February 2012
27 posts
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Google Mobile's 12 predictions for 2012
More than 1 billion people will use mobile devices as their primary internet access point.
10 days where mobile searches represent > 50% of trending search terms.
Mobile’s role in driving people into stores will be proven and it will blow us away.
“Mobile driven spend” will emerge as a big category.
Smartphones will prove exceptional at driving a new consumer behavior.
Tablets will take...
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Builders and Sellers
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the various job functions that go into technology startups. I have many friends who are product managers, “biz dev guys”, “programmers or software engineers”, developers or designers, marketers, community managers, “VPs of operations and COOs”, etc. Lately, I’ve seen a fair number of “chief creative officers” and “chief experience officers.” This is all,...
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$257m Invested In Collaborative Consumption
Excerpt from an interview with Craig Shapiro on Shareable:
“Ownership won’t go away, but attitudes toward ownership are shifting,” said Shapiro. People have become more concerned with experiencing things, rather than being able to put them on a shelf. This will give way to what Shapiro calls a trend toward collaborative thinking in 2012.
“Big data will be extremely...
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Last Week's Brain Food
“Cashflow Matters” http://is.gd/HHAG9g
I cannot stress enough how important it is to get to positive cashflow as soon as possible. Unless you’re the next Facebook/AirBnB/Name-your-preferred-hot-startup and swim in heaps of venture capital (which to be honest you most likely won’t be - the cards are clearly stacked against you… just look at the stats) having positive cashflow means you are master...
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Natural Growth vs. Forced Growth
“My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” Caterina Fake said. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.” The worst thing a social network can do is force growth, she said.
Source | Graph by Leon Håland
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Start Disrupting Industries →
You either build something that makes the world a better place or you don’t. There are complete industries built on creating arbitrary value for the world (investment banking). And there are complete industries built around innovation and creating value for the world (technology).
If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you...
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
– Albert Einstein (via morganmissen)
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The Three Most Important Ingredients
In the past decade I’ve been an entrepreneur, seed investor and startup board member. During that time, I’ve learned that the three most important ingredients to the success are #1 people, #2 people, and #3 people. The people that join you, invest in you and partner with you ultimately determine your experience, no matter how good the idea.
At my first company, Recyclebank, we had a business...
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Data Jobs Are Hockey Sticking
Soure
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Banks Need a Cultural Redesign
There are 6,000 banks in America, but four national banks dominate. As a society we tend not to discuss financial matters, nor do we have a framework for rational comparison among different bank brands. So, we rely on things like headline interest rates when we choose our bank, while ignoring the footnotes. Or branch proximity, forgetting that we rarely visit them. Bank competition has been...
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Values Will Drive the Next Game Changers
Wolff Olins released a report this week identifying five traits driving game-changing companies. We love data. So we pulled some to tumble.
The report highlighted big companies like Apple, LEGO, Nike and Paypal to illustrate these traits.
Collaborative looks for particular values when investing in startups (like Simple, Codecademy, Skillshare, Kickstarter and Gumroad.) We look for a team with...
“The interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.”
– Richard St. John
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The Education Harvest
As the options for self-education explode, what does a college education mean? And how can we measure what a good education is?
Education is changing, and it’s changing fast. Anyone can put together a personalized educational experience via digital textbooks accessible by iPad, video learning from top university faculty, or peer-led discussion. People of all demographics are gathering their own...
“I don’t know what makes a good business. It seems like it helps to have a good...”
– Alex Payne
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Good Ol' Stock Certificate Designs
Source
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Why We Invested in Gumroad
“Small-in-size offerings with greater-than-large effect” -@shl
Sahil Lavingia has a work ethic, knowledge base and passion for life that I really admire.
While most people have talked about his work with Pinterest and Turntable, I found his ability to conceive, design, develop and launch Dayta, Color Stream, Crate, Rmmbr and other applications most compelling.
He gets sh*t done.
...
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Histoire: A Janitor Designed Nintendo Culture
In 1889, Nintendo’s business was alive and well in Kyoto, Japan. But instead of making Duck Hunt, Donkey Kong and Super Mario, the company produced hand-painted Hanafuda playing cards. During the time playing cards evolved into Wii, the company pivoted to operate taxi cabs and manufactured packets of portioned instant rice, all in search of the next big thing.
It wasn’t until 1964...
“Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again.”
– Aza Raskin, Massive Health
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Don’t Build A Company To Sell, Build It To Last
Getting a giant exit is easy, building a company that is around 100 years from now—that’s really hard, but so much more meaningful.
