You should be paying attention to the story of the collapsing WeWork IPO. It’s a fascinating look at all that can go wrong when a company that is overhyped and overvalued is exposed before they can get through the IPO process. WeWork’s most recent valuation was $47 billion, driven primarily by investments of over $10 […]
You’re Not a Tech Company. Invest Your Money Where It Counts
In building the Huffington Post, Thrillist, and JackThreads, I’ve invested a lot of venture capital into building tech platforms. Even though we were media and commerce companies, we described ourselves as tech companies. VC’s loved that description. It absolutely helped increase our valuation in every round. Our pitch decks always had some slides on our […]
Almost Worthless: What Can We Learn From A 99.7 Percent Writeoff
When I see 99% destruction in value in a once high-flying startup, there must be some useful lessons in there somewhere. I know I’m a bit late on the Tumblr story, but I was on vacation last week! It’s hard to keep up with this level of destruction of shareholder value when you’re off the […]
Only Revenue Equals Revenue
HuffPost has published a piece about the rise and fall of Mic.com. It’s worth a read to get some perspective on what it’s like to build a startup in a frantic search for a sustainable business model. There are a few good takeaways here that I might come back to in the coming weeks. But […]
Blitzscaling Is A Seed Stage Problem Too
Wired Magazine published a story yesterday entitled ‘Blitzscaling’ Is Choking Innovation – And Wasting Money that speaks to significant shifts in fundraising over the last decade. The article’s main focus is on the massive amount of money that is being thrown at companies in later rounds to try to fund an accelerated growth effort to […]
The Ideal Employee
Often when I get the chance to speak to a group of students, someone invariably asks me to describe the ideal employee. What are the traits of a prospective new hire that I look for, and would give them the best chance of success? In the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick […]