BLOG STARTUPS, VENTURE AND THE TECH BUSINESS
Posts Tagged ‘Startups’
April 27 2011
by Scott Johnson
Color, Valuations, and the Winner’s Curse
My friend Kevin Lewis is a professor at Duke Business school and he sends out a feed of interesting abstracts describing recent research that I sift through every day or so. Today I found this one: The Bidder’s Curse Ulrike Malmendier & Young Han Lee, American Economic Review, April 2011, Pages 749-787 Abstract: We employ ...
February 9 2011
by Thanasis Delistathis
Watch out for those “Groundhog Days”
“Groundhog Day” is a metaphor for lack of change an innovation. Companies need to watch out for market changes that may render their services obsolete or invalidate their current strategy.
February 8 2011
by Scott Johnson
Groupon Super Bowl Ads – Brilliant?
There is a ton of buzz around the Groupon Super Bowl advertisements, and it is all “negative publicity.” Let’s stipulate for now that the ads were insensitive. Even further, let’s stipulate that they lost some subscribers as a result. Short term, this is not good. Long term? I think all this attention is a big ...
February 8 2011
by Scott Johnson
Is The UnGoogle Economy Viable?
Is there enough market to sustain a startup that competes directly with Google? This is an increasingly frequent topic, as we find ourselves asking entrepreneurs and our CEOs “what if Google decided to do this?” Back in the mid nineties, we used to ask this same question about Microsoft, as the graveyard of companies ...
January 18 2011
by Scott Johnson
Mobile Monetization 2.0
Mobile monetization 2.0 is going to happen in 2011. Marketing budgets against mobile are showing up in the hundreds of millions, some new monetization schemes (CPL and CPD) are paying good eCPMs, 4G is coming, and this is all really great news for entrepreneurs and mobile app publishers as everyone everywhere taps into mobile apps. ...
December 3 2010
by Scott Johnson
“Do Not Track” – Some Predictions to Guide Investment
Congress has proposed an opt-out capability for user tracking. Much has been written about Do Not Track, and I won’t rehash all of that. I will simply say I think it is a good idea, and in general expecting that any industry will effectively police itself is naive. What has not been widely discussed is: ...
November 17 2010
by Scott Johnson
Expanding “Opt In” to include “Claw Back.”
My partner Thanasis wrote a thoughtful piece about the trade-offs between privacy and convenience. Since I am a table pounding “opt-in” zealot, I felt compelled to weigh in. Opt-in is why Pontiflex is taking share so rapidly from legacy “email list brokers”. Opt-out is the reason Facebook got kicked in the gut when they launched Beacon, and how ...
October 20 2010
by Thanasis Delistathis
5 checklist items to raising money
I know this is a somewhat mandane subject, but yesterday someone sent me a one-pager “executive summary” of a business, and after reading it I couldn’t really tell what they do. So I read it again, and still couldn’t figure it out. The summary was fully buzzword-compliant: you know!, it had all those fancy words ...
October 19 2010
by Thanasis Delistathis
Why is it so hard to offer good service?
I have been pondering this question for some time and have had a few conversations about it with VCs and entrepreneurs. I think that offering great service will be an important strategy and opportunity for companies as more and more products are converted into service (e.g. cloud-based software). How many times have you dialed into ...
October 12 2010
by Scott Johnson
Why I Invested in Fashion Playtes (Again)
Fashion Playtes recently announced an oversubscribed up round led by our friends at Fairhaven Capital. The company has a platform enabling custom clothing design by tween girls (ages 6-12). It is a simple concept really. Girls can go on the web and choose different embellishments to be sewn onto dresses, shirts, pants, bags, etc. ...
