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 Mobile Travel Communication 131

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 Data 100

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

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

Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

Innovation

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 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