Charlie O'Donnell
My Twitter Stream- This is going to be BIG!
- My Flickr Photos
- My LinkedIn
- My Last.fm Music
- My Facebook
- My Foursquare
- My Netflix
- Contact
-
Tweets
- @CDiRusso swingle
- @adamgreatkind studying for what?
- Back Garden at Good Fork http://t.co/P4fquVUt
- Checker http://t.co/p2BrKK5B
- Key Lime in Red Hook http://t.co/ricnad2O
- @BKLYN_Brummie well my leg didn't fall off
- Thx for all the support! Came in at 1:38:29 for a 7:32 pace. Congrats to all the finishers! #nyrr #brooklynhalf
- You're not rich in Brooklyn until you're winged goat rich http://t.co/3wtl1le4
- @stringsn88keys yeah it sucks
- Coney Island Stop http://t.co/CLln6TMJ
- Just completed a 13.60 mi run - Right time wrong distance/rate... #pb #nyrr. http://t.co/gHqeb0Mc #RunKeeper
- Brooklyn half runners http://t.co/DsdHoGEJ
- Dear Hip Flexor... Quiet you. We are running this race whether you like it or not. #nyrr
- I'm at NYRR Brooklyn Half Marathon (Brooklyn, NY) w/ 209 others http://t.co/4btemwVD
- @eahiv doing both? I may opt for media fondo sun
- New view from First Round's new offfice. #frc http://t.co/G7YGIs84
- New post: What the Facebook IPO means: 10 things http://t.co/cckJIsSP
- Today is the day to announce all your bad tech news. Techmeme is assured to be a Facebook wall.
- Serious turnout at AKQA for #agenciesvsstartups http://t.co/nUi9xzly
-
Posts
- May 18, 12
1) Expect the angel and seed stage market to continue to stay hot. Newly wealthy Facebookers will likely contribute massively to early stage companies, which means building relationships with companies early and actually rolling up sleeves to add value will be a must for investors. If you're just money, you are toast.
2) Facebook will be hungry for growth in its ad business, and since it is running out of internet connected humans to connect to, it will need tools to make more out of each person. This will be a huge boon for companies like 33Across that monetize social data without being creepy.
3) It will get much harder for Facebook to recruit talent, since the promise of the pre-IPO stock pop is gone.
4) You'll likely see Facebook make a move to diversify revenue by breaking ground on a big new area. I'd say it has to be payments, because knowing who your friends are gives them a natural advantage in peer to peer. That data can also be used for fraud prevention because it's pretty hard to fake a person on Facebook compared to the normal behaviors and extended network of others.
5) Stories of how much money people made as early employees will trickle down to students, who will be more likely to join big companies and start there own businesses. Recruiting for banking and consulting will become that much harder.
6) The newfound wealth created by Facebookers will spur innovation around impact businesses in the sustainability, green, and social good areas--because if you don't need to work, you might as well work on something that makes the world a better place.
7) Expect more competition to Facebook. As crazy as it seems, the truth is that companies tend to take less risk, innovate less, and lose key employees after an exit. Entrepreneurs. May look to figure out what's next now more than ever before.
8) Increased regulator scrutiny of Facebook now that it has to make more disclosures about how it is doing and its methods of making money.
9) Investors will be looking at what Facebook does with it's cash. Facebook Ventures? Bigger acquisitions?
10) Goosed VC returns. Tens of billions of dollars of return should help VC returns a bit, but it will wind up widening the gap between the haves of the top quartile and the have nots of everyone else.
- May 17, 12
How do you price a round?
Its one of the most often asked questions and yet I've never seen a great answer given. It seems to me that the most important factor in pricing your round isn't your progress or your idea. It seems to come down to two things:
1) How much do you want to raise?
2) Supply and demand of capital willing to invest in your company.
The second is pretty obvious, but what about the first? So the more you want to raise, the more your company is worth? Kind of, actually...but how much money a team gets has to do with a number of factors that reflect things like trust in the team, risk, etc. So instead of pricing that into how much a company is worth, they tend to price it into round size.
More simply, the better the team, the lower the risk, and the higher the expected outcome, the more you're going to be willing to give a team and the longer you'll let them go until their next fundraising.
Sometimes, this also relates to capital requirements of what the team needs. For web development, usually it's pretty much the same across the board, but if you're making jewelry in China, it's going to be hard to get much done with a 500k seed round. Usually, teams are asking for enough money, plus a cushion, to get to some milestone roughly 12-18 months out.
So, ask for more and you're get a higher price IF the investors think you can handle it and you need it.
Generally, each round is going to set you back between 15-30%. That means investors are going to buy that much of your company at a time. It's a function of a few things. That means that founders as a group will be right around 50% ownership after two rounds. It means lead investors can get to 10, 15 or 20% ownership depending on whatever math they have that makes their own success model work. That's just roughly the equilibrium we've come to in this world.
Let's say the default, for simplicity's sake, is to take 20% of every round. More often, its probably closer to 25%, but since this is a blog post, I'll try to look more entrepreneur friendly. The question then becomes whether or not there's any significant reason to move off of that default.
Note that, to even get venture in the first place, you are special. Your team must be awesome and your idea must have huge potential. Getting less dilution than standard means that you have to have made fantastic progress, have a world class team, etc. way above and beyond what normally gets funded at this stage.
The other way to move that number is much more simple-- generate more demand for the round than there is supply of allocation. If two million of money wants in to this deal and they're raising one million, it's unlikely that me and my fellow investors are going to get the chunk of the company we normally get. If you're not fully subscribed, though, then I'm probably going to stick with a more normalized price since I'd rather not negotiate against myself.
Just so you see what the results of dilution and raise size come out to be, here's the 2nd grade math in a chart:
One note is that I'm talking about equity here--but no matter what kind of deal you strike, there's usually an equity equivilant. Some people think that by raising a convertible note, they're not pricing a round. Bullshit. Whatever cap you put on the round, that's essentially the price, because no one would bet on you unless they thought you could beat the cap--so its essentially equity. Uncapped notes, on the other hand, leave the investors and the entrepreneur misaligned. I'm not exactly hoping for near term success because my price isn't locked in. Investors should be able to lock in a price that reflects the risks at the moment they pulled the trigger. Call me old fashioned.
So, there it is. It's not that complicated, really.
- May 14, 12
I'll bet you don't know where the Center of NY's Tech Community and Center of Creativity is.
Give up?
It's in the Financial District--right at 55 Broad Street. It says so right on their website. In fact, it is "well-known internationally as the original home of New York's technology community."
I'll bet you didn't know that--mostly because it never was. Back in the late 90's, a lot of money and real estate brokering went into trying to make it so, however. Names like Sun and Cornell (ironically, given the new tech campus) were brought in to try and tech-ify NYC's downtown area.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much actual tech being built in 55 Broad. Sun's space was for it's customer assistance unit and Cornell just had a demo space patched into a supercomputer back on campus. There was a computer training lab run by a company called Prosoft, but that's like having an Apex Tech and expecting to be the next Detroit.
Despite the attempts at seeding things way downtown, Flatiron and Soho is where tech startups grew, just like today. So why didn't it work?
What you had with 55 Broad was a case of trying to thrust a building into the community without necessarily seeding and connecting the community to the building. Just because you put up a structure doesn't mean it's going to sprout a whole innovation ecosystem. You need a lot of other elements crosspollinating.
