[with a post like this, i’m not 100% sure i got it right in first publish – i don’t draft and i don’t circulate for feedback – so if anything is incomplete or unclear,… | Continue reading
[with a post like this, i’m not 100% sure i got it right in first publish – i don’t draft and i don’t circulate for feedback – so if anything is incomplete or unclear,… | Continue reading
We opened our own public library this week. On our lawn. It’s modest in size but made us part of a worldwide network called Little Free Libraries. Books have played a huge role in my life … | Continue reading
Unicorn hunting is hard! As Aileen Lee’s recent blog post suggested, there are only a few dozen billion dollar+ companies created each decade. If you’re a large venture fund, you need t… | Continue reading
2019 didn’t herald any major innovations in how early startup employees receive equity. Which is a shame since, on the margins, the most talented hires deserve more of it. On the positive fro… | Continue reading
For all of my 20s and much of my 30s there was a failure tiger nipping at my heels. No matter how fast I ran, it was still there – hot breath, sharp teeth and a whispered growl promising a bl… | Continue reading
“Hey Satya, should I write a post about the most influential VCs of the decade?” “Sure, expect a lot of opinions :)” Photo by Vitto Sommella on Unsplash We’re just a f… | Continue reading
“Hey, I want to pick your brain about a new opportunity I’m considering. Can you grab a coffee next week?” My recoil when receiving these emails isn’t because I don’t … | Continue reading
Pushing this into a blog post because my tweets are on rolling 30 day autodelete :) And since a “blog post” should have some value-add over just pictures of tweets: Ex-MSFT exec Steven … | Continue reading
There was a time when far less written about – or by – venture capitalists. But I seem to recall “we won’t invest in two competing companies” was an oft-stated princip… | Continue reading
There’s an expression in venture capital called “returning the fund.” It simply means that an outcome in the fund (out of say 20-30 investments in that specific fund) makes enough… | Continue reading
One of the interesting things about getting into venture via your own fund versus coming up through a larger firm is that when “this is always the way it’s been done” comes up as … | Continue reading
God bless Gené Teare for now I have something which explains what I do all day in a format my parents can grok. As part of Seed Series for Crunchbase News, Gené wrote up an extended interview with … | Continue reading
In my 6+ years of Homebrew, I’ve become a student of VC social media. For the first time, I pull back the cover and share this with you, putting myself at risk by breaking the venture omerta.… | Continue reading
Coffee brings me joy. I’m not overly precious about it – if Starbucks is the best available choice so be it – but living in a great coffee city like San Francisco, I don’t s… | Continue reading
The New York Times’ John Herrman recently asked “Is there anything the rest of the internet can learn from LinkedIn?,” in relation to how people there are relatively civil there c… | Continue reading
“And this slide is where I’ll talk about Go To Market, and….” “STOP” I say. “We’re going to do this in real time.” Photo by Veri Ivanova on Uns… | Continue reading
While this hasn’t happened to any of our portfolio CEOs in a while, there’s one reason for a VC passing on a funding round that just sets me off: “I wanted to do the deal but coul… | Continue reading
There’s a tiny hole on my resume. Now, 20+ years later you need to squint to see it, but it’s still there. I took the gig because I needed the money while in grad school, and, honestly,… | Continue reading
14 for 14. Homebrew’s first fund (2013-2015) has 20 core investments of which 14 went market for a Series A. All 14 successfully completed this fundraise. The six who didn’t go out for … | Continue reading
I. New York City I’ve lived in San Francisco long enough to consider myself a Local, if not a Native. But no number of elapsed years or distance can dull my strong attachment to New York City… | Continue reading
I froze my credit file across all three bureaus. I’ve been comped various identity theft and monitoring services which seem to pepper me with really uninteresting updates about their “d… | Continue reading
My obsessive focus on parsing the language of introductions previously resulted in a discussion of “the vouch,” but tbh that’s 101 level stuff. Let’s go deeper…. Intro… | Continue reading
Blog posts, for me, are like kidney stones. Or at least how I imagine kidney stones to be, since I’ve never had them personally. They usually begin with a question or idea, and then tumble ar… | Continue reading
I’m a sucker for travel gadgets and when it comes to these discussions, Peter Pham is my Human Wirecutter. We recently had a FB thread about portable chargers and collecting the recommendatio… | Continue reading
I like my coffee. And recently set out to improve my portable consumption experience by finding a better travel mug. My two primary motivations are (a) moving away from disposable cups and (b) pres… | Continue reading
Expanding a brief quip into a blog post might go against every law of internet nature, which suggests most content is improved by brevity. But something I suggested over the weekend raised enough f… | Continue reading
Everything is setting up perfectly – you’ve got a great relationship with your lead VC – he’s even saying “we” and painting pictures of being on the podium with … | Continue reading
“Don’t worry about making money right now” is not the advice you’d expect a seed VC to give a CEO right after writing them a big check. Do I not desire the UpAndToTheRightCu… | Continue reading
Kylie Jenner was pronounced by Forbes as the “youngest self-made billionaire ever” and the internet started debating what exactly self-made means. Hold aside that the Forbes lists are n… | Continue reading
A tweet resulted in a thread… Which then resulted in a longer blog post from Jason Rowley on what indie software he pays for. Which then spurred *this* post. For purposes of definition, IR… | Continue reading
As a kid I’d prowl graveyards with my mother, tightly holding sheets of wax paper and thick, flat Crayolas. Macabre backdrop for sure, but our interest was in art not mischief. Upon discoveri… | Continue reading
Now it all makes sense! Bezos’ post about his penis and HQ2 dramatic break up with New York City was all just a con man’s swerve, a magician’s distraction, to cause us to look one… | Continue reading
I met Jeff Berman during my YouTube years. He was an exec at MySpace and we were probably talking about a host of different partnership-type ideas that I don’t believe went very far. Fortunat… | Continue reading
In the design of social apps, we’ll sometimes talk about how there’s a Friend Graph and an Interest Graph, and they don’t always mix. Well for my personal Venn diagram of those tw… | Continue reading
The “always find a warm intro to a VC” axiom is misunderstood. Its intent was to suggest that a mutual connection who can vouch for an entrepreneur’s abilities, experience and per… | Continue reading
I want a place to talk about the products I love in a more persistent fashion than a tweet – my favorite notebook, best coffee, preferred blanket and so on. I want this place to be the equiv… | Continue reading
I get a lot of inbound from friends, acquaintances and Twitter followers about making the transition from Operator to VC. Here are the top three reasons – lightly paraphrased – for why … | Continue reading
It was a combination of early career anxiety and actual startup struggles which combined to make my years working on Second Life personally stressful. I remember my parents visiting our office and … | Continue reading
The dashboards we look at to monitor the health of our products are lagging the experiences our user communities are having. Back and forth flame wars on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere register as… | Continue reading