The Bright Future of Online Video Advertising
Online video advertising is the fastest growing sector of adtech. In addition to various analyst reports supporting this claim, our extensive adtech portfolio that includes companies like Brightroll (online video advertising), Turn (demand side platform), Jiwire (mobile advertising platform) and Exelate (data management platform) provide us with additional confirmatory data. Today online video advertising represents […]
Burn Baby Burn: A Look at the Box S-1
I’m pretty busy this week so I was hoping not to dive into the Box S-1, but David Cummings’ excellent summary served only to whet, as opposed to satiate, my appetite. Perhaps it was the $168M FY14 operating loss. Maybe it was the $380M in financing raised during the last three years. Or the average quarterly burn rate […]
Evil VC Seeks Minions for World Domination
If we substitute “Venture Capitalist” for “Evil Genius”, the placard on the right describes the Silicon Valley Startup Culture perfectly. Yes, you young hopefuls, your friendly neighborhood (that’d be the Sand Hill neighborhood) VC really does expect you to sacrifice your lives in a play for world domination. They don’t care about building a nice […]
Kellblog’s 10 Predictions for 2014
Since it is the season of predictions, I thought I’d offer up a few of my own for 2014, based on my nearly three decades of experience working in enterprise software with databases, BI tools, and enterprise applications. See the bottom for my disclaimer, and off we go. Here are my ten predictions for 2014. Despite various ominous […]
The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Ratio: Another Subtle SaaS Metric
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) space is full of seemingly simple metrics that can quickly slip through your fingers when you try to grasp them. For example, see Measuring SaaS Renewals Rates: Way More Than Meets the Eye for a two-thousand-word post examining the many possible answers to the seemingly simple question, “what’s your renewal rate?” In this post, […]
Thoughts on MongoDB’s Humongous $150M Round
Two weeks ago MongoDB, formerly known as 10gen, announced a massive $150M funding round said to be the largest in the history of databases lead by Fidelity, Altimeter, and Salesforce.com with participation from existing investors Intel, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia. This brings the total capital raised by MongoDB to $231M, making it the best-funded database / big […]
Some Thoughts on Rocket Fuel, Their Voice, and Their Recent S-1
Silicon Valley is a place built by nerds, arguably for nerds, but once big money gets involved there is always tension between the business people and the technical people about control. Think, for example, of the famous Jobs/Sculley falling-out back in 1985 where the business guy beat the technical guy. However, in part because of events […]
The Best $500,000 I Ever Raised — And Why Party Rounds May Not Be the Way to Go in SaaS
I’ve never gone Truly Big in any of my start-ups, not in the Yammer or Box way let alone the HootSuite or DropBox way. But, over the years as both a founder and a start-up exec, I have raised over $40m in Venture Capital across 4 successful start-ups. I’ve also pitched over 110 VCs. Yes, 110. […]
Corporate Innovation, Startup Formation and Institutional Venture Capital
I have been trying to reconcile two trends I’m seeing. First, large companies are acquiring venture-backed startups to accelerate their innovation efforts. Even as the R&D budgets and associated efforts of large corporations are increasing, they have not been keeping up with the accelerating pace of technology and business model innovation. These acquisitions fall in two categories. First, acquisitions as a means of jump-starting corporate innovation efforts and getting corporations into the “innovation flow.” Good examples of such venture-backed company acquisitions include Avis’ acquisition of Zipcar, Walmart’s acquisition of Kosmix and of Small Society, Wellpoint’s acquisition of Resolution Health, and…
The only model that matters: Founders First
There are a lot of models that people throw around for how to build a strong startup community. There are a handful of types of players in each community, so there are many permutations of “who gets what” and how resources are moved around. It gets complicated, fast. So there is a model that I […]