One of the reasons the NYC has such a vibrant ecosystem in place for startups is because of its seemingly more "permanent" community structures--not the buildings themselves, but the fulltime people and dedicated money that have a stake in the future of innovation of NYC. These are people whose business it is to support startups.
VCs and fulltime angels bring a lot more than just money to the communities they invest in. There was never a shortage of money in NYC--and there really isn't a shortage of money in any big city. You can get just about any wealthy person to part with some small portion of their wealth to put into risky investments, but these people don't contribute back to the ecosystem. They don't have a stake in it--and by not actively putting themselves out there as a source of capital, they're not in the information flow.
The currency that VCs deal in that's just as important as any other is information. Like pollinating bees, VCs bounce from meeting to meeting interacting with dozens of startups per week each. They carry with them information about patterns of success, pitfalls, best practices and trends to look for. They have a huge information advantage that startups can tap. On top of that, they tend to be the locus of innovation networks. It's no accident that the people who give out money have the largest networks of people floating around them. It connects them to all the companies they've met, invested in, the bigger companies that could acquire their companies and hundreds if not thousands of employees that have worked within their portfolio. They also meet a ton of press. Government and academic professionals also seek them out to get connected to the startup ecosystem. If you want to connect to an innovation community, there isn't a better place to start than someone who invests in it.
This is effective because, without a ground war, it's tough to start an innovation revolution. It needs to go house to house--founders and employees getting matched through individual e-mail intros, deals happening over handshakes, and startups getting recruited into your ecosystem one at a time.
When communities lack a critical mass of fulltime investors, you get a lot of inefficiency. Ideas get poorly vetted because the funders aren't current on tech trends. Companies can't find the partners and employees they need. It's not quite the same when you're putting government money to work supporting new companies. Grants are nice, but they don't come with the expertise of investors who have worked with tons of startups before.
Plus, you lack for visible champions--which is the complimentary air support. As much as a local community member might want to talk up a scene, the media always wants to follow the money. Startups had been located in Brooklyn for years, but it seemed that once the idea of more money flowing here came about from my fund, the media suddenly had an interest in what was on the other side of the East River.
I've come to appreciate how the same approach works with the physical spaces that have become startup hubs. General Assembly is making a business out of fostering the community--and only because of that are they able to commit the kinds of fulltime resources necessary to create the quality and frequency of events that bring entrepreneurs together to learn. When I was running what seemed like half of the events we had in the tech scene five years ago, I couldn't make nearly the kind of impact that a team working on it fulltime could. Individuals running meetups have done a fantastic job helping the community flourish--but it's a major burden to find space, get speakers, and market your event when you have another job to do. It happens and people do it, but it really helps when you have an organization focused on it as a goal. Plus, that organization and the individual meetup organizers tend to find synergies around space usage, teaching best practices and crosspollination of speakers and ideas.
Techstars and other accelerators have also become major network hubs in the NYC ecosystem, bringing investors together from all across the country. Brooklyn Beta will be accomplishing that same thing for the Brooklyn ecosystem. I'm sure their Summer Camp demo day will be the first time a lot of VCs have set foot in the thriving outer borough.
If the dreams of expanding the Tech Triangle footprint of Dumbo, the Navy Yard and Downtown Brooklyn are going to come true--and Williamsburg is to see continued expansion as its own supporter of tech, its going to need more of this kind of fulltime support from people who make a business of startups. Just putting up buildings and spaces without enough fulltime support of organizers and investors won't do it. That's what I fear when I see places like Berlin, Chicago, and Toronto putting on startup events--not enough anchors to make the whole thing stick and to turn the excitement into real opportunity.
This also goes for lawyers and teachers, too. Are your lawyers fulltime startup lawyers who do nothing but startup deals all the time or are they working on new companies as an exception? What about your academic programs? Is your business plan competition a fun thing you do on the side each year, or do you have real programs with fulltime staff dedicated to teaching full stack development and how to incubate real businesses? What faculty member sees it as instrumental to their career to connect to the tech community around them to get in the flow of best practices?
So if you're checking off all the ingredients you need to build your own startup ecosystem, just count how many people you have whose fulltime profession it is to support the ecosystem through their normal course of business--not just a side gig or an economic project. Get enough of those and you'll have your community.
- May 11, 12
Fact: Thanks to the new crowdfunding legislation, it will soon be easier for any entrepreneur trying to build Instagram for Cats to raise $10 million than it is for an experienced investor to raise a fund to invest in the next 25 new businesses as well as support their growth with strategic advice, help with hiring, PR, business development, and connections to future capital.
In fact, thanks to increased scrutiny of investment funds in a post-Madoff world, this imbalance will probably get bigger and bigger. The laws are written seemingly with the view that it's worse to lose your money from fraud than it is from your run of the mill poorly exacuted bad idea. You know, because sometimes startups just simply don't make it [shrug] but you gotta watch out for those financial hucksters who are looking to take your money and run off to kick it in Fiji. Trust me, if you lose all your money on your brother-in-law's Arizona tanning salon, it's not going to hurt any less than if you lose it in his seed fund. (Hmm... tanning salon/seed fund combo... Jersey Shore Ventures anyone?)
I would say something like, "You should see the number of complicated disclosures I had to had to pay a lawyer tens of thousands of dollars to put into my fund's legal docs," that is, if I could say anything about the fundraising status of any fund that I might have at all. I can't tell you anything about it thanks to the SEC. I can't put up my track record on my blog, which I'd happily do--whether I have any exits (even though it is theoretically public what I've worked on and who might have sold to a company that rhymes with hype) and how the other companies are doing. I can't tell you about the... oh, I dunno, let's make up a number that doesn't tie into any living people, real or imagined... 25 people I've actually placed at companies as part of a message of how I help startups.
But crowdfunding investments in startups is the answer to all our worries in life, right? It's a beautiful thing we're all supposed to get really psyched about--Main Street helping Main Street.
Until you realize that vetting and helping companies is actually really hard--or did you not notice all the news that venture capital as an asset class doesn't beat the market. Only the people who do it well produce returns, and when they do, they trounce the alternatives.
So, to recap, it's fine to let people who don't know anything about startups invest directly into them, but we're putting tons of restrictions around people with actual experience helping those people out and vetting the good ideas from the bad ones.
[scratches bald head]
16k+ Twitter followers, 5500+ e-mail subs a week, 6th most read VC blog, appearences on Bloomberg and CNBC and I can't use any of it to market any kind of financial product--but if I wanted to sell you a watch or build a video game, I'd be set. Personally, I think it would be pretty awesome if all of the people who subscribe to my weekly newsletter could put $2000 towards supporting the early stage tech ecosystem in NYC. At least it would be diversified across 25-30 companies--there's no such requirement in crowdfunding. Who wouldn't want in on the next Union Square Ventures or First Round Capital funds? I certainly would! If venture funds could be supported by the local communities they invest in, you'd create a fantastic dynamic.
Instead, you create a dynamic where it's actually easier for bigger funds to raise money from big institutions. The big institutions are more visable--you know who they are. You can get a list of the biggest pension funds and endowments and it wouldn't take that much legwork to figure out who manages their venture programs. Or, as a bigger fund, you could hire a placement agent--someone who specializes in helping you raise a fund. Placement agents, obviously, want to work with bigger funds because they get paid more to raise them--for the same amount of work. If you're raising a few million, it isn't worth their time.
