Marketplace innovation comes in waves and we can point to a handful of major trends over the past two decades: Right now, the most exciting area in marketplace innovation is blockchain-enabled marketplaces, especially with what is happening in decentralized finance. The Ethereum … | Continue reading
As we’ve been spending time on B2B marketplaces and dev tools/platforms, we’ve come to realize that there’s an interesting sub-category that combines elements of both: the API-as-a-marketplace. What is an API-as-a-marketplace? Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-mark … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about productivity a lot lately. As an investor, time is always the scarcest resource. I can’t add more hours to the day, so the question is what can I be doing differently to make the best use of my time. | Continue reading
Over the past ten years, we have invested in and worked with close to 100 startups. Along the way, we have seen teams, ideas, and practices work spectacularly well. And, we’ve seen others that didn’t work out as expected. | Continue reading
We raised our first fund in summer 2012. It was a $15m early-stage fund that we invested in 20 portfolio companies over the course of two and a half years. We’re now seven years in and the portfoli… | Continue reading
A question I have been pondering for some time now, especially since a lot of our portfolio companies are now distributed organizations… This tweet sparked a lot of thoughtful reaction and discussi… | Continue reading
Last week was a rough week. I can be a pretty open book when it comes to my personal and professional life (though I’m not going to delve into the details here). As I shared what I went through, th… | Continue reading
Imagine a future, maybe 20-25 years from now, when there’s a smart toilet in every home. Picture it: the smart toilet, a device that collects our fecal matter and provides information about our hea… | Continue reading
Over the past few years, the term “managed marketplace” has become so widely used that Bill Gurley from Benchmark recently tweeted that it is not clear to him what the difference is between a “mana… | Continue reading
Crypto / blockchain has always been as much of a business model innovation as a technical innovation… Technical innovation: running a decentralized ledger / platform at scale Business model innovat… | Continue reading
When Angela and I were pitching our newest fund to investors, we started using the term “smart SaaS” to describe the kind of SaaS companies we like to invest in. Before the SaaS explosion, software… | Continue reading
Every new technology platform has been built around a specific new capability. The Internet connected people and data at scale (“connecting everyone, everything”). Marketplaces, social platforms, a… | Continue reading
A few weeks ago I shared some important leadership lessons from Stewart Butterfield, including investing in your own growth to make sure that the founder scales as fast as the company. Growing with… | Continue reading
I’ve always thought that the concept of a decentralized prediction market like Augur or Gnosis is one of the most interesting and crypto-native ideas. Just imagine creating millions of small market… | Continue reading
The predominant narrative among Silicon Valley start-ups has been: don’t open a second office until you have reached 100+ employees. Yes, there are tremendous advantages when everybody works out of… | Continue reading
Here’s a question that we have been getting a lot lately: Do you still invest in marketplaces? The answer is YES! We love their network effects and continue to invest in them. In a tweetstorm las… | Continue reading
Part of the job of a VC is to deliver on the promises they made to investors when raising the fund. Every VC defines their investment scope by a combination of thesis (e.g. invest in network-effect… | Continue reading
We recently organized another crypto dinner in Toronto, bringing together the local community and a bunch of people that were in town for EDCON (the Community Ethereum Development Conference). Most… | Continue reading