Disqus - Latest Comments for gscohn

Re: Turn messages into action with the new Asana for Slack

Greg Cohn — Thu, 24 May 2018 18:40:03 -0000

Why do you need my team's names and contact info to support this integration?

Re: Does VC Fund Differentiation Matter?

Greg Cohn — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 18:55:06 -0000

I'm not sure this parallel will really hold up to examination, but the first thing that came to mind on reading this was how ironic it is that the VC category, which often passes on deals that aren't sufficiently "defensible," is itself becoming victim to similar forces.

It seems like VC suffers from oversupply and mature-market dynamics -- too many early-stage VC funds relative to LP demand, "risk-taking first-mover" types of advantages largely gone within seed (at least within the broad market categories most recent-vintage funds are in, ie US, IT, etc), more competition for the best deals, no real information asymmetry about technology and market opportunities, no easy arbitrages, a stampede of fast-follows for anything resembling a new opportunity type. Even if there were some kind of "shakeout" and the bottom quartile of funds up and shut down, it doesn't seem like these dynamics would change fundamentally.

For the near-to-medium term, strategy, deal flow, and execution obviously continue to matter, and I suspect LP's will continue recognize *people* as a primary point of differentiation in picking funds... just as VC's do in picking founder deals.

But my experience working at Yahoo! suggests that relationships only go so far when you're being out-innovated on the product front. I wonder where will those innovations will come from in the VC category.

Re: The Hard Raise

Greg Cohn — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 21:11:32 -0000

Great post. One caveat to this is that I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs (including myself) end up with "hard raises" because they're not bringing market-clearing deals to market, or because they're signaling unrealistic pricing expectations. Seeking a seed round when you lack key team/traction elements and should be looking for friends-and-family investors, for example.

You can hold out for your beliefs, and it certainly makes sense to do this if you have conviction and an all-or-nothing deal model such as a $100M fund thesis, but sometimes reorienting to the right market segment, repricing, or coming back with more traction would be more productive than simply applying more effort. And many entrepreneurs don't realize there are negative effects to chasing unrealistic deals for a prolonged period of time.

(lightly edited, wording)

Re: The Flatiron District

Greg Cohn — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 14:47:51 -0000

I think using 4sq data to generate quality of life scores based on Jane Jacobs-style principles is a really cool idea. Much richer than the "walk scores" the realty sites use. People could also tailor it to their own needs (e.g. outdoor activities, family-friendly things are more important to some than to others).

Re: My Travels In Digital Photo Organizing Hell

Greg Cohn — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 19:23:49 -0000

A comment I tried to post yesterday was lost on a disqus hang, but I share your pain. I went through an analytical process about this a few years ago and landed on Aperture + local complete backups via NAS + a vault of top-rated pictures and important projects to Dropbox. And now that Apple has EOL'd Aperture, I have to start over.

You may want to check out the work Jason Mathai is doing. https://medium.com/vantage/...

Re: Carrying Two Phones

Greg Cohn — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 14:31:05 -0000

There's no reason the phone number can't operate in exactly the same way Snapchat and Twitter do, ie tied at the account level, virtualized to the device(s), accessed by app. (Burner hasn't productized for this use case, but it works effectively this way for texting.)

One challenge is that most people get their numbers and devices from carriers and in ways that are tied to their network connectivity. So, if you port a number to a service like ours, Google Voice, etc, it normally triggers an account cancellation with the outgoing carrier and possibly a termination fee unless you manage that carefully. Because every outgoing carrier is different, it's tricky to scale this on the inbound side without a lot of manual process.

Another challenge is that, on the iPhone at least, the native phone app is inaccessible to developers.

This is obviously all changing fast, happily, given increasingly ubiquitous wifi -- what the carriers hilariously refer to as "unlicensed spectrum" -- and new data connectivity options.

Re: One Simple Paragraph Every Entrepreneur Should Add to Their Convertible Notes

Greg Cohn — Sun, 31 May 2015 01:51:35 -0000

I can attest this is absolutely an issue, one that caught us off guard and caused friction in the priced round that was the follow-on to an early note we did.

Your proposed solution is certainly one viable approach. In some ways it's preferred, because the alternative also creates the possibility of liquidation scenarios where some investors get their money back and then some, while other investors in the same class get less than their money back.

I'm certainly no expert at these things, but my understanding of how this would typically play out when a follow-on priced round is issued is actually a little more complicated and would entail issuing a second "shadow" stock series, e.g. "Series A" and "Series A prime", one having liquidation preferences at face and one, for the discounted investors, conveying liquidation preferences at a discount to face equal to the discount on the price paid.