The investors for small funds are much more random and hidden. They're pools of partners capital from hedge funds you've never heard off, family offices that don't maintain any kind of a web presence or some entrepreneur who sold some airport runway cleaning service in Latvia for like a billion dollars who now just jetsets around the world buying up soccer teams. You can't exactly look those people up on Angel List.
You also create an insider's game. Want to know why there aren't more female partners at VC funds? A huge number of the people who make partner create one by starting a new firm--Fred Wilson, Josh Kopelman, Marc Andreessen, Rob Go, and Josh Kushner all became partners when new funds were created. Raising money for a new fund is harder than raising money for a new company. At least startups have accelerators, incubators, etc. and now croudfunding sites. For new fund creation, you essentially have to already be tied into existing networks of capital. It's really not fair that I'm potentially able to get investors through my existing network for any theoretical entity that I may or may not be putting into place which I'm not allowed to talk about if I was. Good luck doing it if you're not already tied into that world--which is a different world than just the startup ecosystem. It will be a long time before you see diversity in this big money world because of the barriers to getting started--and if you don't get diversity on that side of the table, its going to be tough to get it on the entpreneuer side. (Says the white guy...)
I could, however, raise money for a Facebook-killer which I may or may not have the technical capability to build.
If there was more transparency into this world, and more liquidity in this end of the funding markets, I think you'd see the better fund investors rise to the top--just like you see in the startup world. Lots of companies are getting seeded, yet a smaller percentage of them are making it to the next round. They're failing faster and with smaller dollars.
This kind of quick vetting doesn't happen in the venture world. The current structures create a scenario where you're incentivized to go big with a fund and it takes forever for big venture funds to fall apart--yet we potentially miss out on the dealflow of up and comers that we'd back to put our money to work for us. If Mike Galpert, Frank Denbow, Amanda Peyton and Brad Hargreaves all had little kickstarted pools of money attached to them to invest, I'd back them, because they're smart, they get great dealflow.
Of course, that doesn't negate the need for people who do this on a fulltime basis at all. I'm a believer that someone needs to lead a round, sit on a board, and go to sleep at night thinking about how they can help the companies they're invested in.
Call me old fashioned.
- May 09, 12
It's true. With the ascension of Kent Goldman and Phin Barnes to Partner, Christine Herron leaving to join Intel Capital and me starting Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, there are no longer any people at the Principal level.
Oh, did you think I meant something else? :) I just thought today was Salacious Headline Day in the VC blogging world so I thought I'd chime in.
In all seriousness, Kent and Phin are two of the most principled professionals I know in the venture capital world--and their promotions are well deserved after four years of hard work at one of the most principled firms I know.
It's no accident that the Principal level, which--for a brief moment after I got promoted and before Christine got hired by Intel--had four of us, is now down to zero. The Principal level at any firm is a bit of an awkward stepchild. It's a little bit like adding "Interim" to a coach's title. They're doing much of the same work, but there's something about public signaling that kind of makes others think they're on some kind of probation. Is this person going to be here for the long run? What kind of sway do they have internally? Are they jockeying for position with someone else? Not only is it not quite clear to the outside world but sometimes it isn't even clear internally. Sometimes Principals can lead deals and sit on boards, sometimes they can't.
Plus, you simply don't have the same economics--you're the rookie who is killing it but who isn't up for the fat free agent contract until they've got more years of service time.
When I first sat down with Josh back in September of 2009 to talk about joining First Round. He told me that he already had three great people "on the bench" and there simply wasn't enough "playing time" as it was--so it wouldn't be clear how he could ever really get me into the game. (Clearly I'm riffing off Phin's college ball analogies here.)
That's what being a junior person at a VC firm is like--you do the best with the minutes you get. That's also why the bar is so high for the kinds of folks that get hired. In a way, you need to *already* be making an impact in the venture ecosystem, because if you're not an impact player, you're simply going to get lost in the structure. (I wrote a post about how to do this a while back...) That's why I'm not hiring any junior investment professionals. There's no sense in drafting an impact player that isn't going to be able to fulfill their potential during their tenure because of the structure of the job.
As a Principal, you're always going to be in an uphill battle to make a name for yourself. The paths that Phin, Kent and I took to becoming Partners were roads less traveled and statistically harder. You've got a better shot at joining a VC firm's partner ranks as a successful entrepreneur than as a junior venture professional--and I think you're going to see less and less new Principal positions over time.
You'll still see analysts in bigger firms--people working on cashflow projections, market research, and being the "on the ground" folks showing up to every last startup pitch event to turn over every rock--but they're not going to be decision makers. It will be clear that those are capped positions that get refreshed every few years like working at a bank. It's a great role for seeing a lot of ideas and learning a ton for more experienced folks, but at some point, you're going to want to figure out how to gain the credibility to bridge the big gap between an analyst and a partner making the call and being a value added boardmember.
A couple of years ago, we used to have a Junior VC dinner in NYC. Since then, Eric Wiesen, Mo Koyfman, Phin, and myself have become partners, Sarah Tavel and Mark Davis have gone over to the operational side, Melody Koh has gone off to grad school and Andrew Parker (undoubtedly the next partner promotion along with Thatcher Bell) went off (theoretically) to Boston.
Is this the "Death of the NYC VC Principal" post? Will Schlaf be the last one standing or will it be Tom Loverro? We shall see, but the opportunities for those with too much experience to be an analyst seem to be drying up as more and more venture firms find that this "middle child" position isn't the most efficient use of talent.
- May 07, 12
On Saturday morning, I stepped onto continental Europe for the first time in just over 20 years. I hadn't been here since I was 12, when I did a week long exchange program in Italy. I'll admit to not being particularly well travelled--I've never lived outside the five boroughs. I don't know any other languages. It's not that I don't like new places--I've just spent a lot of time diving pretty deep into my own city and going all in on a career based off of being rooted in NYC.
That's why I thought it was a bit of an odd choice to be asked to comment on the Berlin tech scene for the NextBerlin conference.
That's when I realized how much of a beacon NYC has become for "Outside the Valley" ecosystems. It makes sense. If you're looking to create a new startup hub, you can't look at the West Coast to figure out how to do it. They have a multi-generational head start. You're not going to replicate the Valley, but you could certainly look to a place that went from essentially zero to the second most proflific startup communities in 15 years (or 8 years, depending on if you count the fact that we came back from zero again dating back to '04).
I've spent the last few days touring the city and researching the startup culture here and I'm impressed on both fronts. Berlin is a great place to be full of fantastic people--with a serious dedication to building an innovation community. Yet, I couldn't help shake the feeling that I wasn't seeing anything particularly unique to the country of today--something organic rather than something rebuilt.
It felt a bit like the knock on the German startup scene that I hear. You get a lot of cloning of US models, but not a lot of originality. There are clones of Fab, Birchbox, Pinterest, etc., but I haven't heard much about a uniquely German service that didn't model after something else that had already gained traction. If they are out there, others need to hear about them more--not in a pitch but in a better way to share cutting edge ideas.
Berlin has a fascinating history that seems to leave the city at a bit of a loss to figure out its identity. The city of Berlin was nearly completely destroyed after World War II and it spent many years after torn in two between Communist and Western rule. What you see today is an odd mix of neoclassical buildings rebuilt (cloned) to look like buildings of Germany's past and new glass boxes attempting to move the country forward--with some boxy Eastern bloc elements thrown in as well. It's clean, well laid out, convenient and even fun to get around, but it lacks cohesiveness. It feels like an attempt to create or find a history while embracing the future--yet at the same time not being entirely sure what to do with its troubled middle years. It's tough to jump into the future when you don't know where you're jumping off from.
That was clearly embodied in the memorial dedicated to Jewish Holocaust victims--thousands of unmarked gray slabs of varied heights on a sloping plaza. It's pretty open to interpretation as to what it represents--and yet, it still awkwardly crossed paths with its past. Turned out that the company tasked with coating the stones in anti-graffitti paint was a chemical company with Nazi ties. Here they were trying to come up with a solumn way to honor the victims of a terrible tradegy and the builders couldn't escape being tied into the tradegy itself. When such an event is so pervasive, there are simply no perfect answers on how to deal with it or move forward.
Perhaps it's just safer to copy or to rebuild what came before. You don't risk rattling cages or offending anyone. On the outside, it's working. Fab.com bought it's German clone and others will undoubtedly have to get acquired--but what does it do for the long term? New Yorkers are passionate about Foursquare because it is something uniquely New York in it's local origins. It's made for New York and we export it elsewhere. It feels ours. Twitter was a unique American concept that we exported elsewhere. Even though we may not be the best builders--when you want to find an original idea (if there is such a thing) you come to the US. Or, at least, that's the perception.
I think that perception is going to hold Berlin back--and unnecessarily. There are a ton of fantastically creative people here. How can we unleash their potential further--to make sure the next big startup idea that gets exported comes from here? That's what will attract the best entrepreneurs here--an opportunity to push limits and explore the future of innovation. It can't and won't be market scale or, in the near term, investment capital.
I don't think the Valley really took New York seriously until Foursquare rose up in 2009. Despite a handful of investments from outside firms, I think you need an ecosystem capable of originality before outsiders seriously think about rooting here. The fear is that its getting easier and faster to go global. How much longer will the opportunity to clone startups for other cultures and countries last when we become more and more connected everyday? As systems of communication and supplies get more and more connected, and you have more people with global business experience, the window of opportunity to clone an idea before the original launches in your country will disappear--and if that's all you're known for, it's going to be harder and harder to attract talent. In places like India and China, you can avoid that with sheer scale--that even if you're a copy, you're building in an even bigger market.
New York City has its roots in the financial industry--and while some people think that means we're risk averse, I actually think it means that more people are in the business of taking risk here than anywhere else. That's what I'd love to see here more in the startup models. You have amazing creative talent and ridiculously sharp entrepreneurs--let 'em go on some crazy ideas that teach us what the future of technology in our lives will be. Invest in ideas that are going to change the way we live--not just reapply the way others are living to this market.
- May 02, 12
1. Comment on a series of posts other professionals in your area of expertise seem to be talking about.
2. Read something in a totally different genre like philosophy or history and try and put it in the context of your job.
3. Blog some rhetorical questions that are on your mind.
4. Ask 4-5 smart people for a tip or best practice around something everyone in your area needs to know.
5. Take a look at your resume and write some first impressions/common misperceptions of yourself. How does this differ than what impression you wish people got and what steps or projects can you take on to bridge that gap?
6. Interview someone you find interesting by email. 3-5 questions will do.
7. Comment on two seemingly juxtaposed approaches to success in your area? Why does each work? Are they really mutually exclusive?
8. Write about someone or something that you appreciate.
9. Attend an event and write a thoughtful summary.
10. Share something that you do to make your work easier.
11. List your tools of the trade/most used apps and why you like them as well as a feature request for each.
12. Recruit a fictitious or All Star team to join you on a project or adventure and write about how they'd compliment you and each other.
13. Journal your attempt at creating a Top 25/50/100 list of the most interesting/innovative/disruptive/etc people in your space. Ask for recs, ruminate on criteria, etc. The second you say you're trying to do this you'll get lots of suggestions and you could turn around and interview all of those people, asking them for their suggestions for the list as well. You could get tons of posts out of the interviews if nothing else.
14. Writeup a theoretical exercise for a company changing something about the way they do business--like what if Twitter created a level of paid accounts or what if Facebook added features for the enterprise. Should Uber have shared rides? What kind of advertising mechanism should Tumblr have? Make sure you're respectful of the hard work the company has put in to get where they are going and keep in mind they've probably tought about your suggestion before.
15. Ruminate on what the future of something likes like 5, 10, 50 years from now. What would most people assume happens that they'll likely get wrong?
16. What industry lesson can we learn from a fictional book or movie?
17. Pick out a trendy area and write about how the current solutions may or may not be what ultimately wins in the space. Who has the best chance of solving that problem?
18. Observe some "average" people and how they do something related to your industry that others seem to miss. If you're an architect, how do most architects misunderstand people's home lives? What do doctors miss about typical patients, etc?
19. How are you "average" or not related to how the world is designed with you in mind? Where do you differ from the fat middle of the normal curve and how do you have to be conscious of this when doing your job?
20. If you were hiring someone for what you do and you could only select based on one character trait, what would it be and why?
21. If there was one industry conversation or negotiation that you would have liked to be a fly on the wall for, what would it be and how do you think it would have gone?
22. Promote a person or service for free--who or what has added awesomeness to your life that others need to know about.
23. What is the most simple, smallest task that you could do everyday for the next month that would improve your life and why?
24. What's the most annoying thing you have to do as part of your daily routine and how could technology fix it? Be as detailed on how the product would function as possible.
25. Take a company's approach and apply it to a new area. What would an auto mechanic look like if it was run by Southwest Airlines? If Apple built a car, what would it have? What if Teach for America placed Fortune 500 CEOs instead of teachers?
Any others?
- Apr 30, 12
Yesterday, I did my first Tough Mudder.
If you don't know what that is, check it out. It's nuts. Or, to think about it another way, a few weeks ago, I was proud to say that I did my first half marathon. Yesterday, I basically did a half marathon that included live electrical wires, an ice bath, crawling through mud and a host of other obstacles. It was enough to make me think that if someone doesn't knock me off my bike on my commute or if I don't fall in some water, it will have gone too easily.
See the socks in the picture to the right? Those are, or were, white. :)
One thing that struck me yesterday was the Mudder Pledge and how it reminded me of doing a startup:
- I understand that Tough Mudder is not a race but a challenge.
- I put teamwork and camaraderie before my course time.
- I do not whine – kids whine.
- I help my fellow Mudders complete the course.
- I overcome all fears.
Think about how you might rewrite it for entrepreneurs:
- I understand that entrepreneurship is not a race but a challenge.
- I put teamwork and camaraderie before money.
- I do not whine – cubical workers whine.
- I help my fellow coworkers succeed.
- I overcome all fears.
Sounds like a pretty good "Tough Startup" pledge. Perhaps everyone can get their team together this morning to recite the #toughstartup pledge in their offices. Please tweet @ me if you do! Make a video of it!
By the way, doing or startup or doing a Tough Mudder is not for the faint of heart. Not everyone should do it. They say things at the race like, "If you cannot swim, do not go in the water." Seems obvious, but I feel like, in our world, a lot of entrepreneurs don't quite get this. It all seems like fun and games until you start drowning.
