Disqus - Latest Comments for davemc500hats

Re: The plight of branded ads and the future of social marketing

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Re: The plight of branded ads and the future of social marketing

twitter-75929525 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:51:50 -0000

Re: Facebook’s platform: Rebuilding the plane in midflight

twitter-75929525 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:12:03 -0000

Re: Greylock Partners recruits Reid Hoffman, raises $575M fund

davemc500hats — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:03:30 -0000

awesome pickup by Greylock... congrats David Sze, and congrats Reid!

Re: 4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web

bernardmoon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:58:58 -0000

yes, it is :)

Re: Do you have what it takes to be a founder? A quick quiz

davemc500hats — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:37:05 -0000

you failed to mention people who carp about failing to mention stuff.

oh yeah, startup founders & employees should avoid negative attitudes.

(but other than that, great article steve ;)

Re: The most important question to ask before taking seed money

cdixon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:48:50 -0000

sure, didn't occur to me, but good advice, thanks.

Re: The most important question to ask before taking seed money

davemc500hats — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:46:13 -0000

(btw chris: love your stuff & generally agree with your observations above, but given your investing role you might want to make that disclosure at the top, rather than bottom, of your post ;)

Re: The most important question to ask before taking seed money

davemc500hats — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:43:32 -0000

>> Y Combinator simply doesn’t do follow ons, so there is no way they can positively or negatively signal by their follow on actions.

hmm, i don't believe that's correct. at the very least, i'm pretty sure PG & PB have done follow-in investments in a number of YC companies. you might want to ask Paul or Jessica to confirm.

---

personally i don't think there's anything wrong in setting up funds to do follow-on, but most large VCs don't have the capacity to do very much of it... thus the bad signal you speak of. in our case, we have 2 seed vehicles: fbFund (an incubator program that's a joint venture with Founders Fund, Accel, & Facebook), and FF Angel (an associated seed fund i manage that focuses on ~$100K investments).

when we planned out fbFund for 2009, we specifically made the point that neither Founders Fund nor Accel would likely be leading subsequent rounds, and for Founders Fund we would mostly be doing any follow-on via my FF Angel program.

of the 22 companies we invested in for the incubator program, 6 have currently received financing, and it appears likely at least another 4 more will receive financing by Q4/09 or Q1/10. (note: ~4-5 other startups are profitable or close to break-even and may choose not to raise capital, but i'm guessing most of them will).

to date FF Angel has invested in 1 of the fbfund 2009 startups (Thread.com), and we're likely to do 2-3 more. however, we aren't leading on any of those rounds, and there are simply just too many potential opportunities for us to invest in all of them -- in fact, i missed investing in one of them because other investors moved more quickly ;)

in summary: our "success" rate for follow-in financing and/or break-even looks like it will be above 40%. that exceeded my expectations of 25%, but perhaps we just got lucky this year. we will likely do follow-on financing in 15-20% of the companies, which i would also consider to be higher than my initial expectations.

so while i don't disagree with your general observations, i think there are a few structures that can be successful. by explicitly not leading in follow-in rounds, but still participating, it forces other VCs to make their own decisions.

the above aside, it's still early and we're still learning how all of this works best. as we advise our startups, we'll watch, measure, and iterate on our approach.

Re: 4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web

davemc500hats — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:04:19 -0000

#5: Real-Time Hype is at an All-Time High... ;)

Re: VC Seed Funding is Dead, Long Live VC Seed Funding!

davemc500hats — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:24:43 -0000

energizer bunny... LOL :)

great post mark & interesting set of perspectives to discuss.

Re: I Can Has Cheezburger tops one billion views, names new exec

davemc500hats — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:45:10 -0000

congrats Todd!

Re: A great presentation ignoring EVERYTHING suggested on this blog

JanSchultink — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:39:36 -0000

Smiling.

Re: A great presentation ignoring EVERYTHING suggested on this blog

davemc500hats — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:38:44 -0000

hey thanks jan... glad u knew all those "techniques" were, uh.. COUGH... on *purpose*. right? right.