With that said, the high order bit here is not that this is the one right way to do it, but rather that founders need to understand this concept and make explicit in advance how it's going to be treated.

Many angels and micro-VC's explicitly count on liquidation exits as a key part of their strategy and explicitly go in seeking a discount on the preference as part of their deal model. You could also make a case that a share of stock comes with a lot of rights -- ownership percentage, voting, liquidation, etc. -- and getting a discount price on a share means getting a bargain on all of those things.

So in my view there's no reason this shouldn't be as fungible and negotiable as any other term in a deal, so long as it's explicit. Putting it another way, the mistake isn't conceding it, the mistake is conceding it unknowingly.

Re: Stiking Kilimanjaro from the itinerary | VagaBonding

Greg Cohn — Fri, 29 May 2015 01:42:48 -0000

It is quite cold near the summit at night. I wasn't fully prepared for how cold. (Water jugs getting slushy and toes getting seriously numb even while cold.) The 5-day climb, the antimalarials, hydration and sleep issues, etc, & especially the last few K feet going up were way way harder than the delightful post-summit descent.

It was September when I was there; your seasonal mileage may vary. (I was actually up there on 9/11 and came down to a very weird scene, so my memory may be a little marred.)

Overall it was beautiful and majestic and intense on several dimensions, but it was a lot of work and I don't think you should feel bad about missing it unless you're seriously into peak-bagging.

Re: The Most Important Advice I Could Give You About Unicorns

Greg Cohn — Thu, 14 May 2015 14:29:26 -0000

Interesting point that reminds me of an adage about buying diamonds, which is that buyers are willing to overpay for carat weights that just clear whole-number increments because of the optics of buying a 1-carat (or 3-carat) diamond. (Never mind whether diamonds are a sucker's game to begin with; lots of people buy them.)

Meaning the smart buyer can get more for their money at just under or well over those hashmarks.

I imagine the same is true of buyers of venture capital.

Re: Build with Wunderlist, Introducing our Public API

Greg Cohn — Wed, 13 May 2015 14:20:04 -0000

Very cool!

Re: Joel Monegro — You Can Text Me At (929) 224-7210

Greg Cohn — Mon, 11 May 2015 13:50:17 -0000

Happy to see this here - let us know if you have any questions about it.

Re: My Six Takeaways From Apple’s Watch Keynote

Greg Cohn — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 19:18:01 -0000

I missed this reply but want to talk more about this, perhaps in another forum. Having 2 devices nearby and paired is, technically, a 2FA, but if you're going to mug someone for their iphone, you're probably going to take their apple watch too, and the 2nd device is only incrementally adding to security here.

In general a strong implementation of 2FA involves to uniquely different form factors -- an email/password + phone/pin combo, or a device + a fingerprint. (Less likely that you'd bother to cut off a thumb in a mugging.)

So I'm wondering how watch would be strongly additive to 2FA without requiring touchID (which is already 2fA by itself, and so if you have to take your phone out of your pocket to do TouchID, the watch is not additive). Maybe by use of some kind of accelerometer or biometric signature. A secret handshake routine. A voiceprint. A unique, drawn squiggle as a digital signature. Etc. No sign of this yet, though.

Re: Product Idea: Reverse Engineering VC Investment Strategies

Greg Cohn — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 11:45:51 -0000

FWIW @VCDelta is a bot that tracks additions to VC portfolio pages and has been for a while. Not a lot of metadata but maybe useful as a timestamp.

Re: My Six Takeaways From Apple’s Watch Keynote

Greg Cohn — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 20:21:41 -0000

Can you talk more about how 2FA stuff would work in your view?

Re: Yahoo Would Rather Not Pay Taxes on its Alibaba Shares

Greg Cohn — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 12:35:35 -0000

This is the clearest explanation I've seen for the non-wizard-level financier. One really obvious point I don't think you included is that it also makes Yahoo! (can we call it "Yahoo! Classic"?) much cleaner as an acquisition candidate as well. At $8B without large 3rd-party holdings and crazy tax overhangs, a lot more operating and private equity firms could digest it.

Re: What is the Definition of a Seed Round or an A Round?

Greg Cohn — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 20:33:49 -0000

From the VC point of view -- setting aside the turn-off effect of founders trying to force optics -- does this matter most in terms of fund investment guidelines, evaluating deal value, evaluating traction on an ROI basis, or… ?