- Apr 30, 12
I've been working with the folks at the Northside Festival on their new tech and entrepreneurship track to create an amazing conference in Brooklyn this June. We've got some really awesome speakers lined up and I'm striving to try and make each of these panels good enough to headline other events.
Yet, for some of the people that I wanted to be there, and others that still agreed to come, the answer was:
"I don't really like panels. They generally suck."
Honestly, I didn't have much of a response other than promising to do what I could to make them better. They do, in fact, often suck. But why? Is it the format? Does it have to be this way?
I spoke on a SXSW panel in 2011 that didn't suck. I know it didn't suck because the first person to ask a question told us that our panel was worth the whole price of admission to the conference and we got the same sentiment echoed on Twitter. The panel included myself, Emily Hickey, Ben Lerer, and Christine Herron and we spoke about startup mistakes.
The panel didn't suck because it was engineered not to suck. Here are a few things we did:
- First and foremost, the panelists were carefully chosen. They aren't the biggest VCs and entrepreneurs, but they're some of the most thoughtful ones. Some of the most successful people simply haven't tought much about why they got where they are--and even if they have, they're just wrong about it because they've only scratched the surface. These panelists have seen both success and failure, and they've seen it from multiple perspectives--and on top of that, because I knew them well, I knew they'd be able to share those stories. Not everyone is a good storyteller, so choose carefully.
- The moderator had a sense of the story that should come out of the panel. I knew what I wanted to cover and what I wanted the audience to leave with. Panels are, or at least should be, stories, and a story is supposed to leave you with something. You should remember them because they make sense in a structure. Too many moderators pick something broad like "The Future of the Present" and ask vague questions like, "So what happens after now?" You'll never get a tight story that people can leave with if that's what you do. People either need to leave with a specific story or a sense of "If I believe x, this will happen, if I believe y, this will happen." Moderating is hard and not everyone can do it. Respect the craft.
- The questions were discussed among the panel ahead of time. We vetted a bunch of topics and decided on the questions that would output the best answers. That also gave the panelists time to think about their answers. In fact, they were given a specific format by which they should structure their responses--to think about the tweets that we wanted to see before further explaining. So, when the question was "How can you tell what makes a good hire?" Someone would say a one line, tweetable, comment-worthy sentence as an answer before diving in further.
- Not everyone answered every question. Don't you hate when they go through everyone in order and the last two panelsts basically say, "Yeah, what she said..." but they still take 5 minutes to say that. Some of the questions simply aren't relevent to everyone. With our panel, each person was asked to answer only 2-3 of the questions, so the answers bounced around the four of us and no more than two people addressed any given question--unless they really had something ridiculously awesome to say.
- The panel talked amongst themselves. We disagreed on a few things, asked questions of each other. It was like we were real humans sitting next to each other discussing a topic. Amazing.
I plan on working the moderators hard for Northside--and trying to get people up there who have something to say because they've really thought about it. We're going to experiment with some formats and try to make the whole thing worthwhile for the people that paid to be there.
- Apr 25, 12
History presents a lot of patterns we can learn from, if you examine them closely. Lately, I've been talking a lot about the "Robert Moses Effect".
From the 1930's to the 1960's, Robert Moses was the most powerful influence over the development of New York City's urban landscape. Nearly every highway you've ever driven over in the Big Apple was put their at the order of one man.
He believed that adding more highways would mean less traffic. Pave over some housing and through some neighborhoods and auto congestion would go away. Rush hour would be faster.
It was a total miscalculation. What happened in reality was that when you put a road somewhere, people use it. "Let's take the highway, it will be faster!"
"In fact, let's get a second car."
Adding highways meant adding traffic--more than ever before.
We're seeing the same thing happen within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. As you build more infrastructure to support entrepreneurship, more people become entrepreneurs.
Think about the hundreds and hundreds of people working in co-working spaces. If you had rolled back the clock just four or five years ago, you would have never guessed that there would be enough of a market for these kinds of spaces--yet every time a new one opens up, it gets full right away. I didn't think you'd ever be able to fill General Assembly so quickly, nor would I have guessed that there would be nearly 200 people who wanted to work way up in North Williamsburg (Greenpoint) at The Yard. You then realize how many people are on the verge of quitting their cube jobs or work independently already who look in their backyard or in their social network and think, "Yeah, that seems like a cool place to work... sure, I'm in." The more you build, the more people who get that itch.
That's happening in the DIY world as well. We're seeing more and more services and amenities pop up to de-risk being a one person company--Etsy, Kickstarter, Square--and more ways for people to monetize their off hours to help make this happen, like Taskrabbit. This is opening up the door for more people to turn their passions into businesses. Kickstarter creates more doers and makers than it supports existing ones.
That's why the addition of new NYC schools like the Cornell campus on Roosevelt Island and the urban innovation campus at 370 Jay in Brooklyn are so critical. People keep asking whether or not they're going to solve the shortage of engineers. If anything, they're going to make it worse--because they're going to train more innovators and more makers who will be inspired to create things. Many of those things will become companies--way more than we have now, and so, in a sense there will always be a shortage of engineers and other people to work at startups as long as you keep producing more innovators. You build roads, you get more cars. You educate people to solve problems, you get more startups. The engineering and the traffic problem will always persist.
- Apr 23, 12
I'll show up generally anywhere I get invited to speak. I love public speaking, teaching and generally being helpful. I'm often the last one to leave an event, held back by the most persistant of entrepreneurs trying to squeeze as much advice as they can out of me. It's totally fine--except when I really really have to go (as opposed to when I just said I really had to go, ten minutes ago).
But the truth is, you probably shouldn't listen to me.
I mean, what do I know? I've only recently started leading investments a little over two years ago. My track record of leading deals consists of only seven investments, luckily no zeros (knock on wood) and one exit. I have one failed attempt at a startup under my belt as a founder and I don't have any particularly usable skills that anyone would pay for like selling, designing, building, etc.
Why should that stop me, though? It doesn't stop anyone else. Conferences, startup blogs, meetups--they're all filled with people telling you how to build your company. Often times, the advice is terrible or impractical. On average, it's probably nonsensical.
There are several key problems to this knowledge sharing little community we've built:
- People make themselves look better in hindsight. I read this book, "Why We Make Mistakes" and it talks a lot about "recall bias". When we look back at things, we're terrible at remembering what actually happend. We remember ourselves as being smarter and more thoughtful than we really are. When people tell you how and why they raised capital or what drove their app to success, they often attribute success to planning or neat little explainable reasons when they might simply have no clue what happened.
- Venture capital is kind of like a knuckleball. Even the guy tossing it around has no clue why it winds up where it does. VCs construct stories in their head as to why they invested in this or that, and much of it is based on prior experience, but they're often awful at articulating the real reasons. Maybe you reminded them unconsciously of an entrepreneur they regretted passing on in the past. Maybe they turned you down because they thought you were too pushy. So much of this is gut feel with a thin later of strategy retrofitted to seem more than random.
