Lunch Links - April 3rd, 2014

Major Moves

Spotted @SoFi in Midtown Manhattan! Awesome startup that refinances student loans via alumni networks. pic.twitter.com/xQxCImV4va
— Matt Nicholas (@MattAtMich) January 20, 2014

SoFi, the San Francisco-based startup that favorably refinances student loans through the university's own alumni network, has raised $80M in Series C funding, led by Discovery Capital Management.

Imgur, the image-hosting platform based in San Francisco, raised $40M in Series A funding in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by social link-sharing site Reddit.  This round comes two months after Imgur debuted an analytics platform for pro users and advertisers.

Fonemine, a Bay-area startup that develops enterprise mobility software, has raised $4.5M in Series B funding led by Ann Arbor-based Michigan eLab.

Personal Blogs

In an older post, Jason Goldberg, founder of designer sales site Fab, lists off 5 things that most young people don't yet know.

1. It’s better to do one thing exceptionally well than to do many things really good.  

News flash: Specialists get farther than generalists. If you want to rise to the top, own something. Be known for something. Have your one thing that you are simply the best at. And own it with pride. 

In my career I’ve found that people who have unique talents tend to rise to the top because they offer that unique something that others dont. Now, that unique talent can also be something broad like being a general, or being the the guy whose best at code reviews. My point is that you’ve got to be really good at something, not just kinda good at a lot of things.

2. It's okay to say I don't know.   

The young person who pretends that he or she knows all the answers comes across as sneaky and hard to believe. The young person who says I don’t know and then who comes back with smart well though-out answers, earns respect and trust.

3. People will do great things for you because they want to, not because they have to.  

People will do things for you because they have to, but they’ll only do great things for you because they want to. That means you need to spend as much time getting your colleagues to like working with you as you do getting them to respect your work. 

Just because you are smart will not always mean that you are effective. If you want others to want to do amazing things for you / with you, you need to inspire them and ingratiate yourself to them. 

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures ponders what it would be like to move from blogging to tweeting, and not just as an April Fools joke.

Tweeting is easier than blogging. It was that single insight that led me to email Evan Williams back in the spring/summer of 2007 and ask him if he’d allow USV to invest in Twitter. Thankfully he responded to that email and Ev and Jack did allow us to do that.

I had been blogging for almost four years at that point and was completely sold on the huge benefits that come from publicly sharing your insights, opinions, and decisions. I would advocate blogging to everyone. And folks would try it. And that vast majority of them (way greater than 90%) would not be able to sustain it. So when tweeting showed up, I thought “well this has most of the benefits of blogging but is at least 10x easier”. And then I wrote the email. Most good investment decisions are not more complicated than that.

Entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster says hard deadlines help prevent your software development from becoming a broad research project.

There’s a healthy balance between allowing a design team to dream up functional requirements, talk with customers, analyze competitors and for technical projects – research the latest cool-kid tools to play with.

Design with no constraints becomes a research project.

You see there is a creative tension along the spectrum of  time and scope. If you pull too hard at the scope end of the chain your time drifts. If you pull hard at the time end of the spectrum you end up shipping inferior product. As obvious as it seems I assure you that many projects I’m involved with don’t sit down and have hard enough conversations about the need to hit time-based deadlines – so dates slip.