Continue reading Long-tail acquirers for medium exits.
I try to practice inbox zero and am arguably obsessed with productivity. At the very least, you can say I hate wasting time.
At odds is the fact that I like to stay abreast of a lot of things, e.g. what people are saying about our company, what's going on in startup land, what's going on with our servers, what people are working on inside DuckDuckGo, etc. For the most part, I'm notified of developments via alerts -- most via email, but some via txt and chat as well.
Continue reading Ditching alerts that aren't actionable.
I think most search results would benefit by some form of instant answer (like xkcd). DuckDuckGo has a lot of goodies, but I think we're only scratching the surface on what can be done there.
That's why today we're announcing DuckDuckHack: an open source platform to create instant answer plugins for DuckDuckGo. Think of them like add-ons for Firefox.
Continue reading Introducing DuckDuckHack.
Continue reading Out of acqui-hire stage.
Blake Master's class notes for Peter Thiel's startup class have been great, which is why I immediately was intrigued by the PandoMonthly event with him. One of the more interesting things to me that was said was his pointed questions to ask startups.
As an angel investor I usually ask:
- How did you (founders) come to be entrepreneurs?
- What led you to this market/idea in particular (and what markets/ideas did you discard along the way)?
- What is your path to victory?
- What are your exit expectations?
Peter asks...
Continue reading My answers to Peter Thiel's questions he asks startups.
People often ask startups how many employees they have. I'm not entirely sure why they do or why I care, but something about this perpetually asked question bothers me.
Yes, there are real organizational differences as you grow significantly, but most of the time when it's asked of small startups the answer is pretty obvious, i.e. somewhere less than 30.
Continue reading How many employees do you have?.
I don't know what Chris was referring to exactly, but as an angel investor this statement resonates with me right now. I've been seeing some really high valuations floating around.
Don't get me wrong -- there is nothing inherently wrong with high valuations if everyone is aligned in exit expectations. The problem is I don't think the alignment is there in many cases.
Continue reading Are you an indie, angel or venture company?.
This post is directed at startups that have not yet reached product/market fit.
I have nothing against hiring for the right reason--when it is clear that doing so will advance critical path quicker and/or with higher probability. When that's clear I've extolled (and am practicing) inbound hiring; when it isn't clear I think the right answer is not hiring until it is clear.
Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. I realize I'm the outlier here, but even though it's the norm I nevertheless cringe when I here something like this:
Me: what's the use of funds?
Founder: we'd like to hire a designer, n front-end programmers to do slick JavaScript and round out our product, n back-end programmers to help us scale, and a data guru to help us model all the data we're generating and/or build out these complicated algos we need.
Let me unpack why this bothers me so much.
Continue reading Do you really need a full-time hire for that?.
Every now and then I start using a service that really changes my life. I don't mean just because it's awesome, but that it literally effects my behavior so significantly that it makes noticeable changes in the way I conduct my life. Here are a few examples.
Continue reading The way of life effect.
I believe that ambitious startup ideas have similar success probabilities to their less ambitious counterparts, if not higher success rates. No, I don't have any real evidence. Call it a highly educated guess.
Continue reading Why you should choose an ambitious startup idea.
