In the past few months I’ve met, read about, or been introduced to a number of companies that are working on solutions to make parking in cities a much easier experience for consumers. Most of these services are focusing on the SF and NYC markets, both of which are know for limited street parking, high […]
Read More “Valet Parking Startups and Non-Consumption as the Real Competition”
As a VC, I take the majority of my meetings without seeing a presentation or “deck” in advance. And when I do get slides, I tend not to study them closely in advance. I’ve never explained why and wanted to do so.
I’ve been thinking about LinkedIn quite a bit lately. I think LinkedIn is really interesting because in many ways I think it is one of the most durable and hard to disrupt companies that sit at the intersection of SaaS and social networking. I’ve also been meeting a ton of companies that I think are looking to compete with LinkedIn by attacking them on a feature-by-feature basis as opposed to a full frontal assault. There are some interesting and emerging things I’m seeing on this front and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts on the subject.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how deep-linking is going to play out. For those who are not familiar, deep-linking is a technology that allows app-to-app communication to function very similarly to the way that web pages work. In the same way that a hyperlink to a website need not drop you […]
Mobile ads, particularly app install and direct response ads, have become a big business for Facebook and are likely to become a big business for Twitter very soon. Much of the focus has been on the app install business and how large that line of business can become. But I think Twitter and Facebook could head in different directions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes Craigslist so durable and why lots of vertical marketplaces have succeeded and failed in trying to unbundle the company’s myriad offerings.
I recently took a look back at a lot of the companies that I found really interesting, regardless of whether I invested or not, and tried to group them. It turns out that there is a large cluster in one theme – city living. While San Francisco is not as dense as New York or Tokyo, it does have sufficient density to unlock some really interesting businesses that maybe wouldn’t work as well in a more sparsely-populated area.
This is a quick full blog post that is a follow up to a question I posted on Quora. One thing I’ve been thinking about is whether the battle between Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Beats Music, and the various other competitors from Google, Amazon, and others will result in a winner-take-all scenario. I have a few […]
Read More “On-Demand Music Streaming is Winner-Take-All, Right?”
In the past few months I’ve looked at quite a few commerce marketplaces and social networks. One thing I’ve been trying to understand more deeply is the set of circumstances when commerce networks tip toward winner-take-all outcomes, with one dominant network accounting for the bulk of transactional activity. This blog post is very much a […]
Read More “Commerce Marketplaces, Network Effects, and Winner-Take-All Outcomes”
A few days ago I was trying to find two new-ish apps, Jelly and Secret and I went to the App Store and just tried to find them via search. The results were not encouraging. I got a lot of results that were not at all what I was looking for. It turns out that […]