Re: Startup Visas

mizznike — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:25:18 -0000

Why not just create a program for the lead investor to be able to sponsor someone for a H1 or H1b visa? A separate quota from the normal employee quota..I'm sure the VC community would be able to figure out some way to qualify who gets fast tracked (i.e. greater than X valuation, age of the business, VC's fund size or some other metric). In fact, the quota for founders should be greater than the quota for general employees as they are not potentially displacing a job, but rather coming to create more jobs.

Re: Startup Visas

ShanaC — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:17:24 -0000

Dave, I think the noted above thing is going to have to change- disqus changes the local of popular subthreads. Oy.

Re: Startup Visas

davemc500hats — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:03:35 -0000

as noted above, if you go the H1 or H1b route then you're working for someone else, not starting your own biz. you can't sponsor your one H1.

thus really it's the USA not the immigrant that's being lazy here... we should make the US more competitive in enabling entrepreneurs to strt businesses in the US, not necessarily because we're helping them, rather because we are creating jobs & new businesses.

Re: Startup Visas

davemc500hats — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:59:16 -0000

if you're applying for H1 or H1b, then you're working for someone else beore you can strt your own business. you can't sponsor your own H1 as far as I know.

that's inefficient. we should let people who are fundable / have funding start companies, and thereby create new products & creat jobs, as soon as possible.

http://StartupVisa.com

Re: Posterous’ dead simple blogging gets dead simple bookmarklet

facebook-205071 — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:28:30 -0000

HAHA I love it, Dave. Complexity is Preposterous. Simplicity is Posterous.

I gotta put that on a t-shirt.

Re: Posterous’ dead simple blogging gets dead simple bookmarklet

anthonyha — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:11:06 -0000

Ha.

Re: Posterous’ dead simple blogging gets dead simple bookmarklet

davemc500hats — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:08:06 -0000

Complexity is pre-Posterous.

Re: When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs

davemc500hats — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:48:10 -0000

definitely thought provoking quote.

again I think optimal company size is probably a function of Mgmt skill, and may likely be the same size as historical hunter-gatherer societies... our brains & culture have evolved over millions of years for these sizes (25-100? sorry not an anthropologist). only in the last 10,000 years / 500 generations have we lived in maximal-humanity city-state agrarian societies.

being able to manage groups / companies over size = ~100 is probably the exception rather than the rule.

since Internet startups optimize for online leverage vs human leverage, it's
likely more startups will win with less rather than more, unless their leaders are exceptional at org structure.

prob more important for them to be excellent at product development, marketing, design, or business model engineering.

Re: When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs

davemc500hats — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:35:46 -0000

agreed. "because they can" is more likely the answer than "because they need to / it's a good reason"

arguably, beyond 25-30 people it's difficult to manage and scale the headcount efectively anyway... certainly for development at least.

there may be a reason to scale mktg/sales/ cust svc since they may be indepedently scaled and perhaps linear in ROI. but certainly mgmt and product development are beat kept lean until the core biz model is discovered & refined. even then -- or perhaps especially then? -- there
may be no need to ramp any of the other groups if you can use automation & community to drive Mktg/sales and handle customer service with crowdsourced resources.

unfortunately most people hire ahead of figuring out the biz model.

Re: http://www.charleshudson.net/why-social-nets-are-shying-away-from-payments

chudson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:42:34 -0000

Dave,

Thanks for the comment! I don't actually think a payments system based on social identity is necessarily superior. I think the best payment system is one where the person accepting payment has a high degree of confidence that the user is in fact authorized, where there's a low probability of repudiation, and where there's minimal friction. It's clear that Facebook has more "real" people than other social networks, there are still plenty of fake accounts.

Re: This News Made Me Smile A Mile Wide

davemc500hats — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:25:00 -0000

awesome. even more psyched to have him running FCC with your endorsement fred :)