The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

Web 3.0 and Online Fashion

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

In 1999, long before fashion on the Internet actually took off, I started a company called Uuma. It was a traditional venture-backed personalized fashion startup that received an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren before the company was caught in the first dotcom crash.

I am going to articulate the vision behind Uuma, particularly because that vision still remains unrealized. I hope that some entrepreneur, somewhere, will execute on it.

As you know, I define Web 3.0 as a verticalized, personalized user experience. The web is still utterly fragmented. You have to go to different places to find information about the same context. I have long had the vision of a personalized Saks Fifth Avenue. I want my store — my personal store — that carries merchandise that applies to me; that suits my hair color, eye color, skin tone, body shape and personal style. I want it to stock my favorite designers and more like those. And I want to see articles and community discussions that are specific to my interests.
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Featured Videos

10 Thought Leaders in Big Data

We have a long-running Thought Leaders in Big Data series on the 1M/1M blog. We started publishing the series back in 2012. Over the last couple of years, we have featured many of the innovators in the field. Of those, today, I will introduce you to ten who I think would be interesting for you to get to know.

Let me explain why I have chosen these ones in particular.

The significant opportunities for entrepreneurship currently exist in the application layer of the Big Data industry. The platforms and plumbing are in place.

Today, the most exciting opportunities are going to be available to those entrepreneurs who harness the power of big data, but couple it with intense domain knowledge in specific areas of business.
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Men’s Fashion e-Commerce Entrepreneurs Thriving

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

Most major retailers are latching on to the e-commerce trend but there is also a growing number of online men’s fashion upstarts like Combatant Gentlemen and JackThreads that are using social media channels to understand the consumer and sell effectively under their own retail brands.

Combatant Gentlemen’s strength lies in creating a brand that produces high quality clothing at an affordable cost and then effectively selling it to their target customer of young, aspiring professionals through Facebook. CEO Vishaal Melwani says, “One of the big reasons that we still, to this day, take away clients [from competitors like Men’s Warehouse] is because their messaging is incorrect. They don’t understand the pains and the trials and tribulations that our guy goes through on a daily basis.”
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The 10 Trends In Content Marketing

We’re not too far from a world where Content represents the Brand.

Brands, therefore, are trying to develop good content, and engage audiences by getting them to read/view their branded content.

Here are 10 trends in content marketing that marketers should keep track of:

1. Quality: The online universe is full of crap. Producing quality content isn’t easy, and it isn’t cheap to do so. If you can invest in a high-end content strategy and engage people with it, you have a differentiated advantage. But it is extremely difficult to do. Imagine, you are running a mini New York Times. You have to churn out quality content that is relevant for your audience everyday. If you are a toothbrush brand, that may not be all that easy to do!
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Mompreneurs Love To Sell Baby Products

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

The e-commerce model of business allows women entrepreneurs to have greater flexibility in their lives. That is probably why we see several mompreneurs launching home-based businesses, and some of them scale to much bigger outfits. Of particular significance are mompreneurs selling baby products online. Here are three inspiring stories of mompreneurs who used their love for babies, clothes, shopping, and sharing to create successful ecommerce ventures.

Women Love To Share

Smocked Auctions sells children’s smocks and other clothing through comment-selling on Facebook. It was started by two friends and mompreneurs, Amy Laws and Nicole Brewer. They met in 2008 while trying to get back in shape after having their first children. They had a lot in common – their sons were of the same age and they soon had little girls. They became great friends and it was in the summer of 2010 while attending a sample sale in Dallas that the idea of doing business together was born.
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Zero-Logistics eCommerce Businesses Kick Ass

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0

A key factor for the success of an e-commerce business is the management of inventory and logistics. Especially for bootstrapping companies, this could be a major challenge. One way to work around this challenge is be a zero-logistics company. Shoplet, eComfort, and Car Part Kings have all successfully applied this method in their businesses and they surely kick ass!

Shoplet is an online retailer selling discounted office supplies. They cover 16 major categories including furniture, cleaning and break room supplies, green products, and security and safety. Their products cut across categories and feature many unconventional products that small and medium sized businesses need.
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The 10 New Trends in Corporate Innovation Management

Last year, we launched a program called the 1M/1M Incubator-in-a-Box. Part of its goal has been to stimulate corporate innovation and intrapreneurship. It has exposed us to a broad range of technology companies and their innovation goals, strategies, and processes. While most of what we have learned is confidential, I will synthesize some trends we’re seeing in this domain.

1. Culture Change: Most major technology companies recognize the fact that they have a certain amount of disadvantage when it comes to innovation. Cultures, as companies become larger, become stodgy and uninspiring. The more innovative talent ends up leaving for smaller companies, or to become entrepreneurs. One of the primary goals of a formal corporate innovation program is to generate excitement and create energy around the concept of innovation such that innovative talent stays.

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Building A Unicorn Company By Resurrecting The Dead

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks and Kayak. Today, we look at SuccessFactors.

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve heard this narrative before: The market is grinding to a halt, the IPO window shut, and only a few brave souls dare venture out into the turbulent seas. The mergers and acquisitions market is adrift as well; public companies are under stock price pressure; further down the value chain, the startups – especially the venture-funded ones – are stuck in an exit-starved no man’s land.

You can sit around, depressed, or as some technology startup veterans will tell you, you can pick up great technologies at rock-bottom prices and build businesses out of them. Big businesses.

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For Women In Computer Science, Tech Is A Golden Opportunity

Google recently released report acknowledging the lack of diversity in their workforce kicked up a storm. The company says, most of its workforce is white (61%) and male (70%). Worse, a mere 17% of Google’s tech workforce is women.

By and large, this is not Google’s fault. It simply reflects the fact that the nation’s education systems have not been able to attract enough women and minorities into their Computer Science programs, hence, for Google (and other tech companies who have similar demographic distributions) there is no supply of trained workers to hire from.

Opportunity in Scarcity
For those women who do have a Computer Science background, this is a golden opportunity. Here are some strategies that you can use to catapult yourself to highly successful careers in the technology industry. Notice none of them actually have anything to do with your actual computer science skills. I am assuming, you have learnt those well, and continue to keep yourself current. These strategies are the extra elements that may get you to a much larger role in the industry:
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How To Navigate The World of ‘Fat Startups’

In the Unicorn series, I have so far written about Tableau Software, FireEye, and RightNow. Of these, while Tableau and RightNow have followed Lean Startup principles, FireEye is definitely what I call a ‘Fat Startup’ that required a lot of early funding to get to market.

While it is true that these days, we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going, fat startups still play an important role in developing large-scale success stories with significant defensible competitive advantage. In the FireEye article, we saw how Ashar Aziz has used cross-domain innovation to build a business that has scaled to an over $3 billion market cap.

The bulk of the industry has moved away from the ‘fat startup’ category. Investors expect that you will have your product launched, customer acquisition model fleshed out fully, and a team in place before Series A.

However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization and analytics requires some serious investment.

While in the 1M/1M program, we steer people mostly along lean startup paths, I have pondered and investigated the question: How do people fund ‘fat startups’ these days?

I am seeing a few trends:

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