Category: Business
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Focus (a.k.a. f(success) = M * (runway / burn rate) )
Of all the characteristics and skills we consider when assessing the quality of a given entrepreneurial team, the ability to focus on the right things is probably the most critical. Any given early stage startup probability of success can be expressed as the relationship between a key problem-solving milestone, the cost of taking a shot at hitting…
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Lean Vetting
I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Eric Ries lately. If you haven’t read The Lean Startup, you should get it and check it out. Working in early-stage consumer-facing products, this book is as close to a bible as I’ve ever read and it helped me reframe the way I think about business-building. In…
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Rethinking the Tip Jar
I picked up some coffee the other day at Birch Coffee near our offices and encountered this tip jar (yes, I tipped for LOTR): Aside from this being a creative way to ask for tips, I am willing to bet that this tactic is more effective than a standard tip jar. Instead of asking explicitly…
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Retail is Dead, Long Live Retail
There’s a pretty good read in the Economist this week on ‘making it click‘ that convincingly makes the point that the Internet presents little opportunity for retailers. This is an over-simplification of the point of the article. The author also discusses opportunities to for traditional retailers to use the Internet and mobile in innovative ways…
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Joining the team at K2
I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be joining the team at K2 Media Labs on a full-time basis in the coming weeks. K2 is an early stage private equity fund that invests in startups focused on the connected consumer. The Company is a bit of a hybrid, in that it makes early-stage investments and also…
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Connecting the Dots
A couple weeks ago when Steve Jobs announced his retirement, I did a little research to try to sum up my takeaways from his success. One of his stories was about taking a calligraphy class in college, and how that class gave him enough knowledge in the subject to create font sets in the first Apple…
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Five Things I Learned From Steve Jobs
On the heels of Steve Jobs’ announcement that he’s retiring from Apple (okay, I’m a little late for the heels, but there was a pseudo-hurricane), I thought I’d reflect on the top five things I take from the single greatest entrepreneur in the history of consumer technology. 1. Know Your Customer: When you start a…
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Building A Thesis
Investing in startups is a phenomenally risky business. True, when compared to the current machine-driven equities market the asset class may not seem as crazy as it did last Thursday, but it’s risky nonetheless. At the early stage there are very few corporate finance tools that will work for potential investments, which is why the…
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Five Reasons VCs Say No (aka “Team, Market, Idea”)
As my Summer at Softbank winds to a close, I thought I take an opportunity to relay a few insights that I will take with me from my time with the incredible team up in Newton. I started out learning about investing from Jerry Neumann, who at the time was a professional angel, before he…
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Changing With the Market: Netflix
I read this headline from CBS (“Netflix Socks Subscribers With 59% Price Hike“) and I thought it was good inspiration to think about adopting to a changing market. Netflix is a fascinating success story; a company that continues to defy the laws of business physics, or at least manages to bend them in their favor.…
Hi, my name is Christian. 