Disqus - Latest Comments for lance

Re: Taking Money “Off The Table”

lance — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 10:36:06 -0000

I have used this methodology with stock and stock options over the years and it has served me well.

Re: What’s your purpose?

lance — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 17:45:10 -0000

I wrote this down a while back. My purpose in life is to be a loving husband, attentive father, and values based business leader. I intend to lead the growth of organizations and communities so that others may have opportunities to enrich their lives.

Re: SalesLoft’s $15 Million Series B: The Details

lance — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 14:45:47 -0000

Congrats to you and the rest of the SaleLoft team Kyle. What a journey it has been thus far.

Re: 6 Call Tracking Platforms for SMBs

lance — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 20:35:26 -0000

According to Dataynze CallRail has the largest installed base https://www.datanyze.com/ma... and the company is the highest ranked in customer satisfaction on G2 Crowd https://www.g2crowd.com/cat.... Company should most likely be in the mix.

Re: 7 Tools SMBs Can Use to Track Leads

lance — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 17:46:46 -0000

I might be a little biased but CallRail has a pretty good call tracking application for merchants. Most merchants can get up and running with a 14 day free trial and it cost just $30 a month. CallRail is both the market share leader according to Dataynze and has the highest customer satisfaction rating according to G2 Crowd.

Re: SEO Firm Doubles Monthly Client Intake with CallRail

lance — Tue, 05 May 2015 14:56:50 -0000

Fair enough. We will strive to go deeper. Our aim is to help our customers. Thanks for being one and thanks for caring enough to push us to do better.

Re: On The CallRail Team | Force of Good

lance — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 09:19:50 -0000

Thanks Adam and thanks for being a CallRail customer.

Re: Atlanta Cracks The Top Ten

lance — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 22:57:48 -0000

It's most interesting that Atlanta Tech Village has changed their stated goal to top five. We have a ways to go for that but I think if we forget everyone else and focus on getting 100 first fundings per year we will be more than twice as strong a startup community than we are right now.

Re: Guest Post: Beware The Post Money Trap

lance — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 13:07:53 -0000

Not smart enough to specifically answer the question but a seriously doubt there is a perfect correlation. I do think it is high if you take into account the lag between a change in the public markets and what happens in the private sector. Market goes bad, company raised too much at too high a valuation can't raise an up round with a new lead, VCs start doing less new deals because they want to keep part of their current portfolio alive on life support, limited partners have to reallocate away from VC asset class so less VC funds get raised. I could go on. My primary point is that Albert is right about the dynamic external financing for startups adjusts when there is a big fall in the stock market.

Re: Guest Post: Beware The Post Money Trap

lance — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 14:59:18 -0000

Let's see you have a marketing automation startup that is privately held. Your public market comparables would be companies like HubSpot and Marketo. Financial market cools off and their stock price drops. People use public company comps to work back to private company valuations. All things being equal the value of your private company drops.

Re: Guest Post: Beware The Post Money Trap

lance — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 12:07:15 -0000

The valuation of publicly traded companies effects the value of privately traded companies. When the bull market ends and we enter a bear market the value of publicly traded companies is going to fall. This is the change in the financing environment that will in turn cause the value of privately held companies to fall.

Re: Most Active Atlanta Investors

lance — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 17:12:05 -0000

While not on the TechCrunch list, Tom is indeed a major participant in Atlanta tech startup investing. He does not get enough credit. In addition to leading Internet Security Systems Tom invested in too numerous first wave InfoSec companies to count. He was the primary driver in the creation of the Atlanta InfoSec cluster. It would not have happened without him. It is great to know that he is staying involved in the next wave of companies and moving beyond his InfoSec roots. I had the pleasure of working with him a bit in the early days of Endgame. You are fortunate to have him on your team.

Re: Some Final Thoughts on the FCC and Title II Ahead of Tomorrow’s Vote on Net Neutrality

lance — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 07:45:06 -0000

People are making a distinction for some reason that I can only guess, Brad believes it is a stall tactic. Regardless, the FCC makes a draft order available to the public for comment. They did so on this matter last year. Based on draft order comments and a number of other factors the FCC modifies the draft order into a final order. The final order is not made public until after the vote. The FCC has issued talking points, which are exactly that, for the final proposal. I think it is pretty clear what they want to do. Prevent packet discrimination by IP carriers from ISP termination points to the end user. Based on my experience in the ISP world I believe this is the right thing to do.

Re: Some Final Thoughts on the FCC and Title II Ahead of Tomorrow’s Vote on Net Neutrality

lance — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 16:43:19 -0000

Two thoughts here. One is that as Brad mentioned you can find the draft that was issued for comments by searching for FCC 14-61. Two is that the last mile internet was regulated under Title II prior to 2005 and that seemed to turn out OK.

