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Month: August 2019

One client changes everything. My compliments to Vanessa Camones. She just rose to legendary status in Spatial Computing

by Robert Scoble
This post is by Robert Scoble from Scobleizer

Does one client make your career?

I haven’t been able to sleep in the 48 hours since Vanessa Camones brought one of her clients to my home. I can’t tell you who they are. But they showed me some technology that goes way beyond anything I’ve read about in Wired Magazine or seen covered in other press yet. This company builds satellites and planes and lots of other things. Is hugely important to American history and technology. Unfortunately the NDA she had me sign keeps me from saying more.

I’ve been thinking about what they showed me ever since.

You’ll read about it someday in Wired or New York Times but that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Instead, I’m writing about Vanessa Camones.

I’ve known her for years. Decades, even. She’s always been nice to me, always shown me companies that are competent and interesting. Always had a kind word for me and about anyone else in the industry we talked about.

I ran into her a few months back leaving Facebook. She was working on something there that I’m still interested in.

But before Thursday I’ll be honest. Thought she was doing a great job but nothing she was doing rose to the top of my mind as a legendary consultant or world changer. She hadn’t brought me something that I thought the leaders in Spatial Computing industry, or the tech industry overall, should see.

That all changed Thursday.

When companies asked me “who would you hire (Read more...)

Investor Stories 120: Why I Passed (Hea Nahm, Moatti, Clavier)

by Nick Moran

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:

  • Tae Hea Nahm
  • SC Moatti
  • Jeff Clavier

Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to invest, why they passed, and how it played out.

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.

Investor Stories 120: Why I Passed (Hea Nahm, Moatti, Clavier)

by Nick Moran

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:

  • Tae Hea Nahm
  • SC Moatti
  • Jeff Clavier

Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to invest, why they passed, and how it played out.

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.

Lessons about the future of work from six years of investing

by Roy Bahat

Lessons on the future of work from the last six years

Work makes many people suffer.

Many suffer from lack of work, while others suffer from work — its inability to provide, its effect on their personal lives, their health. We can do something about it!

This is what we’ve learned in six years at Bloomberg Beta:

From our first day, we’ve focused on the future of work— investing in founders who use technology to make work more humane and more productive.

If we learn from communities outside the technology industry, we might not have to choose.

Before investing in startups, I spent time in many a place… as an exec at a big corporation, a founder, university faculty, a government staffer, head of a non-profit. Every experience gave me a lens, and I now need them all… because so much of what we believed was wrong.

Let’s start with what’s clear:

Technology has reinvented our life (shopping, family, friendships) so much less than it’s changed our daily work — the thing we do with more of our waking hours than anything.

Yet most ways technology has changed work — automating the rote, offering work on demand, opening communication channels — have failed to make work pay for the vast majority of people. (Though they have made things cheaper to buy…)

Technology is a force of nature — we can shape it, we can harness it (and should!), but we can’t roll it back.

Our fund was blind, six years ago, to the technology trend that would most change work: machine intelligence.

A year later (Read more...)

192. Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor)

by Nick Moran

Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz joins Nick to discuss Secrets of Sand Hill Road. In this episode, we cover:

  • When Marc and Ben first reached out to you about joining A16Z, you hesitated. Why?
  • "When Marc and Ben first started A16Z, they described a founder's leadership capability as "egomaniacal"... what do you think they mean by that and do you share this belief?
  • What are the key factors in determining if venture is appropriate for the new business and its founder?
  • How should one decide how much to raise?
  • Scenario I've heard all too often... founder goes out to raise their next round, they've more than doubled the business, hit major milestones but the offers are less than double that of the last round. Scott, can you talk us through the valuation mistakes you most often encounter?
  • Founder has started fundraising... the first step is to get their foot in the door. Talk us through the right and wrong way to get a meeting.
  • You mention the 5 pitch essentials in the book - can you talk us through each?
  • We've done an episode with Brad Feld where we went into detail on the Term Sheet... both Economics and Governance. I don't want to cover each term today but first, related to Economics, what's different now about the Economics terms or the negotiation than what you saw maybe five years ago?
  • Same question for Governance, what has changed and what are the key terms in focus?
  • Do you have any (Read more...)

192. Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor)

by Nick Moran

Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz joins Nick to discuss Secrets of Sand Hill Road. In this episode, we cover:

  • When Marc and Ben first reached out to you about joining A16Z, you hesitated. Why?
  • "When Marc and Ben first started A16Z, they described a founder's leadership capability as "egomaniacal"... what do you think they mean by that and do you share this belief?
  • What are the key factors in determining if venture is appropriate for the new business and its founder?
  • How should one decide how much to raise?
  • Scenario I've heard all too often... founder goes out to raise their next round, they've more than doubled the business, hit major milestones but the offers are less than double that of the last round. Scott, can you talk us through the valuation mistakes you most often encounter?
  • Founder has started fundraising... the first step is to get their foot in the door. Talk us through the right and wrong way to get a meeting.
  • You mention the 5 pitch essentials in the book - can you talk us through each?
  • We've done an episode with Brad Feld where we went into detail on the Term Sheet... both Economics and Governance. I don't want to cover each term today but first, related to Economics, what's different now about the Economics terms or the negotiation than what you saw maybe five years ago?
  • Same question for Governance, what has changed and what are the key terms in focus?
  • Do you have any (Read more...)

Fighting over VR and Facebook’s Oculus Quest

by Robert Scoble
This post is by Robert Scoble from Scobleizer

Ahh, a 20-something-year-old guy was over the house tonight. We almost got in a fight over VR. Tried to tell me something other than the Oculus Quest is better after seeing the Quests on the floor and declaring “I would never buy one of those.” I tried to tell him the press, like CNET, was saying it’s the product of the year.

I almost eviscerated him with the research I was doing for our book and research reports we’re working on for our company but remembered that I have been arrogant and wrong like he was many times in the past and that I just don’t need the drama so I put my metaphorical weapons away and went to my corner to sulk and think about where people like him get their opinions.

After he left I said heck with it and wrote this post, but will keep his name out of this.

After all, it’s obvious he had never played with all the headsets yet he was so certain of his opinions and if he had he hadn’t spent more than a few minutes with each, which isn’t enough time to get a real opinion about the ecosystem of each. He got under my skin, mostly because he reminded me of myself.

Another thought. He reminded me of the nerds across my career who have made me feel like I didn’t know anything, so two triggers were pulled. The Unix ones in college who made me feel like (Read more...)

From Instant Pot to Instagram: Critical Lessons in Startup Community Building

by First Round Review

Bailey Richardson (an early Instagram hire and current partner at People & Company) has studied ordinary people who started extraordinary communities. Here, she shares the nuts and bolts of how startups should approach community building, highlighting eight valuable lessons on how the best communities start, gain steam, and evolve as scale takes hold.