- It is nearly impossible to derive truth given the number of stakeholders that needed to come together to create success. Try and figure out exactly what a startup had to show at the moment a VC chose to invest in them. Half the time, founders were pitching a completely different idea than what took off--so the VC who looks brilliant for funding the latest viral app really funded a B2B product that never took off. In hindsight, they'll say, "I knew that was a smart team" but in truth it's kind of impossible to predict the success of teams. Does that mean everyone who fails was dumb? Not special? Smart people fall all the time, trust me. Same with product ideas. Whose idea was it to be private, or public? It could have been that awful hire you made that disrupted the team and you had to let go, but funny enough, that's never the story is it?
- The biggest problem is that what gets lauded as successful strategy isn't replicable--or at minimum should never be advocated. There's a difference between saying that Twitter succeeded because it was free and then turning around and advocating that some entrepreneur's site be free so it can be successful. Most startups fail. By taking best practices from other companies, at best, you lessen your chances of failing, but you do not, by any means, guarantee success. In fact, if you borrow best practices from someone else, but those strategies for one reason or another don't apply to your team, product, industry, etc. you could very easily increase your chance of failing.
So why bother showing up? Why ever read another tech blog?
The problem isn't with the content. It's what people do with it. Unfortunately, people are out there taking Skillshare classes, reading VC bloggers, and buying Steve Blank's books and taking the advice contained within them as some kind of religion--mindlessly applying them like my grandmother applies Vicks--everywhere and anywhere there seems to be a problem.
What you should be doing is thinking about this more like a Pinterest board--meant to inspire and not necessarily for you to just buy everything. When someone tells you they achieved success because they launched a mobile app, that means you should go off and consider whether it's appropriate for what you're doing to be on mobile. Does it work for your customer? Is what mobile did for someone else relevant to what you're doing?
New entrepreneurs seem to lack discernment--the ability to take the firehose of information coming at them and weed out what is relevent and sensible for them. They don't stress test. They don't look cautiously at the advice given to them by their favorite VC blogger. I've heard far to many times entrepreneurs telling me "We're a lean startup" as if that magically means they're different/better/etc. If that is a methodology that has worked for you, great--but at the end of the day, you're just a business--one that is doing well or not, on a path to success or not. If lean methodologies have lead to product improvements, that's great for you--but just because you're using lean methodologies doesn't guarantee you're going to achieve anything.
So gather up all the ideas you can--new ideas, especially ones that force you to challenge your thinking--are good, but spend just as much time weeding them out as you do listening and applying. Go to a conference to figure out what other people are trying not to figure out what to do.
Think for yourself. I can often and will be--once history proves it--terrifically wrong. So will everyone else.
- Apr 20, 12
Answer: After your business model makes boatloads of money. :)
Ok, well, short of that, this is one of the questions I get most and here's what I've noticed about venture raise timing. There seems to be three windows, each with their own pros, cons and complications.
Here are some general tips to keep in mind:
- Phin tells companies to solve all the problems you can solve without money first. I think this is great advice.
- The price of your deal matters less than who you get as an investor. If you get people who can actually help you succeed, whatever dilution you take now because of a lower price will pale in compare to what you don't have to take in later rounds because of your progress--and moreover what you will get after a better eventual outcome.
- I'm a big believer in sharing what you're up to with investors early, even if you're not likely to get a deal. Their feedback about similar models and what you need to do go raise money will be invaluable.
So here's when I see people tend to raise:
Entrepreneur + Approach to a Market
Sometimes, the right person/team comes along and says "I want to tackle X market and I think this is how I'm going to do it." That's all they have--no demo no code--and they get funding. WTF? How's that even possible? You're slaving away learning to code and getting a prototype up and some fameball gets a check without even doing anything. How do I get that?
I'm not saying it's fair or a good idea, but here's what I see as the criteria:
- You are the best team I could possibly conceive of approaching this market--either because of your industry experience, your prior track record, or because I already know you well and trust in your awesomeness.
- I like the area that you're playing in.
This was the chloe + isabel bet. With 15 years in jewelry and paying her way through college selling CutCo knives, I couldn't think of anyone better than Chantel to start that business. Plus, I liked the economics and clear prospects for building a big company in that space.
Entrepreneur + Kinda Workable Demo/Alpha + Little to No Data on Traction
You've launched or you're about to launch. I can login and kinda do most of the things you're going to let people do. There isn't any growth yet so all we have is a sneak peak at product direction and some confirmation that you have the ability to build something.
This is a confusing one for entrepreneurs--because some people get this round done but others don't. The issue is that you need an investor that has conviction--and very few have this. You need investor to say "I have a preconceived pattern in my head that this kind of product would work for this market, so I believe in it and I like what I'm seeing so far." The problem is that you have no idea which investors think what about particular products.
This was the Square bet. When Jack comes to you with that little reader, plugs it into his iPhone, and swipes you, you're in. Could Jack have raised money on is own without the demo? Probably. Sure. But that's not what he did. He built the demo first and if you were interested in mobile payments, he won you over. Traction? Before I joined First Round, I was the 476th and 477th dollar to be swiped on a Square--so there really was none--but I believed in the concept enough that I would have offered him a check.
This was also the GroupMe bet. I already believed in small, private groups going back to my observation of LiveJournal--where people's blogs were read by 5 people and mostly kept private. I didn't care so much about how many people were using it after 48 hours. It was a solution to a problem I already had in my head, plus I liked the guys.
There are other things at the same stage that I look at that I just don't feel the same about. I can't explain it so much, but I just don't believe in those models--and without any proof, it's really my opinion against yours... which brings us to...
Entrepreneur + Kinda Workable Demo/Alpha + 1-6 months of *Real* Traction (Not Launchrock signups)
I don't think your idea will fly. Who is going to do that? Wait? You have 250 paid customers already? Wait wait, I think maybe I'm a dumb VC who doesn't know everything and I need to take a look again.
When I first saw del.icio.us, I didn't get it. When I heard that 10,000 people had signed up, I was stunned that 10,000 people had figured out (in 2005) how to drag the tagging button up to the bookmarks bar. If enough people figured that out, there had to be something there.
If I don't believe in what you're doing, traction is what will prove me wrong. But it's got to be real traction--not a ton, but enough of the right traction to prove whatever hypothesis I have about it wrong.
What's real traction?
- Returning users--people who make it part of their daily or weekly routine, and use it more and more.
- People who need to do something not exactly easy to use it, like paying, contributing sensitive data, integration of some kind into their workflow, etc.
- Traction on the tough part. You built a local merchant marketing tool, but can you sell it? Anyone can build that, but not everyone can sell it.
This was the SinglePlatform bet. I'd seen lots of ways local merchants could market themselves, but none with any kind of real traction. When I first saw the company, Wiley had strong growth in sales on a small base--like 100-150 merchants I think.. and they were paying. That's something.
I'd love for investors to weigh in here on whether they think this is accurate...
- Apr 19, 12
I played softball last night with a team I've been on for over 6 years. Most of the core of our team has been together for at least 3 seasons now and we're one of the top teams in Zogsports.
One of our guys went the other way on a tough pitch and drove a line drive to right field and I commented to Jeremy that this was the best I've ever seen our team hit. The funny thing was that the score was only 8-5 at that point and we had just racked up 19 runs the game before.
Will scored on the play and immediately came up to me, saying "This is the best we've ever hit."
"Dude, I just said the same exact thing to Jeremy!"
Yet, we didn't even have half the runs we rang up last week--so what was the difference? Isn't out come the only thing that counts?