Re: Another Angle On The Shifting Pro-Rata Debate

Greg Cohn — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 17:29:39 -0000

There are some special considerations that apply in the case of convertible notes that I think are important to be thinking about in light of current discussions about pro rata.

The general way convertible notes work is that they convert into preferred on the terms negotiated at the next equity (ie preferred) round (minus a discount).

The assumptions are a: that all the perks preferred A get accrue also to the converted-in class, and b: that on top of the convertible note you can't start making (as a founder) or extracting (as an investor) specific promises that "pre-negotiate" the A.

But what happens in reality is bigger investors in the A try to restrict who gets pro-rata to "major" investors. And, smarter/more influential angels, and/or angels who are writing bigger checks in the note round, try to get pre-commitments that they'll be treated as majority investors. (Majority investor rights can include things other than pro-rata, like information rights.)

I've had ambiguity around this as both an investor and as a founder, and it can be frustrating. A founder who is knowledgable about how these effects work can fend them off in advance, however, and structure the situation to maximum advantage for the company (or at least set expectations in advance with investors).

Re: The bullshit Apple Beats deal

Greg Cohn — Wed, 14 May 2014 13:34:55 -0000

I have not seen any denials.

Re: The Story Behind My Investment In Burner

Greg Cohn — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:34:21 -0000

Semil, we're honored to count you as a supporter.

Re: TaskRabbit, some scary shit

Greg Cohn — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 20:55:17 -0000

Very sad, obviously. I think one of the challenges of these collaborative consumption platforms is they're all slightly differently flavored. Etsy curates but is really a listings clearinghouse; Uber vets drivers and maintains high ratings standards (and insurance): AirBnB has insurance but does minimal vetting, etc. etc. There was recently a NY POst story about prostitutes using AirBnB's (ie other people's homes) for assignations. Yuck.

You hear about a new service, it seems cool, you try it out... but where do they fall on the spectrum? How much insurance do they have? If something bad happens with a taskrabbit, what happens? How much homework do I have to do for each of these situations?

Re: Thoughts on Fooled by Randomness - The Gong Show

Greg Cohn — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 13:10:29 -0000

Re your point 1, there is a also a relevant point to be made that assumptions regarding what is "safe" can impact likelihood of exponential returns. Unlike some early-stage investors, I presume you would rather lose all of your money ten times out of ten if it increased your chances of hitting a hundred X-er.

Re: Ignoring Anonymous Coward and a Rant on Anonymous Apps

Greg Cohn — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:09:45 -0000

"selective permission based disclosure", which Austin Hill talks about vis-a-vis dating, really resonates for me -- it's what we're trying to do with Burner. People should be able to control their identities, but communities ulimately have the responsibility for the culture of their members.

Re: Comcast Bites Netflix Again By Snagging Its Big Show

Greg Cohn — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:18:10 -0000

Wouldn't increased distribution of older seasons via syndication only increase viewer appetite for new seasons?

Re: Three phases of messaging — Benedict Evans

Greg Cohn — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 23:27:20 -0000

@walt french, this totally makes sense for fairly monolithic use cases, but what about "everything else"? for most people, communications have a long tail.

(and, fwiw, a lot of DSLR pictures are taken on the automatic settings)

Re: Three phases of messaging — Benedict Evans

Greg Cohn — Sat, 22 Feb 2014 13:10:19 -0000

We agree this describes a very interesting area of opportunity. But many apps already have messaging implemented that "substitutes" for SMS -- consider Tinder, for example. Adding a simple voice protocol layer to that type of messaging, whether P2P or A2P, is not a very satisfying solution for most use cases.

Users need much more fine-grained control over voice (screening, accepting or not accepting messages, returning calls by voice, returning calls by text, blacklisting, etc), and at least some persistence for the channel. For example, if you take a look at Uber's voice implementation, it works great within the exact bounds of "expected" behaviors, but breaks down among a lot of edge cases (e.g., if you try to call your driver about a lost item a couple of days after your ride). We've heard a number of anecdotes about Uber dispatchers using Burner to contact Uber drivers, because of some edge case not covered by their system.

Furthermore, as P2P communications are stimulated by and proliferate across many different apps, do users really want different calls coming in for restaurant confirmations, taxi rides, and so on across an infinite number of different apps? Or does it make sense to federate these into a single UI, merging voice and text channels.

We at Burner think the latter, which does bring semi-persistent and user-controlled identity into play.