About 2 years ago I was asked by a founder during a pitch meeting, “how long do you think you’ll be in this job?” It was the first (and only!) time I’d heard that question during a pitch and it caught me totally off guard. It was easy enough to answer (“as long as it’ll have me!”) but when I asked him why, and he nonchalantly replied: “you seem fairly young, so I just wanted to make […]
Twin brothers Sean and Kenneth Salas’ mother, an immigrant from Mexico, started a small Mexican restaurant, and over 25 years, grew it into a chain across Southern California. Over the course of this experience, she navigated the company cashflows, hiring and building a team, operational and logistics scale, and creating a brand. She ended up having to close her business and move back to Mexico, from where the brothers were accepted to University of Berkeley. […]
I was asked “what advice would you have for incoming college students genuinely interested in building products/companies?” on Twitter this summer, and stalled in my response, because I wanted to tell them “any advice I give you is, at least subconsciously, my way of either validating or repudiating my own random choices. My advice is take lots of advice, listen to none of it.” But I couldn’t resist answering eventually. And here’s what I said. 1. Read […]
We have lionized Steve Jobs, and the set of characteristics that he brought to bear over his extraordinary tenure at Apple. I might go so far as to say we have internalized them as the archetype of success for a founder. Fittingly, one description of him, coined by his colleague Bud Tribble in 1981, is his ability to create a “reality distortion field”. Described simply, it’s the way that really dynamic individuals can make listeners believe […]
Everybody says hardware is hard. But here is why. If you can spend a bit of time getting ahead of these challenges ahead of time, maybe your road will be a little less hard. If you have experienced other similar hardware challenges, please share them in the comments! – There is an unhappy tension between demand and defensibility. If you build something for which there is either proven demand, or for which the demand is demonstrated […]
How many of these have you heard of: Express Scripts (by Medco), CVS Health, Prime Therapeutics (by Blue Shield), United Health, Catamaran Corporation? These are the top five pharmacy benefit managers in the United States. PBM’s are demand aggregators for insurers, creating local monopsonies for drug manufacturers. They do this so that the insurance payers can have uniformity among their patients about which medications they cover, and so that they can negotiate discounts by playing […]
Venture capital occupies a strange space in finance, where *real* financial services people don’t consider it finance, largely because a lot of the diligence, assessment, and dealmaking is substantively less quantitative than you might see in middle markets private equity, or mezzanine debt. And that is right, but I don’t think that’s why venture capital is so different. After all, there are plenty of venture capitalists who bring substantive quantitative assessment to their work, even […]
I posed this question on Twitter this week: Has a consumer software or internet startup that launched with an “influencers strategy” ever ended up successful? — Kanyi Maqubela (@km) August 18, 2015 To be honest, it was a slightly cheeky post, as I expected the answers to look like “Of course there aren’t any. All successful consumer internet communities launch with a small, mostly-fringe set of early adopters that start solving their own narrow, niche […]
I’ve been surprised to learn how many companies today are still using SEO/SEM as a primary acquisition tactic, in fields as varied as local services like HVAC repair and plumbing to party supply rental and finding a medical specialist. This surprised me because of three trends I have been following. – As our collective internet time moved further and further to mobile, there was once a question as to whether mobile web would be an effective […]
Two years ago I read a great book describing the creation of the computer. The period between 1930 and 1960 was one of war, paranoia, and frenzied product development. At all costs, the government would spend on the necessary resources to win. It reminded me of Bill Janeway’s description of bubbles, which I want to spend a few minutes on again this morning. By my understanding of Janeway’s framework in “Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy”, downstream […]
Musings 