for a most founders. It’s such a common trend that Sarah named her book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good”, after it. So when she asks Dustin Moskovitz about the potential for his post-Facebook venture to be as big as Facebook, it’s no surprise his answer was, “absolutely.”
“We certainly think its a $100 billion business, or whatever Facebook is worth right now,” he said. Even though Asana is plays in the admittedly not sexy business to business enterprise world, he believes he brings something new to that industry. Meanwhile, he tries to ignore the fact that Asana isn’t a consumer-focused company, he said.
It helps with recruiting talent if they know their product will be used by people we know. We say ‘enterprise customers are just consumers at work,’” he said, but he’s still lost some candidates to consumer startups. Continue reading
