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On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to invest, why they passed, and how it played out.
On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to invest, why they passed, and how it played out.
During the first social era as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other products were first breaking out, there was a lot of talk of the "social enterprise" or "networked enterprise". The idea, circa 2010, was that all the collaborative features of Web 2.0 social products were going to be baked into SaaS leading to large scale transformation of software. This obviously did not happen 10 years ago.
More recently, the two big trends transforming the enterprise are (i) Nocode/Lowcode/RPA, and the (ii) Collaborative Enterprise[1]. Collaborative enterprise is an updated take on building collaboration and learnings from consumer products into SaaS.
The emergence of collaborative products in the enterprise is being driven by a handful of trends:
A. User shift. Users (and founders) who grew up with social product, chat, cloud storage, and lots of cloud apps are comfortable with using similar products in the enterprise. Adoption of basic team communication and collaboration tools have now been massively accelerated with COVID. COVID is a new "why now" statement for many companies in this area.
B. Distribution shift. Bottoms-up adoption and in-product viral and growth distribution techniques have at last been integrated into SaaS products. In-product distribution techniques are inherently focused on collaboration, so some of the earliest features in many products are peer-to-peer or network driven. Box and Dropbox are examples of early pioneers of these techniques, with Slack similarly adopting early in product-distribution techniques.
In the past, many large enterprises were locked down by IT and (Read more...)
During the first social era as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other products were first breaking out, there was a lot of talk of the "social enterprise" or "networked enterprise". The idea, circa 2010, was that all the collaborative features of Web 2.0 social products were going to be baked into SaaS leading to large scale transformation of software. This obviously did not happen 10 years ago.
More recently, the two big trends transforming the enterprise are (i) Nocode/Lowcode/RPA, and the (ii) Collaborative Enterprise[1]. Collaborative enterprise is an updated take on building collaboration and learnings from consumer products into SaaS.
The emergence of collaborative products in the enterprise is being driven by a handful of trends:
A. User shift. Users (and founders) who grew up with social product, chat, cloud storage, and lots of cloud apps are comfortable with using similar products in the enterprise. Adoption of basic team communication and collaboration tools have now been massively accelerated with COVID. COVID is a new "why now" statement for many companies in this area.
B. Distribution shift. Bottoms-up adoption and in-product viral and growth distribution techniques have at last been integrated into SaaS products. In-product distribution techniques are inherently focused on collaboration, so some of the earliest features in many products are peer-to-peer or network driven. Box and Dropbox are examples of early pioneers of these techniques, with Slack similarly adopting early in product-distribution techniques.
In the past, many large enterprises were locked down by IT and (Read more...)
The pandemic shook up our (and virtually every other) video news production process as Zoom became the focus of our daily lives; slowly but surely we’ve altered the production process to reflect Zoom’s easy onboarding and semi-casual approach to virtualized meetings and conversations.
We now use a series of interweaved services to broadcast the live Zoom recording session over ReStream, which in turn streams to Twitter/Periscope, YouTube and Facebook Live. Some of the show’s regulars share the Facebook stream using Watch Party, aggregating comments and viewership metadata of their friends and cohorts. Once the session is over, we add music, titles, and pointers to the Gillmor Gang Telegram Backchannel, and embed the YouTube mix here on TechCrunch.
Much of this live-streaming strategy has been workshopped with people like Brent Leary, who with his CRM Playaz partner Paul Greenberg produce a growing series of live streams on LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networks. Brent joined the Gang in late 2019. On this Gillmor Gang episode, Brent switches gears from yet-another-TikToc segment to a new streaming target, Twitch. Just before he bails to co-host a Playaz show, I ask him to explain the latest project they’re cooking up. Here, in his own words, is more:
CRM Playaz Executive Roundtable Convo Livestream…Not Webinar….or Panel
We’re seeing broadcast media use streaming platforms to do their jobs while they shelter in place and social distance. And while some of this has the look and feel of a Zoom conference call we’re all experiencing way too (Read more...)
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or luck about how YC got going, it can’t be that hard, and 2) if you can get it off the ground, the network effects are self-sustaining.
More YC-like things are good for the world; I generally try to be helpful. But almost none of them work. People are right about the self-sustaining part, but they can’t figure out how to get something going.
The entire secret to YC getting going was PG and Jessica—there was no other magic trick. A few times a year, I end up in a conversation at a party where someone tells a story about how much PG changed their life—people speak with more gratitude than they do towards pretty much anyone else. Then everyone else agrees, YC founders and otherwise (non-YC founders might talk about an impactful essay or getting hired at a YC company). Jessica still sadly doesn’t get nearly the same degree of public credit, but the people who were around the early days of YC know the real story.
What did they do? They took bets on unknown people and believed in them more than anyone had before. They set strong norms and fought back hard against bad behavior towards YC founders. They trusted their own convictions, were willing to do things their way, and (Read more...)