Lunch Links - April 8th, 2014

Major Moves

Neura focus on how people interact with their smart devices, and tries to make it as simple as possible.

Neura, a Bay-area / Israeli startup that seeks to integrate "internet of things" and wearable devices under common layers of technology, has raised $2M in Series A funding in a round led by Greenhouse Capital Partners.

Another Bay-area / Israeli startup, Tel Aviv's Kenshoo, just raised $20M to set their valuation between $400M and $500M.  Kenshoo provides a software platform for advertisers to manage their online marketing campaigns, and makes revenue from taking a percentage of the $5B in ad spending done on its platform annually.

North of the border, Toronto-based Wattpad raised $46M in Series C funding to aid in its vision to create a mobile online community of writers and readers.


Personal Blogs

Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, describes how the rise of mobile apps is drawing development talent out of the mobile web:

This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing. 

Moreover, there are signs that it will only get worse. Ask any web company and they will tell you that they value app users more than web users. This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Resources are going to app development over web development. As the mobile web UX further deteriorates, the momentum toward apps will only increase.

Entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster notes that a lot of reference calls end up being useless, and offers a guide on how to make better ones:

10. How to interpret references 

Finally, I’d like to point out that you need to be careful about how you actually interpret references. If you get somebody who doesn't say totally glowing things about your candidate make sure: 

• You think critically about whether that person may have biases that led him to the conclusions he has about your candidates  

• Make sure to ask other people about those specific qualities that the reference said weren't good – even if you have to call back people with whom you’re already spoken. 

• Understand whether any negative information is something that would stop you from wanting to hire the person. Everybody has weaknesses. 

The things that are always non-starters for me? People with attitude problems. Negative people. People who cause conflicts unnecessarily. People I perceive as not having good moral compasses.

Practical advice of the day:  Scotty Loveless of Overthought.org writes a detailed guide on using your iOS device battery to maximum efficiency:

Step 6: Turn Off Battery Percentage 

That's right, you heard me. 

Turn off that battery percentage meter and stop worrying about your battery drain. You can find this setting in Settings > General > Usage, right above where your battery times are listed. 

One thing I found in my Genius Bar experience is that people that are anxious about their iOS device battery life are constantly checking it to see the percentage and how much it has dropped from the last time they checked it. So if you check your device twice as much, simply to check on the battery life, you are essentially halving the time your device will last. 

Stop freaking out and enjoy your life. There are more important things to worry about than your device's battery life. The control freak inside you might freak out the first few days you do this, but you'll get used to it.

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.

Lunch Links - March 31st, 2014

Major Moves

Crossbar Incorporated is a Bay-area consumer electronics company working to usher in a new generation of non-volatile memory through "Resistive RAM" (RRAM) tech.  They'll get some help in their goals through $25M in Series C funding, joined by SAIF Partners, Artiman Ventures, KPCB, Northern Light Venture Capital as well as my alma mater, the University of Michigan.  Founder Wei Lu previously worked in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of Michigan.  

ClearStory Data, another Bay-area startup, wants to make it simple for business users to gather data from dispersed data sets across internal sources, corporate sources, Hadoop, and the Web.  They have received $21M in Series B funding, in a round led by DAG Ventures and heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and KPCB.  

Kitchensurfing, a startup based in Brooklyn, is seeking to make finding a private chef as easy as booking a hotel room online.  They received $15M in Series B funding, in a round led by Tiger Global Management and joined by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, and may raise their valuation to approximately $40M.

Personal Blogs

Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer, a San Francisco startup that helps you share across all social media, explains how his co-founder and himself structured themselves when the time came to use labels such as CEO and COO.

In the first week of December we were in Thailand for our second company retreat. It was during our time there that Leo and I had a lot of lengthy walking meetings around Pattaya about the structure of our roles. We talked a lot. I couldn’t think of a more perfect setting for us to figure these things out. We’re both optimistic people and despite the tough conversations we knew we’d come to a conclusion about how things should work. We had gratitude for how lucky we were to be in Thailand and had built a company to a stage where this problem had arisen.

Justin Kan, new YC partner and founder of Exec and Justin.tv, gives a post-mortem on Exec Errands, an app that sought to find people willing to do simple tasks in their spare time, and offers his own diagnosis of what he would look at differently.

Customer acquisition was hard. Lyft and Uber are viral online-to-offline businesses, because many of the times you call a ride you take it with others (who subsequently think it’s an incredible experience and download the app). Exec Errands was a not nearly as viral (and cleaning not at all), because you could use those services without ever telling anyone.

In an old post, but one that bears mentioning, Ben Milne, founder of payment network Dwolla, advises to “solve problems that piss you off.”

Q. “How much does this really piss me off?”


A. Tons. Shit, I hate this. I see it everywhere. I sign up for new services hoping it does it differently, and it never does.

Something I hope you can take away from this: 

YOU CAN’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM WHILE YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO IT. 

So, I know it bugs me to no end, and I know I can’t let it go. It’s not a personal issue, and the more I think about the time we all lose to this junk, the more it bothers me. This may not be true for others, but for me, if a problem:
1.   Doesn’t get me out of bed
2.   Make me lose sleep
3.   Drive me to the point of getting angry when I see strangers doing it
4.   Make me swear constantly about how obnoxious it is that I’m doing it
5.   Isn’t systemic in society (a lot of people deal with it) 

 Then I shouldn’t solve it!

Lunch Links - March 26th, 2014 - Oculus Rift Acquisition and Candy Crush's IPO Bust

Major Moves

The big deal today, of course, is Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR, maker of the namesake Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, for around $2B ($400M in cash and $1.6B in Facebook common stock).  Mark Zuckerberg announced the deal via his Facebook page at 5:30pm last night, giving the tech community some time to react.  Minecraft creator Markus Persson apparently disagreed with the acquisition, backing out of talks with Oculus VR about creating a Minecraft version for the Oculus Rift:

We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014

Also on Twitter, Marc Andreessen of VC fund Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) noted that A16Z had led funding rounds and excused himself from the deal due to a possible conflict of interests.  Oculus VR previously had raised $91M in Series A and Series B venture funding, and has so far provided a 20x return on that investment, according to Bloomberg.

This deal is Facebook's fourth acquisition of the year, and comes on the heels of its $16B ($4B in cash, $12B worth of stock) acquisition of WhatsApp last month.

King Digital, the digital entertainment company behind Candy Crush Saga, had a lackluster IPO this morning, breaking below their syndicate bid and falling from $22.50/share to around $20.00/share, a drop near 10%.  The drop seemed to be fueled by comparisons to Zynga's deflated IPO and fears of King's Candy Crush Saga being a one-hit wonder.

However, unlike Zynga, King has both significant profits and a profitable track record.  King's CEO Ricardo Zacconi noted on CNBC this morning that their company has been cash flow positive for 9 years, and has only taken $9M in outside capital.


Personal Blogs

After reading Zuckerberg's announcement, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures writes about how the Oculus VR acquisition signals Facebook's search for the "next mobile", which could be anything from virtual reality to drones.

Entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster reflects on his six-and-a-half years as a venture capitalist.

Far above the rabble of today's deals, marketer Seth Godin blogs a few philosophical sentences about money vs story.