The Angel VC

DECEMBER 16, 2012

If you're building a modern SaaS solution for the Fortune 5,000,000 , the importance of your marketing website cannot be overstated. In the old world of enterprise software, most software vendors used to have pretty lame websites. Most of them were poorly designed and looked very technical and uninspiring, and the only images they contained were the seemingly obligatory stock photos (suit-wearing business people trying to out-smile each other, handshake close-ups and of course an attractive head

SaaS 164

SaaS Marketing Transportation Startup 164

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 20, 2012

About three years ago, I started journaling my startup education by blogging. In retrospect, blogging has been one of the most rewarding activities for me as an investor. Blogging helps me some observe changes in the start-up ecosystem, communicate trends primarily through data while strengthening and building relationships. It’s been more gratifying than I could have hoped.

Social Media 100

Social Media Mobile Trends Innovation 100

Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 9, 2012

There are some great lessons here regarding SaaS confidentiality agreements (aka NDAs). Background : A startup SaaS company disclosed its confidential consumer electronic buyback program information when trying to win the business from a ‘prospective customer’ = Best Buy. Best Buy gave all the right buying signals and Techforward went even further and disclosed its trade secrets (internal workings of its proprietary analytical model) to Best Buy.

SaaS 52

SaaS Compensation Software Review Education 52

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

DECEMBER 2, 2012

Lots of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies offer free trials. But in even the best cases, only about a modest portion of the free trialers actually convert into paying customers. In fact, many times the free trialers don't even try the free stuff. People download the trial, but then they get distracted. Or they don't have the time to use it. Or they don't have the data they need to get started.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Investment SaaS Data 100

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The Angel VC

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Last August, Marc Andreessen wrote a great essay titled "Why software is eating the world". In his article, which got a lot of attention in the tech world, Marc explains why and how a variety of industries have been and continue to be disrupted by software. Read it if you haven't read it yet, it's a well-written and inspiring post by one of the most successful and knowledgable people in the Internet industry.

Software 131

Software Travel Mobile Communication 131

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 18, 2012

When I started working at Google, I heard the word generalist over and over. “We only hire generalists,” I was told. Eight years later this mantra is pretty common. I hear it often both referring to the desired characteristics of new hires and also the aspirations of a team - “we want to be a team of generalists”. At the time, I understood the word generalist to mean someone really good at a lot of things.

Travel 100

Travel Interviewing Startup Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 17, 2012

The famous global macro hedge fund manager George Soros once said, “I don’t play the game by a particular set of rules; I look for changes in the rules of the game.” Inside the House of Money. Soros' insight is equally well applied to startups. Successful startups discover and leverage changes in the rules of the game. Discovering the changes in the rules of the game is one of the hardest things about starting a company, but understanding precisely the change and developing a hypothesis for expl

Startup 100

Startup Social Media Government Mobile 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 16, 2012

Email and most meetings aren’t work. We all know this to be true. But huge swaths of our days are allocated to meetings and answering email. It’s impossible to accomplish much aside from information dissemination. A close friend, who like me is a productivity nut, asked me a question that made this point clearly: What fraction of your day is spent in meetings you asked for compared to meetings that were asked of you?

Metrics 100

Metrics 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2012

I call the last working week in December Board Week because it’s packed with board meetings. These board meetings are often the most important of the year. By virtue of their place on the calendar, everyone in the room is thinking more strategically, less tactically. These meetings set the tone and strategy for the company for the upcoming year. I’ve assembled a checklist below of top 5 things I’ve seen founders do in and around the end of the year that position their companies for success in th

Startup 100

Startup Sales Hiring Headcount Compensation 100

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Innovation

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 12, 2012

Great teams accomplish amazing things. But it’s rare for any founding team to have all the constituent parts on the day they start the company. Most startups will need to build a strong management team whose strengths and knowledge complement the founding team. Finding the right people to help starts with being honest. As Swizec of Zemanta wrote yesterday, there simply isn’t enough time in the day for founders to manage all the key parts of a startup: BD, hiring, fundraising, goal setting, produ

Startup 100

Startup Management Engineering Communication 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 11, 2012

Tech startups write a ton of code. Broadly speaking, most of that code base is customer facing. But to be successful, the product must be supported by a litany of great “invisible” technology - the internal tools and products that help a company scale. They are the skeleton of the startup. At Google, there were hundreds if not thousands of small internal tools built to solve problems.

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Scale Software Travel 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 10, 2012

Performance marketing is a skill every startup should hone as a core competency as quickly as possible. Performance marketing creates a process where $1 invested in the business creates greater than $1 in output - a growth machine. Building a growth engine. The goal of performance marketing is simple: to determine, as precisely as possible, the expected value of every current and potential user.