Last June, Silicon Valley-based startup Evernote closed a round of funding. When describing its business strategy, CEO Phil Libin took a cue from The Social Network and said, “[A billion dollars isn’t cool.] You know what’s really cool? Making a hundred...
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Last week I received an exciting investor update from one of Collaborative’s portfolio companies. This got me thinking about how investor updates might correlate with a startup’s success or failure. Over the last five years, I’ve received close to a hundred of these updates in my inbox, so I took a moment to identify commonalities.
These observations aren’t 100% scientific...
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Taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s original investment letter:
Focus on Impact
If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.
Move...
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“Sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”
– Thomas Edison
January 2012
31 posts
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If You Want It Done Right, Don’t Do It Yourself
It’s not just laziness. Collaborative platforms that maximize comparative advantage can increase productivity and boost local economies.
Time is our most limited resource, and knowing how to maximize it is imperative. Successful people across the globe have clearly figured this out, deliberately deciding to concentrate on tasks where they are most productive, while outsourcing the tasks where...
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To-Build List: Startup Ideas For 2012
This weekend we read Jude Gomila’s thoughtful list of 25 startup ideas for 2012. Some of his ideas demand ambitious engineering projects, others fill a niche in the online consumer landscape. Here’s our take on a handful that piqued our interest: Build an educational learning platform The time is ripe to disrupt education. We agree with Jude: There’s great potential in taking the concepts of...
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Histoire: The Side Project That Birthed Pixar
It took one imaginative Boeing architect named Loren Carpenter to help birth an entire industry and novel way of seeing the world — all because he was curious enough to explore a side project and courageous enough to follow through.
Carpenter worked at Boeing Computer Services in the late 70s, where he was steeped in modernizing mechanical design. At the time, the process for...
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Fact: Google Spent Nearly $2 Billion On 79... →
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“Now, when you’re a tech columnist, you get e-mail pitches every day from P.R....”
– Financing the Stuff of Dreams Through Kickstarter. By NY Times tech columnist David Pogue.
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Values Matter When Taking Big Risks
Even though Craig Dalton’s business had so many things “wrong” with it, honesty, transparency, and connection between his customers and the artisans making his product were enough to create a successful company.
The advent of new technologies often begets the decline of established crafts. But sometimes, to quote the cliche, when innovation closes one door, it opens another....
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“According to Calacanis, each employee who understands how to code is valued at...”
– Douglas Rushkoff
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Quiet Leaders Build Lasting Companies
“The US’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.” -David Brooks
Humility is not about being a martyr or abandoning one’s own interests, desires, and suppressing competitive drive. It’s not about shunning success, money, acclaim, and all the other good things that we work so hard to attain. Humility is, simply put, a state of mind...
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Codecademy is taking its classes to the classrooms. This morning press and public have their eyes on the White House and Codeacademys’ announcement: a partnership to teach programming skills to underprivileged youth. But we feel it’s important to highlight another new move: Code Year Meetups.
Connecting online education tools to offline communities speaks to a larger trend—a...
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5 Values Shared by Fastest Growing Brands
After 10 years of research into 50,000 companies, Millward Brown published a list of the top 50 fastest growing brands and the values behind them:
• Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility
• Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways
• Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore...
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“Don’t talk about stuff. Do it.”
– Sal Khan (Founder, Khan Academy)
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Investing In Human Touch, Quarterly Co
As we journey deeper into a connected age, it dawns on us that there is something missing from our online experiences. They are, in fact, rather two dimensional and shallow, lacking a human touch. We realize that, despite the incredible genius of the Internet, something has been left out. Our lives weren’t meant to be lived online, but in the old-fashioned, three-dimensional world. As we realize...
“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources...”
– Howard Stevenson (via Kanyi)
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Mike Bloomberg Is A Smart Businessman, That’s Why...
This is the first piece in a Collaborative Fund-curated series at Fast Company, written by thought leaders in the for-profit, for-good business space.
The founder of Codecademy explains why learning how to program is the best job security you can have, and how a knowledge of code is the best way to improve the economy and the planet.
Our economy is at an interesting juncture. After years of...
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“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re...”
– Jeff Bezos, Wired, December, 2011
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One of Collaborative’s investors recently asked me a couple of probing questions which got me thinking about how far we’ve come since launching the fund roughly one year ago, and how much potential and hard work lies ahead in 2012. His questions were:
How do you feel about your original investment thesis?
What do you think about others crashing the party?
Given demand, why don’t you...
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WatchAOL co-founder Steve Case sees a generational shift away from ownership toward shared use and experience. Inspired, Stephen Colbert recognizes a ripe market opportunity for communal toasters.