Family man, seeker and learner. Revealing my inner-poet. 2X Founder: Conversio (acquired by Campaign Monitor) + WooCommerce (acquired by Automattic). Ex-Rockstar.
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Family man, seeker and learner. Revealing my inner-poet. 2X Founder: Conversio (acquired by Campaign Monitor) + WooCommerce (acquired by Automattic). Ex-Rockstar.
I read Ben Horowitz' post about their investment in Instagram that made them a 312x return, turning a $250k investment into $78m [http://bhorowitz.com/2012/04/22/instagram/]. Most people would regard that as a shrewd business decision on Andreessen Horowitz' part, but I think it actually comes down
There's been a lot said lately about us replicating the Dot Com bubble all over again and even though a much-respected figure like Paul Graham has stated his believe that we're not in a bubble [http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinators-paul-graham-dot-com-bubble-was-dumb-leading-the-dumb-2011-2] , the doubts remain. I'm yet unconvinced by either to be
Interesting that Y Combinator focuses much of their investment decisions on the type of people behind the startups and not necessarily on the startup or the idea itself. So if I'm correct, I should be able to take any above-average idea to Y Combinator and based on my success with
I'd add"it takes money to make money". If you can't de-risk such an early stage startup, then we're basically talking about gambling to some extent. Yes social proof works well and gut feel (based on experience) works too, but many of these type of investments won't work out. I
In this post [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fund-phenomenon.html] Fred Wilson goes on to explain that a company should first scale & gather traction on seed funding before it goes after venture round funding. Whilst WooThemes has never taken any outside funding (we’ve bootstrapped from the
Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of GitHub [http://github.com/], on bootstapping.
This is a great write-up by the 37Signals crew about WooThemes which focuses on being bootstrapped [http://rockstarbusiness.com/cash-flows-financing-wasting-money/] and building a global business without any VC funding. If you’re keen to get to know WooThemes in any way, this post is a great start.
This is a great write-up by the 37Signals crew about WooThemes which focuses on being bootstrapped [http://rockstarbusiness.com/cash-flows-financing-wasting-money/] and building a global business without any VC funding. If you’re keen to get to know WooThemes in any way, this post is a great start.
A few thoughts on why first-time attempts at raising funding are failing.
First time that I’ve heard a VC explaining their investments this way, but this makes total sense as they are not only diversifying the risk between different investments, but also increasing the combined probability that they will all succeed (to differing extents of course).