Disqus - Latest Comments for Healy_Jones

Re: Could Staples go private? - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blog Term Sheet

Healy Jones — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:10:40 -0000

I'm not sure I follow your logic. Staples is the second largest ecommerce company in the world. Only Amazon moves more product via web/mobile stores.

Re: The Cloud Medals in London Olympics

Healy Jones — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:01:13 -0000

Am I the only one who had a lot of spinning/jumpy video as I tried to watch it online?

Re: Signaling Pricing Expectations Early in Seed Investment Discussions

Healy Jones — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:30:07 -0000

David, solid logic.

Usually I've found that the most sophisticated entrepreneurs never start the valuation discussion; it's the investor who asks something along the line of "what are your valuation expectations."

How would you recommend an entrepreneur respond if they a) don't really know what the market rate is, but are open to the #2 discussion you highlight above or b) if they are getting interest from other investors at a particular valuation level (i.e. there are other investors who have, somehow, indicated they are open to a particular price point or convertible structure?)

Re: OfficeDrop Review

Healy Jones — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:30:54 -0000

Trevor, thanks for testing us (I work at OfficeDrop)! We are working on image enhancements, which will make the image taken with the OfficeDrop app automatically less blurry & tighten up the text in the things you scan. Also - we do connect with FreshBooks, although you do have to use our web interface to use this integration. Finally, if you really want to access a lot of your files on the phone & are a PC, you can download our Windows sync client, sync up to 5 GB for free (more if you want to pay) and then search for, find and share from your Android.
Thanks again for trying our app!

Re: The Rise & Fall of Great Venture Firms [Part 1]

Healy Jones — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:30:28 -0000

Sweet post.

There is a nuance to your point #1 that I think is important. When you founded Nextview, you founded it with two special people - two guys who you knew really, trusted, had a history with, etc. Some might even call it friendship - that's a pretty powerful force binding you together.

When you pass on the firm to the next generation (hopefully you are really successful and that happens!) you will pass it on to a group of people who didn't pick each other in the same way. You'll pass it on to guys & gals who YOU picked, not them. So they don't have the exact same ties that bind and that will keep them together in quite the same way. That can create a whole host of issues upon a generational transfer of a fund. And I have absolutely no idea how one would manage those issues, but clearly some funds have figured it out.

Re: Feature Friday: Friendly Failing

Healy Jones — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:32:00 -0000

The conversations we've had and surveys we've done with thousands of our service's users happen to make my personal opinion not particularly important. People wanted to work offline with an app that was originally designed to be connected, so we had to adjust.

Re: Feature Friday: Friendly Failing

Healy Jones — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 10:33:21 -0000

No, users usually don't want you hogging up their bandwidth the second they get back into coverage. They are much happier if you prompt them or if they have to take an explicit action that uses up their connectivity when they get back into coverage. My company has a graceful notification when connection problems prevent users from uploading (it's actually a feature; turns out people like to do scanning when they are on planes coming back from business trips; saves them time and gives them something productive to do when they don't have connectivity.)

But when users get back to having a connection they often want to do something really important that they couldn't do when they were disconnected - stuff like check emails or use GPS. If you hog their bandwidth with less critical apps they aren't happy. It really seems to be better to prompt them or let them choose to use their bandwidth.

Re: Teaching Lean Entrepreneurs

Healy Jones — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:44:51 -0000

Tyler, thanks for moderating the panel. It's great that Wharton is embracing entrepreneurship, both with professors focused on it and by welcoming back graduates who are trying to make a go of running a lean startup!

Re: Study: More buyouts succeed in 'red states'

Healy Jones — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 10:34:04 -0000

I feel like it's an interesting idea for a study, and the researcher has collect a very impressive number of transactions. I'm not convinced that the blue/red definition is good enough for such an analysis. But I'd bet there is historical data on the "attractiveness" of different states for business or the minimum wage by state. I'd be very curious to see some studies on PE returns vs. those metrics.

Re: Kendall Squared: Rising Rents Squeezing Startups

Healy Jones — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:19:04 -0000

Curt, great series. And the road to our Alewife office got paved recently! :)

Re: CIOs to Tablets: It’s Business Time

Healy Jones — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:11:04 -0000

I get roped into a lot of meetings with both big and small technology companies, and pretty much every meeting has at least a couple of people with an iPad. In terms of the companies I'm meeting with, they are clearly the earlish adopters, but still, the trend is clear. Lots of people within corporations are using iPads everyday.

