I came to the US on an h1b visa. I’d like to think I’ve been a net positive for the country.
RT if you or a family member are also an immigrant who has been net positive for the US
1/32 Mary Meeker’s 2019 internet trends report deck is always a must read on consumer internet, SaaS, and the general economy. I made some notes on it as I always do. It’s the 31 pages of the 300+ page report that are most relevant to me. Here they come…
@AmyChanta
Same. It's why we send our kids to a chinese immersion school; we can't teach them and we want them to know how to speak since we never got the opportunity to (and opted out for the same reasons you did truth be told)
In checkout line at Safeway:
Me (to person standing right behind me): Excuse me, would you mind moving further away
Her: Why? I'm not sick!
Me: Maybe I am. That's the point
Her: <Moves to another line>
.
@Blockchain
added 120k+ new users yesterday (that’s more than the population of Berkeley!) and sent 6X Venmo's transaction volume. This
#bitcoin
thing. I thinks it’s going to be big...
A decade ago I was doing the same job at the same firm, living in the same house and married to the same woman as today. I do have a new car though. So that’s progress!
Was telling an entrepreneur today that VCs aren't stupid, but we are ignorant. We don't understand the nuances of your business as well as you do, but we can grasp the key things we need to believe to invest. So if we ask the wrong question to that end, help us ask the right ones
Great news for the startup ecosystem. The Biden administration has effectively created a Startup Entrepreneur Visa.
Thanks to the
@nvca
for advocating for this program under the leadership of
@BarryEggers
My 80 yo father in law who has been a US citizen for decades was walking near our house yesterday when a middle aged white man pulled over to tell him “Go back to your place. You don’t belong here. You’re not wanted here”.
So that’s making America great again.
1/ Why do people look at LTV/CAC? It informs eventual steady state profitability.
LTV = cumulative contribution margin (often over 3 years)
CAC = fully loaded customer acquisition cost (media + other marketing costs)
If LTV<CAC you're losing money on each customer.
(thread)
1/10 Today
@Affirm
is going public. It’s the next step in the company’s journey and the culmination of years of hard work from
@mlevchin
and team. I’ve been lucky to get a front row seat on that journey.
The conclusion of a study trying to correlate IQ with success: “High but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.”
"If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children." - Confucius
Incredibly responsible to acknowledge when they couldn’t see a path and return capital to investors and time to the team. Would be much worse for all concerned to push a rock uphill without hope of reaching the top until it rolled back down and crushed the company.
Consumer apps are now more part of pop culture than technology, and LA has always been one of the centers of pop culture in the US. Silicon Valley has never been a center of pop culture for anything.
"A CEO has 50 plates spinning at a time and her job is to decide which 10 to keep spinning and which 40 to let drop. Execs are either plate adders or plate removers. Plate adders have to go"
-
@cquarles
(CEO
@Corelsoftware
; Former CEO
@OpenTable
, Former SVP-GM
@Disney
)
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” -Pablo Picasso
True not just in art, but product management, investing etc One error I see is early-career people disregarding rules altogether. The other, in mid-career, is overly applying rules once learned.
Founders: What criteria would you use to rate the quality of a meeting with a VC? (e.g How respectful were they? How helpful were they? How well did they understand your company? What else?)
Good thread from Josh on reconciling the valuation of
@joinClubhouse
:
-Series A: 4/20 ~1k DAU, $100M pre
-Series B: 1/20 ~1M DAU, $1B pre
vs
@Snapchat
at same rounds:
-Seed: 4/12 90k DAU, $4.25M pre
-Series A: 12/12 3M DAU, $61M pre
-Series B: 6/13 19M DAU, $800M pre
Clubhouse is certainly having a week. With people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Vlad Tenev having big public conversation. All thanks to
@sriramk
and moreso
@aarthir
. I have gotten a lot of questions about it’s $1B valuation and if it is really “worth it” so fast?
We’d all like to think that the best product wins. But it often does not. And when it does not, the reason is usually a larger competitor's networks effects and ability to fast follow:
Even the biggest companies can only focus on 3-5 things at a time. It's hard to compete head to head with FAANG's A team. It isn't so hard to compete against their C team. If what you're doing isn't a top priority to them, they're beatable
@jrichlive
1. I don’t need to drink to fit in
2. I can’t have it all. Work, family, fitness, hobbies and sleep are all competing in a zero sum game.
3. It’s better to have other people feel smart than to have them feel that you are smart
1/7 We deserve more women in tech as founders, as funders, as early employees, as engineers and leaders. Otherwise, terrific talent and potential is not fully realized.
I’m just finishing two weeks of intermittent feasting. Benefits include a renewed appreciation of tropical fruit, a happy belly, general well-being and an excuse to buy new clothes.
Success in Venture Capital ultimately comes down to getting an entrepreneur to pick you. And getting lucky. Here are my thoughts on how to be a good investor:
The
#1
fundraising mistake I see founders make is treating the pitch deck as a vehicle for the delivery of facts, when in fact it is a vehicle for the delivery of emotions.
In the US we have real messaging app fragmentation. But we largely all know when to text, when to Snap and when to DM. We tried to make this implicit decision more explicit here.