Re: Non-Discrimination | Force of Good

lance — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 17:39:24 -0000

ISPs have always been under the authority of the federal government.

History has shown that regulating ISPs as a common carrier, during the period pre 2005, resulted in more competition than during the time frame since then. We have gone from consumers having the choice of hundreds of ISPs to in effect having two. This decrease in competition has increased Internet services charges while reintroducing the concept of metered plans that was unacceptable in the previous common carrier era.

As for the the barriers to entry argument, I can only think of a two significant new players in the ISP market since the change to information services classification. Clear and Google. Clear is now a part of Sprint. The capital expenses to build out an ISP infrastructure are just to high for new entrants regardless of classification as long as last mile unbundling is part of the deal. Last mile unbundling, which would enable new entrants, made a lot of sense in dialup/DSL days, less so now.

Re: Diet Coke vs. Coke Zero- A Village Debate

lance — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 11:23:57 -0000

Diet Coke and Coke Zero have very distinct tastes and are targeted to two very different demographics. Coke rolled out Coke Zero because males perceive diet drinks, including Diet Coke to be for females. Hence Zero. Dr. Pepper did one better with Ten which is unabashedly targets to men. With all that said, be customer drive provide them both.

Re: Let’s abolish voicemail, who’s coming with me?

lance — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 10:47:53 -0000

Been doing this for a while. I generally call when I think a conversation would be better then email. If I get voice mail I hang up and send a real brief message that I called, the reason for it, and that I would like to speak with them at their convenience. Seems to work.

Re: MIndSpring TV Ads | Force of Good

lance — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 13:26:39 -0000

Can't say that I loved them but the Outpost ads were the ones that I was referring to in the post.

Re: The Economy, Stupid | Force of Good

lance — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 15:43:00 -0000

It's an interesting chart. Couple of thoughts about it.

1. Not sure I buy into the concept of jobs not gained. While it is hard to understand how this is derived (my guess is an assumed steady percentage of population calculation) at some point you would expect productivity gains, which is in my mind part of the cause of slow job growth.

2. The time frame of this chart greatly exaggerates the job loss in historical context. Here is a longer view: http://research.stlouisfed....

3. About 20% the jobs lost in the chart above are in the USPS: http://research.stlouisfed....

4. To me historical context is very important. Over the past 50 years we have seen government expand from 4% to (depending on how you count) 7 - 9% of the total employment population. Seeing it return to something closer to pre Great Society times would not bother me.

5. With that said public sector jobs are such a small part of overall employment that they really are not a driver of the unemployment rate.

6. The reason why I said private sector jobs in the first place is that I believe that their is a difference between value creating and value extracting jobs. I believe that value creating jobs are more beneficial to the economy.

Re: Brand Equity

lance — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 08:54:00 -0000

Customers today, brand along the way.

Re: Entrepreneurs Get Speeding Tickets

lance — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 08:34:57 -0000

Like a champ. The more advanced ones have camera locations and such.

Re: Entrepreneurs Get Speeding Tickets

lance — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 07:46:45 -0000

Invest in a radar detector. My next car is getting the built in the bumper variety.

Re: Next Wednesday Is The Internet Slowdown

lance — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 20:58:51 -0000

There is no free lunch or in this case bit transmission. The app makers generally either pay for the cost of transmitting their services over the backbone of the Internet to local ISP points of demarcation, (the point where a consumer starts paying for carriage) or enter into what are known as peering arrangements to do the same.

Re: Next Wednesday Is The Internet Slowdown

lance — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 17:57:01 -0000

The reasonableness in such things is generally defined in the ISP terms of service with the consumer. To use your analogy they ask users to stop taking forks or stop putting them out.
The entire ISP model is based on overselling bandwidth to users. To deliver what they have sold requires more infrastructure which would reduce their earnings. At its core that what their entire argument is about. Profits.
In the world of IP content and carriage are being separated which is not good for a company that is used to providing both. Carriage is a commodity and in the future companies that provide it will only earn commodity type profits. They can fight it, and will do everything that they can to do so including discriminatory practices, but it is going to happen.

Re: Next Wednesday Is The Internet Slowdown

lance — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 16:49:20 -0000

I worked for an ISP (the one that Tom Wheeler was on board of directors for 10 years) at an executive level for seven years and it actually is not different in the way you describe. Say for example I pay Comcast $55 a month to be able download at a speed of 25 Mbps. I should be able to do whatever I want with that speed regardless of what service I am requesting. If the ISP thinks I am being abusive by downloading torrents or whatever they consider to be abuse they can throttle me. But to go to an app provider and make them pay to ensure the level of service that I am already paying is nothing more than selling the same bandwidth twice. It's backward monopolistic/regulatory thinking that is not good for the consumer, technology startups, or the development of our national technology infrastructure.