Re: Kenny Kellogg: Reblog: What News Sites People are Reading, by State

Healy Jones — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:15:25 -0000

The onion is a news source?

Re: Hands-On: TweetDeck Wants To Be Your Pro Twitter Client Again

Healy Jones — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:43:12 -0000

I really like the old version of Tweetdeck, so am excited to try out the new one. Thanks for highlighting some of the new stuff so I can be sure to check it all out.

Also, it would have taken me a while to notice it was HTML5 and no longer AIR. Let's see if HTML5 lives up to the hype...

Re: Why I left Goldman Sachs – oh please

Healy Jones — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:16:27 -0000

I'm very hopeful that the Atlas portfolio does well enough that you can start to really influence some bankers as you look to big time exits Fred!!! :)

Re: Consumer or Business? I don’t care!

Healy Jones — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:22:18 -0000

Ok, makes sense.

Re: Consumer or Business? I don’t care!

Healy Jones — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:54:05 -0000

This may have happened when the last bubble burst, but it didn't happen before the last bubble burst. There were big follow on rounds until after the market crashed. If we are in a bubble, it hasn't yet popped, has it? I mean, there are some great companies going public right now, so I don't see a pop. Or are you referring specifically to a seed bubble?

Re: Why I left Goldman Sachs – oh please

Healy Jones — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:49:45 -0000

Fred, your post rings true. However, if it took you 7 years to really understand what the investment banking business was about why can't it have taken this Greg dude 12 years? I mean, if he's 58.3% as smart as you it might just have taken him that much longer to "get" it, right?

The other place that we can ascribe guilt on the traditional ibanking side is the clients (I'm not talking about the use of a bank's balance sheet to trade against a client, I'm talking about the traditional "old school" advisory business that used to be a big part of a banks raison d'etre.) I started out as a baby banker working for a MD who would tell clients when he thought a deal they were trying to do was a bad idea. Most of the time the clients either fired him, didn't give him the deal, etc. The clients wanted to do deals just as badly as the bankers - either because they were incorrectly incentivized by their board or because they thought it was fun/sexy. He did land and keep a few really big clients with his "tell it like it is" strategy, and for him the revenue impact was likely slightly more positive than negative, but the amount of headache and effort required was intense.

Re: http://williamsulinski.com/post/18794386918

Healy Jones — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:40:17 -0000

Good luck with the new idea Will! I'll be in SF a lot so you can't get away from me that easily.

If you need any "free" advice on acquisition.io I'm not your guy, but I do work for beer... and I'm happy to help in any way that I can. Very curious to see what you are working on with it.

Re: http://bryce.vc/post/13906009815

Healy Jones — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:41:03 -0000

I'm pretty sure Delta uses that ad money to keep themselves in business, so technically you are getting value. If you look at their financials, they are barely hanging on there...
And they show you videos because they can use existing infrastructure (i.e. the screens and video player in the plans) and because the advertisers can use existing ads instead of having to spend the time and money to develop additional advertising collateral.

Re: Cheap Will Be Smart. Expensive Will Be Dumb.

Healy Jones — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:40:58 -0000

The military has been doing this for years. Sure the nuclear sub is 15 years old, but the targeting system, sonar system, weapons, etc are up to date. Same for fighter jets, air craft carriers, etc.

Re: The Boston Success Project - 10 Ways We're Winning

Healy Jones — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:25:08 -0000

Yes, this partnership is pretty cool (of course I'm biased.) But Nuance is a pretty big local tech company and we (OfficeDrop) are working very closely with them.

Re: The Boston Success Project - 10 Ways We're Winning

Healy Jones — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 09:39:30 -0000

Good list Jason!

Re: Apps Growing in Popularity and Importance

Healy Jones — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:24:01 -0000

Totally agree; OfficeDrop (my company) is experiencing tremendous growth via our app strategy. People want to take full advantage of the power of their devices, and apps are the way to do this.

Re: SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement - Increase Conversions & Lower Churn

Healy Jones — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:02:26 -0000

This is really well done and timely for my startup!

Re: Can a venture capitalist add value beyond money?

Healy Jones — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:30:03 -0000

Mark, beyond the advice one area where a VC CAN add value is quality introductions. Intros to new potential partners, exits, management team members, reporters... it's a lot of work, but it really matters. I'm willing to bet that a statistically meaningful part of some of the big West Coast firms' returns are from helping get their companies into the right potential exits/partners.