Musings

The unit economics in carsharing are extremely challenging. I had an interesting conversation with Ezra Goldman yesterday, who made the case that the costs are as follows, in order of cost: – Parking– Insurance– Inventory I’ve heard arguments that Zipcar’s challenges in unit economics resulted from cost-prohibitive insurance. I’ve heard others claim that it was from holding inventory. But apparently a fleet of cars involves high startup costs, but maintenance costs (holding inventory) are actually […]

Customer acquisition relies on conversion funnels. Of the X people you start with, X/10=Y click-through to a product. Of the Y who click-through, Z = Y/10 actually buy something. To get to 50 purchases, marketers may send out 100,000 emails, and sometimes 1 million emails. It is understood that the conversion from an unsolicited message sent out to a purchase is less than 1% in most cases. That is, the growth strategy for most traditional […]

I was on a thread with my colleagues Craig, Alberto, and Ryan where Craig proposed that “social enterprise was eating the enterprise” and it got me thinking. Is that true? Why? I work for Collaborative Fund because I believe it, but what motivates that belief? Here is how I’m currently aiming. Technology has a number of definitions, and a common one is: “The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, esp. in industry: "computer technology”; […]

It’s amazing to me to meet with entrepreneurs from outside the Silicon Valley. I’ve found that in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and even Boston, the valuations are lower, the entrepreneurs are more likely to be thinking about revenue, and the fundraising is proving (on average) more onerous. But really, it pales in comparison when meeting with an entrepreneur from outside the United States. A friend of mine joked that a Demo Day in Europe […]

Some industries tend to have winner-take-all dynamics more than others. These dynamics share the characteristics of “defensibility”. When a product is properly defensible, only a herculean effort or an enormous sum of money can shake it from its position of dominance, protecting it from start-ups and big companies alike. But not all defensible products have monopolistic tendencies, which is the “winner-take-all” dynamic I hope to explore a bit here. Let’s look at internet companies, in […]

It is rampant, and extremely hard to avoid. I met with a number of entrepreneurs yesterday whose backgrounds were highly varied, and whose products were all inspired. I saw a couple kids who went to college together and had been tinkering on websites and launching multiple successful Kickstarter campaigns. I saw a twenty-something who had previously founded and been the principal of a Japanese high school where nobody wears shoes and Ambassadors send their kids. […]

This morning I naively asked on Twitter: “Can someone write a post-mortem on HTML5 taking over mobile? Was it a technical performance failure, or a business strategy failure?” The collection of responses were almost unanimous in saying: it was performance. Users want their apps to be fast, and HTML5 apps weren’t performing well enough. Compiled language implementations (native code like Objective-C on the iPhone) perform better than interpreted language implementations (like HTML5 for mobile web). Quick, […]

Every time someone designs a piece of hardware, she also needs to design a manufacturing line to produce that hardware. This is a non-trivial problem. The early lines of hardware products are always highly un-repeatable, because the designers are still experimenting with different mould injections, circuit designs, CAD software, not to mention the software itself. In this early stages of engineering, where they are doing skews of <100,000 units of their product, they have to pay […]

If you haven’t already done so, read Peter Thiel’s article “End Of The Future”. It is darkly brilliant, and extremely compelling. It speaks to the fact that the energy revolution we were promised in the 70s seems to have stalled; that cars planes and trains don’t move any more quickly today than they did 40 years ago; that the leaps and bounds in biotechnology that we should have made by now seem to still elude […]

I wrote last year that early stage capital increasingly becomes a commodity. Here is a quick summary of why: – You can do MUCH more with MUCH less. There are more free resources in business strategy and legal, in hosting, and prototyping in web and mobile, and even visualizing full UX– The top ranks of entrepreneurs have unionized, working in guilds like YCombinator and 500 Startups, and using these guilds to lead the market, create […]