The week before, I homered off the top of the right fielders glove--she had gotten all sorts of twisted around and couldn't make the play. For every home run we had, we popped the ball up the batter before. We swung at a lot of bad pitches--and while some of those turned out to be hits, nine times out of ten, if we hit like that, we wouldn't win against a good team.
But last night was different. Every shot was hit hard--even though many of them went right to one of the fielders.
There's a stat in baseball called "Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP)". In a way, it's a measure of luck. Usually when you hit the ball, something good happens a certain percentage of the time. Sometimes, the balls just always seem to wind up in spots where there are no fielders. Other times, you're hitting it right at where the fielders are. A lot of this is just dumb luck--or the randomness of a small sample size. Over the long run, these things balance out. I would take the way we hit last night over the way we hit the week before anytime, no matter what the run total is.
Outcomes are often disconnected from effort and skill. Sometimes the ball just drops in the right place. The same thing happens in startups. A small team working for a year or so with little to no revenues normally doesn't produce multi-hundred or even billion dollar outcomes. Sometimes, you find a hole the same way someone swings at a bad pitch and pops it right over a misplaced fielders head. Normally, that's a hit, but it's not usually a home run. It's not to take anything away from companies that have gotten there like that--many of them have built great products--but there are a lot of companies working their asses off growing revenues month by month, and they'll never ever get to a billion dollar outcome.
I've had a couple of people pitch me and say, "We're not an Instagram", because their business wasn't a viral consumer play. They built something, sold it to someone else, etc. You know, old school. As an investor, I'll take those all the time.
A billion dollars is awesome and so is 19 runs in a softball game. That doesn't mean that someone built a better or more sustainable business. I'd rather get a good swing on a pitch and hit it right at someone, because if I come up with a swing like that every at-bat, good things will happen. When it comes to building companies, you want to work hard, build thoughtfully with a business in mind, and move towards goals. Do that well and you'll be fine. You might not be the next Twitter that way, but neither will most of the people who tried to be the next Twitter.
- Apr 18, 12
I've been using a thought experiment in the personal branding class I teach to entrepreneurial Fordham students that I think is worth sharing. I asked them to curate a conference--just as a mental exercise, not for real.
The conference format forces them to do a couple of things that haven't been easy to get them to think about and has a lot of potential lessons for how they think about networking and personal brand.
First, they have to narrow down a particular field. With respect to their careers, it's tough to get across why just deciding to be a marketing major isn't enough. They need to focus more, go deeper. Taken in the context of a conference, no one thought that a generic marketing conference seemed that interesting. We talked about focusing on horizontals and verticals--like financial education, technology's affect on art or mobile food. These intuitively sounded more interesting and I think it will help anchor students in their career goals--that specializing in a horizontal plus a vertical will help focus them.
Building out the panels is a focus on trends and news--but more importantly what's going on right now that people are talking about. If you can't, off the top of your head, come up with 5-10 panel topics for an area that you're interested in, than you're just not paying enough attention.
Speaker lists are a good way to figure out the quality of your network. How do you determine speaker quality? Do they have experience? Is it unique experience? Did they build Pinterest or comment about it from the sidelines. Being close to the source of trends and being unique seemed important. Building out a list of who in your field of interest would make for a great panelist is also a great target list for who you should build relationships with.
It also helped them think about what made *them* interesting. Are they prepped well for meetings. Do they have clear and concise answers? Perhaps there are some contrarian beliefs that they hold. Would they make a good panelist themselves?
It's been a fun and evolving exercise and I look forward to continuing to evolve it.
- Apr 16, 12
I've always been one to veer away from what the masses are doing. I never saw Titanic, didn't watch Lost and I'm not into American Idol. When a whole bunch of people get out of their heads excited about something, it makes me a little bit less interested--because I want to discover the awesome thing that no one knows about yet.
That's why I've always tried out a wide variety of phones. I had a couple of Palm phones, a Windows mobile phone in 2005, and even had a Helio. When everyone went iPhone, I went Android. While there may be more Android phones out there, among VCs and tech folks, it was the zag to seemingly everyone else's zig.
Truth be told, I really liked my Android phones, especially since I'm on Google's cloud for just about anything important that I do. I feel in love with Swype and liked adding apps over the air.
Eventually, little things would pop up--and eventually the little things piled up and became, well... downright maddening. The fact of the matter is that the care that goes into every last detail of the iPhone design just isn't there with Android phones--and it's that last 5% that really makes the difference. There was nothing big that I wanted to do on the iPhone that I couldn't do on the Android, but doing them was just that much slower, clunky or glitchy. Not a lot, but eventually, just enough.
Here were the camel straws:
- Memory. Androids have plenty of memory--when you include their flash memory cards. The problem is that not all apps work on the flash memory, particularly the ones that use some core functionality of the phone. So, eventually, you start to get "low memory" notices and you're forced to delete your twitter cache and manually move apps from internal memory to the card. I couldn't help but think, "Steve Jobs would never let a user spend time moving apps around memory or worrying about cache clearing. The phone got too cluttered up for me to run Swype and I had to switch back to normal typing.
- Random apps running in the background. One of the number one apps in the store is Advanced Task Killer--an app that helps you close down apps you never opened in the first place. Seriously? On a routine basis, I had to kill my American Airlines app that would just launch itself and do God knows what in the background--taking up memory, power, and probably sending my data to the highest bidder. Total fail.
- Power. The screens are big and lovely--and maybe when we have fuel cell technology, they'll be useful, but for now, they just outstrip the phone's capacity to stay juiced up. I'm not sure the iPhone is that much better, but my iPhone friends don't seem to spend nearly as much time undering for outlets as I do.
- Micro-USB. Those tiny little plugs are utter crap and totally designed to fail. Eventually, all of the chargers I had wound up bending too far and making it flakey to charge the phone.
- Testing startup apps. As a VC, I could never advise that a startup launches on Android first--the VCs, media, and key influencers are all on iPhone--which left me at a disadvantage as an early adopter. Perhaps if building for the Android phones weren't such a pain in the ass...
So now I've joined the iCult--yet I still use a PC on my desktop and am perfectly happy with that. Feel free to play Draw Something with me in the meantime.
-
Photos
-
Info
- Partner at Brooklyn Bridge VenturesVenture Capital & Private Equity | Greater New York City Area, USSummaryCharlie is a connector--introducing like minded friends, helping entrepreneurs find supporters, or just trying to make sense of disruptive ideas and the appropriate opportunities to create change.
His interest in technologies that improve connection and empower individuals has led him to the creation of Path 101 (www.path101.com), a career discovery destination. He is the company's co-founder & CEO and passionately leads the business strategy, marketing, and business development. Charlie works on the company's product vision with co-founder and CTO, Alex Lines.
In early 2006, Charlie founded nextNY (www.nextNY.org), a grassroots a participant-driven organization of almost 1,000 up and coming digital media and technology professionals in NYC--the largest in the area. Events have included discussions on the NYC startup environment, an open house at Google NYC, and an discussion on the future of online advertising.
He also kayaks and plays softball.
Most recently, as the Director of Consumer Products for Oddcast, he helped launch the company's first direct to consumer avatar platform, Voki. (www.voki.com) He was responsible Voki's product vision, functional specifications, and initial business and marketing strategy. He coordinated the company's technical and creative resources to help get the product from idea to launch.
