Feed: A VC : Venture Capital and Technology - AggScore: 87.1

Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day

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I'm a bit late with this news about our portfolio company Duck Duck Go but I am super excited about it so I'm posting it anyway. I'll let a tweet tell the story: We received over 1,000,000 direct searches yesterday...

Utilities vs Networks

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It's interesting to see a network, Instagram, starting to replace the iPhone's native camera application in many users' daily usage of their phones. I see this in my kids' behavior all the time. When they want to take a photo,...

Payments Day

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Yesterday was payments day at USV. Two pretty big things that our firm has been involved in for a while now were coincidentally announced on the same day. First, our newest portfolio company Dwolla announced the closing of a round...

Building The Ecosystem

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I've always seen the work that my colleauges and I do as more than venture capital investing. That is our main job and we need to do it very well. But we also need to work to make sure the...

The Academy For Software Engineering

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A number of years ago, I wrote a blog post talking about the need to teach middle school and high school students how to write software. In the comments (where the good stuff happens), a Google engineer told me to...

Shapeways and 3D Printing

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Last week, in the thread on Herky Jerky Investing, the AVC community forked into an incredible discussion about 3D printing and our portfolio company Shapeways. If you click on this link, you'll see that the conversation just goes on and...

Fredsquare

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Our very own Kid Mercury has built a learning community (and game) called Fredsquare. The following is a guest post he has written to introduce all of you to it. I hope you'll visit Fredsquare, play the game, and learn...

Herky Jerky Investing

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The WSJ says some venture funds hit pause on big deals. The Journal describes a group of venture capitalists dialing back on certain deals after a breathless year of venture investing that had some comparing 2011 to the late 1990s...

2012: The Year That Movements Go Mainstream?

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I returned from ten days of skiing with my family last night. I'm on mountain time and plan to stay there until the new year. Staying up late and sleeping late seems to be a good way to bring in...

Profitable: To Be Or Not To Be?

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Mark Suster has a great post on this topic. In typical Mark fashion, it is long, with a lot of detail and substance. I highly recommend all entrepreneurs take the time to read it end to end. For those who...

Mocked And Misunderstood

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When people ask me, "how do you know which companies and services are going to be the biggest successes?", I usually tell them to look for the companies and services that are mocked and misunderstood. For some reason, that correlates...

Some Thoughts On The IPO Market For Web Companies

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We have an IPO market for web companies again. I don't have all the names in front of me, but this year has brought IPOs for Pandora, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, and TripAdvisor. These five companies are all trading for north...

FinTech 2012

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I've written extensively about the startup accelerator phenomenon. I think it has been transformative for entrepreneurs and VCs and startups in general. We should all take a second and thank Paul Graham for his insight into how to properly construct...

Should You Introduce Yourself To Me At A Bar?

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Saw this question on Hacker News today: Went to a talk by a VC who is very active in my area. Didn't get a chance to introduce myself after the talk (there were < 25 ppl at the talk but...

Finding Signal In The Noise Of Demo Days

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I'm taking a break from MBA Mondays today because Christina Cacioppo just posted a terrific blog post on the USV blog on her takeaways from a summer attending most every demo day imaginable. Christina notes: Over the past few months,...