Startup 100

Startup Marketing Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 9, 2012

Believe it or not, this pig has a Twitter account, @impeePiggy. Whenever someone drops change into the pig, the pig counts the change using an optical sensor, increments the savings and tweets the value of its contents using an electric imp. This deceptively intelligent pig has a lot to do with disruption: In a conversation with renowned Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen about the newspaper industry, Joshua Benton remarked, “The perception of the incoming disruptors is that t

Banking 100

Banking Technology Startup Communication 100

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Revenue

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Over lunch last week, a good friend who is an entrepreneur and I were brainstorming about the features of his optimal initial target market. His product hasn’t yet launched so he still had some decisions to make about which users and use cases to target. We wondered if there were a rule of thumb about initial target customer segments. We took out a blank sheet of paper and came up with this: Ideal Customer = max (DAU / MAU).

Product Marketing 100

Product Marketing Pricing Development Marketing 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 5, 2012

Jeff Bezos appeared on Charlie rose two weeks ago and spoke about Amazon’s history, future and best of all, its culture. In the interview, Bezos discussed Amazon’s core values: We are willing to be misunderstood. We are obsessed with customers, not competitors. We are long term thinkers. While all of them are critical to Amazon’s success, my favorite is the first because it combines three critical concepts for startups.

Interviewing 100

Interviewing Startup Technology Software 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 4, 2012

I rowed crew in college. I walked on to the team and fell in love with the sport the very first time we pushed the boat from the dock and took a stroke. Looking back on those four years, I often draw parallels between rowing and entrepreneurship. My freshman year, Joe Holland, who had raced for the national team in the eighties had taken a sabbatical to coach the freshmen team.

Entrepreneurship 100

Entrepreneurship Management Marketing Business 100

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 3, 2012

When going to market, startups tend to pursue one of two sales strategies, either education sales or execution sales.These sales strategies are substantially different. They demand different sales cycles, pricing and market positioning - potentially even different team members. The Education Sale. If your customers don’t know they need your product yet, then the sales process is an education sale.

Education 100

Education Sales Market Segmentation Consulting 100

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Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 2, 2012

In this month’s HBR, Clay Christensen and Maxwell Wessell published an article targeted to the CEOs of large companies on how to prevent disruption to their businesses. They point to five major barriers to competition in a market listed in increasing order of difficulty to assail. Instead of reviewing the incumbent’s strategy, I’m going to flip these around to reverse engineer these defenses and build a startup’s playbook for disruption with examples from our portfolio.

Engineering 100

Engineering Startup Technical Review Marketing 100

Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 9, 2012

There are some great lessons here regarding SaaS confidentiality agreements (aka NDAs). Background : A startup SaaS company ( Techforward ) disclosed its confidential consumer electronic buyback program information when trying to win the business from a ‘prospective customer’ = Best Buy. Best Buy gave all the right buying signals and Techforward went even further and disclosed its trade secrets (internal workings of its proprietary analytical model) to Best Buy.

SaaS 40

SaaS Compensation Software Review Education 40

Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 9, 2012

There are some great lessons here regarding SaaS confidentiality agreements (aka NDAs). Background : A startup SaaS company ( Techforward ) disclosed its confidential consumer electronic buyback program information when trying to win the business from a ‘prospective customer’ = Best Buy. Best Buy gave all the right buying signals and Techforward went even further and disclosed its trade secrets (internal workings of its proprietary analytical model) to Best Buy.

SaaS 40

SaaS Compensation Software Review Education 40

Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 9, 2012

There are some great lessons here regarding SaaS confidentiality agreements (aka NDAs). Background : A startup SaaS company ( Techforward ) disclosed its confidential consumer electronic buyback program information when trying to win the business from a ‘prospective customer’ = Best Buy. Best Buy gave all the right buying signals and Techforward went even further and disclosed its trade secrets (internal workings of its proprietary analytical model) to Best Buy.

SaaS 40

SaaS Compensation Software Review Education 40

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Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 9, 2012

There are some great lessons here regarding SaaS confidentiality agreements (aka NDAs). Background : A startup SaaS company ( Techforward ) disclosed its confidential consumer electronic buyback program information when trying to win the business from a ‘prospective customer’ = Best Buy. Best Buy gave all the right buying signals and Techforward went even further and disclosed its trade secrets (internal workings of its proprietary analytical model) to Best Buy.

SaaS 40

SaaS Compensation Software Review Education 40

Aber Law Firm

DECEMBER 9, 2012

There are some great lessons here regarding SaaS confidentiality agreements (aka NDAs). Background : A startup SaaS company ( Techforward ) disclosed its confidential consumer electronic buyback program information when trying to win the business from a ‘prospective customer’ = Best Buy. Best Buy gave all the right buying signals and Techforward went even further and disclosed its trade secrets (internal workings of its proprietary analytical model) to Best Buy.

SaaS 40

SaaS Compensation Education Software Review 40