Previously an analyst for Union Square Ventures, the New York City based early stage venture capital fund. Charlie focused on early stage investments in technology enabled service businesses such as del.icio.us, Indeed.com, Feedburner, BugLabs, Etsy, and Oddcast.
Prior to joining Union Square Ventures, he spent four years at the General Motors pension fund’s $6 billion private markets group, where he worked extensively on venture capital partnerships focusing on emerging technology as well as private equity investments in the consumer sector.
Charlie can also be found blogging at www.thisisgoingtobebig.com.Specialties: Early stage venture capital, media, marketing, consumer businesses, financial services, general private equity, social networking, MySpace, Facebook, blogging, interactive advertising, careers, recruiting, career educationExperience- Jan 2012 - PresentPartner / Brooklyn Bridge VenturesBrooklyn Bridge Ventures seeks to make investments in early and seed stage technology companies in the “Greater Brooklyn Area” (which includes Manhattan and other boroughs) across a variety of information technology sectors. It will also have the capability to lead or co-lead seed rounds and will be based out of the NYU-Poly Incubator in DUMBO.
- Jan 2010 - PresentBoard Member/Co-Founder / Brooklyn Bridge Park BoathouseThe Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse is a public kayaking and rowing program run out of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park.
- Feb 2006 - PresentFounder / nextNYFounded nextNY, a fun way to connect both socially and professionally with young people who have a stake in future of tech and new media in New York City. Participants generally have less than ten years experience and we especially welcome recent graduates who are just starting their careers.
- May 2005 - PresentAdjunct Professor / Fordham UniversityI have designed and taught several graduate and undergraduate level courses including: Introduction to Business Blogging, Management for the MySpace Generation, and Innovation and the Entrepreneurial Mindset.
- Nov 2010 - Jan 2012Principal / First Round CapitalBoard Observer on Backupify (Board Member until $4.5 mil raise) Board Member/Observer on chloe + isabel Board Observer on Salescrunch Board Observer on SinglePlatform Board Observer on Refinery29 Board Member on Docracy Chief Evangelizing Investor (unofficial) for GroupMe Friend to all FRC Portfolio Companies
- Oct 2009 - Nov 2010Entrepreneur-in-Residence / First Round CapitalEvaluating venture investment opportunities in early stage technology companies in New York City. Establishing a more substantive New York presence for FRC, including a more permanent office.
- Aug 2007 - Oct 2009CEO/co-founder / Path 101Path101 aims to be the go to place for career discovery, goal setting, and success for college students. It will provide a paced, easy to use, and fun experience that helps students learn about their opportunity set, as well as build and leverage their network. We are actively seeking dedicated and passionate development talent.
- Feb 2008 - Sept 2009EIR (Entrepreneur-in-Residence) / ITACHelping ITAC build on FastTrac and other programs that they've offered entrepreneurs for 10+ years in order to become a premiere destination for NYC startups looking to build their businesses.
- Jul 2006 - Jun 2007Director of Consumer Products / Oddcast- Responsible for Voki consumer avatar platform. (www.voki.com). Voki enables users to express themselves on the web in their own voice using a talking Flash-based character. - Created product vision, functional specifications, and initial business and marketing strategy. - Coordinated the company's technical and creative resources to help get the product from idea to launch.
- Feb 2005 - Jul 2006Analyst / Union Square Ventures-Help screen new business opportunities in the IT-enabled services space -Research active deals by performing competition analysis -Maintain financial models -Track industry trends and help proactively seek out new opportunities -Streamline and innovate related to our investment process and team collaboration
- Feb 2001 - Feb 2005Investment Analyst, Private Markets / General Motors Asset Management-First undergraduate analyst hired by private markets business unit. -Responsible for portfolio analytics and research for $5.5 billion private equity portfolio of venture capital, global buyouts, distressed and mezzanine debt. -Led efforts to apply more quantitative approaches to private market portfolio analytics and reporting. -Co-led secondary investment team that sourced, valued, and executed $500 million in secondary purchases of venture, buyout and mezzanine limited partnership interests. -Provided analytical support to multiple investment deal teams responsible for due diligence of both partnership and direct investments.
Education-
1997 - 2001Fordham UniversityBS in Finance
-
1993 - 1997Regis High School
Additional Information-
Websites:
-
Interests:Kayaking, Zog Sports Dodgeball, Zog Sports Kickball, Softball, Mentoring
-
Recent Tracks
- Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum (Rudy Van Gelder Edition) by Wayne Shorter
- Fables Of Faubus by Charles Mingus
- Studio Concert - Excerpts by Duke Ellington
- Sophisticated Lady - live by Duke Ellington
- The Most Beautiful Girl in the World by Sonny Rollins
- Cheryl by Joe Henderson
- The Two Lonely People by Bill Evans
- Better Git It In Your Soul by Charles Mingus
- Yama (2004 Digital Remaster) (Rudy Van Gelder Edition) by Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
- Part I-Festival Junction - Live by Duke Ellington
RammsteinRob ZombieThe FaintDepeche ModePink FloydMarilyn MansonLacuna CoilOriginal Motion Picture SoundtrackThe Crystal MethodPropellerheadsBeastie BoysDisturbedOrgyEvanescenceGarbageFlukeFischerspoonerThe PresetsKornThe ProdigyThe Smashing PumpkinsMobyNine Inch NailsNirvanaThe Postal ServiceThe White StripesDaft PunkRadioheadInterpolHans ZimmerNo DoubtDuran DuranThe Chemical BrothersClint MansellA Perfect CircleOSTThe KillersRuoskaSurvivora-haThe OffspringThe StrokesRage Against the MachineThe KnifeGreen DayKMFDMMuseBill ContiKilsyThe Cure- 50 plays
- 41 plays
- 32 plays
- 31 plays
- 31 plays
- 25 plays
- 24 plays
- 23 plays
- 23 plays
- 23 plays
- 22 plays
- 22 plays
- 22 plays
- 22 plays
- 22 plays
- 21 plays
- 21 plays
- 21 plays
- 20 plays
- 20 plays
- 20 plays
- 20 plays
- 19 plays
- 19 plays
- 19 plays
- 19 plays
- 19 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 18 plays
- 17 plays
- 17 plays
- Never There by Cake17 plays
- 17 plays
- 17 plays
- 17 plays
- 17 plays
- 17 plays
- 17 plays
-
Status
-
Checkins
- Ample Hills Creamery623 Vanderbilt Ave
- The Good Fork391 Van Brunt St
- Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies204 Van Dyke St
- Mocha Mocha Cafe4th Avenue
- NYRR Brooklyn Half MarathonProspect Park
- Ground Support399 W. Broadway
- Harvest HQ187 Lafayette St.
- General Assembly902 Broadway, 4th Floor
- Bubby's Pie Company120 Hudson St.
- Bagel Schmagel7510 3rd Ave.
- Blueprint Health483 Broadway 2nd Floor
- WeWork Labs175 Varick
- Le Pain Quotidien801 Broadway
- Milk Studios450 W 15th St.
- Area Yoga389 Court St
- Bobby Van's Steakhouse230 Park Ave
- Entrepreneur's Roundtable Accelerator1500 Broadway
- Archway Cafe57 Pearl St
- Mesa Coyoacán372 Graham Ave
- Wix Lounge10 W 18th St - 2nd Fl
-
At Home