1/ Many are trying to reconcile the "We're open for business" message from VCs with a sense that deal flow is slowing down. I know why my intent and my behavior is divergent; perhaps it applies to others also (thread)
Many successful entrepreneurs start a company because they have a compelling passion about a problem that they want to solve.
Few successful entrepreneurs find a problem that they want to solve because they have a compelling passion to start a company.
1/ I love to connect people when it's a mutually beneficial intro, but I always request that the asker send me a "Clean Email" so that I can clear the intro with the prospective connection.
What is a Clean Email ™
🧵👇
Earlier this year, an Indian company set the world record for most viewers for an OTT video stream. 10m concurrent viewers, 2-5x more than any us stream. Here’s what we can learn from that:
An exciting step forward as we expand our network — we’re partnering with
@Amazon
to deliver
@Affirm
’s flexibility and transparency to select customers at checkout in the U.S.
"People who are right a lot of the time often change their minds. It’s perfectly healthy to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.”
-
@JeffBezos
Absolutely this! Like Picasso said, learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. Before you learn the rules you say yes too often. When you only apply the rules you don't say yes enough. But when you understand the why behind the rules you get your yes back.
One thing I was taught as a young VC is that new investors want to say yes to new investments too often. So you get more selective and say yes less often over time. I think there's a second wave where you find your groove and want to say yes more often again based on experience.
When given the choice between fixing something that is broken and amplifying something that is working, always choose the later. Even if it means with living with the bug
How to Build a Breakout Brand = Organic Strategies + Paid Campaigns. If you’re launching a brand today, you’ll have a big leg up by utilizing one of these organic channels: an owned content channel, organic social, or real-world word-of-mouth:
Silicon Valley is changing “This dispersion of startups embodies a deep irony. The technology industry, which has disrupted nearly all other sectors, is disrupting itself.”
#RiseOfRest
If you work at a company where I am a board member and you believe that you have been discriminated against at work due to your race or gender, you can email me at jeremy
@lsvp
.com and I will ensure that it is looked into
How can a DNVB increase LTV?
- Increase prices (uncommon)
- Increase contribution margin (economies of scale)
- SKU proliferation (the most proactive approach)
Am I missing any?
cc:
@kirstenagreen
@Nik_Quinn
@dunn
@rebeccak46
1/19 Great article in
@theeconomist
- explains that Entertainment is what drives internet use for the next 1bn users. (paywalled) some highlights below:
.
@FortniteGame
entered popular culture so quickly because it shares many of the viral characteristics of social networks. Here are ten ways the game echoes social software:
New tonight —
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s adopted hometown of San Francisco on Tuesday formally condemned the naming of a major hospital after him and his wife, the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy.
Three ways to ask the same question when investing at an early stage:
“Why Now?” -
@sequoia
“What’s the unique insight?” -
@lightspeedvp
“Revisit fundamental assumptions and check the time stamp” -
@eladgil
Diversity means including people from a range of different social & ethnic backgrounds & of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.
Individual people can't be diverse
Groups of people can be diverse
Please don't describe a person as diverse when you mean "not a white man"
I was the first investor in
@blader
’s first company (serious business!) & can vouch for the fact that he could not read an income statement. It does not surprise me that over 12 years he still can’t, and to avoid doing so he is literally going to start a company
12 years ago, I started my first company. I didn’t know how to read an income statement.
12 years later, I was running
@sandboxvr
. I still barely knew how to read an income statement.
Financials make me feel stupid, and I know I’m not alone in feeling this way …
“
@Fortnite
is not a game they play... it’s a place they go with friends... It’s fulfilling the same development role as those illicit teen spaces from the 1970s and ’80s — those dodgy youth clubs, arcades, and video stores that we discovered unchaperoned.”
I spent my first Independence Day as an H1B immigrant, in 1996. I finally became a citizen in 2016, to vote.
I've learned that on the 4th we celebrate freedom. Yet we are not yet free of systemic racism.
Injustice against one of us is injustice against
#allofus
.
#BLM
.
@wsj
has great stats on
@tiktok_us
. Engagement is strong -8 sessions and 45+min per day. $1b+ in annual revenue. Surprisingly, $1b+ in marketing spend. We haven’t seen a US social media winner spend meaningfully for customer acquisition before.
Here’s a strong case for not shotgun-marrying a board member with a 2-day process.
Brutal, but 1/100th brutal as the founders and other board members enduring this guy for years
In
@forbes
list of 30 Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2019, three have more revenue than equity raised:
@Rothys
: Raised $42M, 2018E Rev, $140M
@truepill_rx
: Raised $13M, 2018E Rev: $48M
@Davesavesyou
: Raised $13M, 2018E Rev, $19M
How did
@Amazon
build 100+ private label brands in <10 years? "About 70% of the searches done on Amazon’s are for generic goods. That means consumers are typing in “men’s underwear” or “running shoes” rather than asking, specifically, for Hanes or Nike."
Entrepreneurs, write a will. When Colin Kroll died he didn't have one. Same with Tony Hsieh.
It might feel morbid, and hopefully will be irrelevant, but you should give thought to who inherits your money and just as important, your stock and your board seat.