I was just reading this blog post by Ben Horowitz - great blog, by the way - and could not help thinking this guy sounds a lot like Dave McClure, only at a much larger scale. Dave McClure wants to help build your accounting department.
Investment firms aspire to be incubators. It is not like, here's the money, and now go build. The money is good, heck, it is the primary thing. But then there's the advice, the network.
I mean, look at this, this looks like a FoxConn report. As in, we cooked 30 tons of rice today and 12 tons of pork.
Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBaseIn 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.
We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio.
We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies.
We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies.
So I got to meet Mark. Suster. In person. It was a great feeling. I had read enough of his blog posts that I really wanted to meet in person and make it real.
Mark is the most visible VC in Los Angeles. One time years ago I happened to be in downtown Los Angeles. I made a point to go see the bank where the bank robbery scene in the movie Heat was shot. Heat is one of my favorite movies.
During the first dot com boom, people bought servers. And then Amazon web services killed the idea. You don't need to buy servers, we got them, they said, a ton of them. But now companies like Facebook that are not in the data center business end up with these huge, humongous huge data centers.
Ben: As Kanye says, hip hop is 1/2 what you say and 1/2 how you say it, so I put the tracks up on the blog http://bhorowitz.com Me: @bhorowitz The hip hop quotes make your blog stand out and gets me to keep coming back. Although the posts are also good.
There has been tremendous buzz today about FourSquare's new round of funding. This process has gone for a few, long months now. It has been one drawn out process. There has been drama. There has been intrigue. The sweet spot for me was when after months of talk Yahoo might buy FourSquare, FourSquare instead went ahead and stole a key talent from Yahoo. That's the way you do it.
When there was talk it might get bought, I strongly argued selling FourSquare would be a mistake. I was not saying, do the right thing, don't go after the money. What I was saying was, think about money, big money, do not sell.
I am not the first person to draw FourSquare-Twitter parallels. But I sure am one who gets the parallel. The two have had similar trajectories. At first sight a tweet feels as lightweight as checking in. What the.
Twitter had enormous buzz. It scaled but not as well as I would have liked. It made monetization moves, but much too late for my tastes. And it has done a lousy job of adding new features. FourSquare has scaled well. What is the FourSquare version of the fail whale? I don't know it. And FourSquare has been very impressive in the monetization department. But FourSquare has not impressed me in the features department. And I have to say that out loud because, unlike Twitter, FourSquare has competition. I hope this new round of funding allows FourSquare to cement its lead. I wish Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) all the best.
Like Andy Grove said, only the paranoid survive. Checking in is the starting piont of the FourSquare experience. Companies for which that is not true - Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter - are not serious threats, although all of them could use that key feature. Checking in in the mobile space is like the inbox in the email space, it is basic. But that check in as the starting point space has a few different players, and checking in is an activity that leaves much room for imagination. Could FourSquare ride that imagination wave? If it does, it goes IPO in a few years. If it doesn't, it should then go ahead and sell off. I am betting it will ride the wave. We shall see.
FourSquare has a shot at going IPO before MeetUp.com, a more senior tech company in town, senior in terms of years. Unless we get a few solid IPOs, New York City has not really arrived on the tech scene. Until then we should brag about our subway instead.
Dennis not only created the vision for the company, but for the entire product category. Beyond that, he is very clearly the thought leader in the market. This is not at all surprising as he has been working on the problem for a decade and has highly refined his thinking through that period. ...... . He’s the kind of leader that great technical minds will be excited to follow: visionary, righteous, and competent. I am really excited to work with Dennis to help him on his path from being a great leader to a great Chief Executive of an incredibly important company. ...... at Foursquare is growing faster than Twitter did at this stage. ......Dennis and team have identified over a dozen different dimensions of the Foursquare product that must interact with each other in precisely optimal ways to achieve user delight. Years and years of research and sweat equity went into cracking the code, and the results are magical. ....... over 4.6B people have mobile phones and there are 1.7B people on the Internet. Already, over 200M people worldwide have smart phones and that number is headed north fast. ...... , major brands such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zagat, Bravo TV, Starbucks, C-SPAN, Marc Jacobs and over 10,000 businesses are currently working with Foursquare to build customer loyalty and drive traffic. Not many companies have their users turn into their sales force, and it’s definitely a good sign that this is happening around Foursquare.
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBen Horowitz: Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBaseIn 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.
