Disqus - Latest Comments for jedc

Re: Minimum Wage, Maximum Automation

jedc — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:24:41 -0000

There's a startup I've been helping out a bit that does exactly this; a robot that makes food, aimed at restaurants to help mitigate the high costs of labor. (http://www.casabots.com) They've had a *ton* of interest from owners of restaurant chains.

Re: What Android Phone Should I Get?

jedc — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:36:40 -0000

I LOVE my Nexus 6P, & it 100% fits your requirements above. I got it with Google's Project Fi, which is such a fantastic billing and user experience when compared to any other carrier I've used.

Re: Help Me Understand The Value of Slack Instead of an Email List

jedc — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 14:01:21 -0000

This is something we've struggled with a bit at Techstars, particularly with a certain slice of founders that live/breathe Slack.

What I've come to the conclusion on is that Slack is *awesome* for an organization with strong ties: a company (like Foundry or Techstars internally), an accelerator class (Boulder 2016), etc. When you have strong ties, you have common goals and an organizational rhythm which makes this type of messaging work.

But when you try to extend Slack to an organization with weak ties, it just breaks down. Either a) there are so many people posting so many random things that it's information overload with a low signal/noise ratio, or b) the Slack dies from lack of use/value. I'm on a number of cross-organizational Slacks and have found generally little value from them; all of them seem to suffer from one of these two problems. People participate for so many reasons and have so many different goals that participating feels like a burden.

What we've gone with for Techstars across the network is a Discourse forum, which is a hybrid web forum and listserv. Users who love email can interact with it 100% via email; others who prefer forums can use it like that. So far, it seems to fit our needs FAR better than Slack.

Re: Email Conventions and Why Email Clients Suck

jedc — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:59:17 -0000

I don't like the lower information density in Inbox, but I do like that I can mark specific emails as "ToDos" and then flip the switch so I only see those messages. (Effectively pausing my inbox.)

Email is such an individual choice, part of me is surprised that Gmail has achieved the number of users they have...

Re: Email Conventions and Why Email Clients Suck

jedc — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:45:55 -0000

If you use Google Inbox (which you can use in parallel with GMail; it's essentially just a different front end), you can do the +Name and easily choose someone to get added as a recipient.

It's not a solution for #2 above, but it's part-way there. :)

Re: My One Wish For All Startup Employees

jedc — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 17:26:36 -0000

Thanks for writing about this movie, Mark. I got it a while back on the advice of a former boss, and loved it for exactly the same reasons. It's one of the few movies I keep on my tablet, because Shep is such an interesting person.

Re: Beyond SKUs: Dipping Our Toe Into Hardware Investments

jedc — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 07:08:21 -0000

"carbon fiber manufacturing technology startup"? Now *THAT* sounds really interesting. As someone who's hand-built a carbon-fiber racing car, I definitely look forward to hearing more on that.

Re: The super-magic productivity button in the new Google Inbox

jedc — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 13:41:12 -0000

just sent it now!

Re: The super-magic productivity button in the new Google Inbox

jedc — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 13:41:01 -0000

just sent!

Re: The super-magic productivity button in the new Google Inbox

jedc — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:33:57 -0000

just need your @gmail.com address!

Re: Venture Outcomes are Even More Skewed Than You Think

jedc — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 19:16:57 -0000

Since this is based on financings instead of companies, I wonder how these effects might be magnified by multiple venture rounds in successful companies?

In the poorly performing companies, I would assume after one (or two) financing events the company is done. In the successful companies, there would be several financing events, where the earliest events have the highest multiples, and the latest events have multiples in the 1-5x range.

Given that, it would imply that the distribution on a company basis is skewed even *more* right-ward?

But returns would also be based on expectations... investors in Facebook's last financing round probably weren't expecting a 20-50x return, but by putting enough cash to work and getting a smaller (safer) return on a faster basis obviously would have done pretty well cash-on-cash and IRR-wise, right?

Fascinating data, thanks for sharing!

Re: CDR Salamander: COWPENS to help produce a movie for the Lifetime Network

jedc — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 11:27:46 -0000

Reading the report, it looks like he got plenty of medical care, and was medically cleared for full duty. But he made it *seem* like he was a lot worse than he was, for whatever reason.

Re: Joining Techstars

jedc — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 04:58:57 -0000

Thanks, Ben! Yep, it's an exciting product to build. I like that it's both very quantitative but also encompasses/drives a lot of in-person engagement.

Re: Money Doesn't Talk. Why Most Startups Aren't Announcing Their Seed Financings

jedc — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 07:55:38 -0000

This phenomenon has definitely made it more difficult for me with Seed-DB, and it biases the apparent results of different accelerators toward longer-running programs because they're more likely to have had Series A+ rounds that do get included in resources like Crunchbase.

Re: Investors Updating Their Investors: Inside Homebrew's First Annual LP Meeting

jedc — Sat, 03 May 2014 17:10:57 -0000

Wanted to join the others in saying this is really valuable transparency. I've found posts like this extraordinarily helpful in better understanding the LP/VC and VC deal flow parts of the industry. Thank you!

