The Ultimate Product Part 1.5
OK I should build IKEA furniture more often. Spending the last 2 hours building a new dresser from IKEA meant that my mind kept drifting back to The Ultimate Product and why it makes me feel...
View Article[UPDATED] If We Meet, I Will Ask You…
After blogging about a variety of topics, I find that they form the core nucleus of the things I care about before investing in a startup. Yes, I also care about the usual stuff like smart...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Talk About the Problem, Not Just the Solution
When I meet with entrepreneurs, the conversation often goes like this: We start by talking about the startup idea or problem they are trying to solve. We spend about a minute on that and then we dive...
View ArticleThe $100,000,000 Question
I’ve got a new favorite question to ask entrepreneurs during their pitches. The question is: “How do you get to $100,000,000 in revenue per year?” After they go through their entire pitch, I zing them...
View ArticleWhat I Really Mean By “Souring on Internet-Only Startups”
People who know me have heard me say in the last several months that I’ve “soured on internet deals.” Unfortunately, this has been misinterpreted as “Dave has stopped doing internet deals completely.”...
View ArticleWhat’s the Real Problem with Your Startup?
After I wrote my post Talk About the Problem, Not Just the Solution, I’ve had a series of pitches all characterized by the same thing: a singular focus on how wonderful the product is. Unfortunately,...
View ArticleDo Not Let History’s Mistakes Repeat Themselves
Charlie O’Donnell of First Round’s NYC team recently wrote a very important post entitled, Ignore startup history at your peril. It was so good and relevant to today that I’m adding it to my list in my...
View ArticleBuilding the “Apple of [fill in the blank]”
Yesterday afternoon, I reconnected with an entrepreneur on his project. He reminded me of something we discussed a while back and it re-rang a chord. That something was the fact that when we discussed...
View ArticleFrequency of Product Usage in Startup Strategy
I just read Mark Hendrickson’s post-mortem for Plancast on Techcrunch and the section on sharing frequency hit a chord. When I meet startups, I mentally run their product or service through this test,...
View Article“Can I get you to Series A?”
In my last trip to NYC, I had breakfast with my buddy Steve Schlafman of Lerer Ventures. I was talking about how many of our startups were going up for series A, and how it was filling my brain and...
View Article