Re: Why Vertical Incubators Are More Interesting to Investors

jedc — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 02:01:55 -0000

One of the trends with accelerators is that a lot of them want to be the "YC for NorthEastern Montana" or whatever location they're in. In which case they're competing against YC for the best entrepreneurs and they'll eventually lose.

But if that city/location is the heart for a particular industry, it might allow an accelerator focused on that industry to flourish there. So it's not directly the size of the particular city, but the concentration of a particular industry in that city.

-Jed (of www.seed-db.com)

Re: Why Vertical Incubators Are More Interesting to Investors

jedc — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:25:37 -0000

Two quick comments to this, Hunter.

1- Because organizations self-report in Angellist as incubators, the list is almost completely crap. You'll find some accelerators (like YC, TechStars, RockHealth, etc.), but also incubators (IdeaLab, co-working spaces), and a whole lot of angel/venture funds that somehow also want to be seen as incubating ideas... probably trying to model themselves after a16z.

2- 100% agree with your main point; that vertical accelerators are becoming way more interesting than horizontal accelerators. This was something that I theorized back in 2009 when I originally started collecting data on these programs. It's becoming increasingly hard for any new program to compete with YC/TechStars and the top tier of horizontal accelerators. But by focusing vertically they can build relationships with the very best entrepreneurs, mentors, and investors in a particular vertical.

Re: A horrifying accelerator story that you’ll need to read twice

jedc — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 06:07:11 -0000

Agree that funding isn't a good measure of success. (Though disagree with the cynicism of "wearing right kind of hoodie" remark.)

"Definition of success is actually succeed" doesn't say anything. Most people would call a profitable, growing company a success but there aren't any public metrics about that. Exits are a measure of success because they value a company. So the 156 companies that have exited *are* successes to some degree. Their breakdown:
67 from Y Combinator
28 from TechStars
7 from 500startups
6 from Seedcamp
6 from i/o ventures
6 from Angelpad

(Note the 500startups *accelerator* is just a subset of the 500startups *portfolio*. We shouldn't just the accelerator on the basis of the performance of the portfolio, but instead of the performance of the accelerated companies.)

Re: A horrifying accelerator story that you’ll need to read twice

jedc — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 19:40:20 -0000

It depends on what you call a success.

Here are the startups from all accelerators that have raised >=$2million (248 of them): http://www.seed-db.com/comp...

Here are the startups from all accelerators that have had exits (155 of them): http://www.seed-db.com/comp...

Definitely a few more than just YC/TechStars...

Re: A horrifying accelerator story that you’ll need to read twice

jedc — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 11:20:40 -0000

Nope, it works exactly as you want it to. :) I calculate the total funding raised by all companies that have gone through the accelerator (whether there's data for them or not), and divide by the total number of companies. You can double-check the math for yourself!

Because that still can skew toward massive successes, I also calculate median funding since that's an even better way of looking at average success. But the way I've set this up is that median funding only appears if >50% of companies have funding data in Seed-DB.

Re: A horrifying accelerator story that you’ll need to read twice

jedc — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 20:41:20 -0000

Thanks for posting this, David, as horrible a story as it is. As you wrote in your WSJ piece, I agree 1000% about accelerators needing to be transparent, which is why I created Seed-DB. I want to make it easier for entrepreneurs to do their due diligence on accelerators, and see hard data on results from previous classes. Of course that's always going to be significantly harder for first cohorts of any program, but this story was ridiculous.

(http://www.seed-db.com for anyone curious about where to go)

Re: A horrifying accelerator story that you’ll need to read twice

jedc — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 20:36:52 -0000

I do what I can on Seed-DB (http://www.seed-db.com) to make it clear which accelerators are producing results and which ones aren't. While it's not a rating system, it is hard numbers... check it out!

Re: How to Raise Money as a First Time Founder

jedc — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:48:31 -0000

Hi, Wade. I'm the founder of Seed-DB; thanks for citing it! Happy that you found the information useful. :)

Re: Mentor/Investor Whiplash

jedc — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 11:25:58 -0000

That's generally what happens, at least in the best programs. Lots of 'mentoring' (whiplash) to start, but one of the goals is to find the fit with the 3-5 key people the startup wants to keep working with.

Re: Seeing Both Sides: Should I Join an Accelerator?

jedc — Thu, 30 May 2013 20:33:16 -0000

Hi, Jeff. I've done a lot of work to try and capture the full 'world' of accelerators, and last year launched Seed-DB (http://www.seed-db.com), which is a world-wide database of 160+ seed accelerators and the 2600+ companies that have gone through them. It could be a great resource for entrepreneurs interested in applying to and comparing programs.

Most recently, I launched the Investor Graph, which lets anyone see which investors have invested in companies from which VCs, in which rounds, and for how much. For example, you can see Flybridge's entry here: http://www.seed-db.com/inve...

I hope you and others find it useful!