From the Investors
Angel Investor Jerry Neumann tells wanna-be angel investors to get a strategy and get in line in “Betting on the Ponies: non-Unicorn Investing”
Paul Cianciolo of FirstMark Capital points to Tim Howard of the US men’s soccer team to illustrate how CEOs should protect their team in “The Art of Deflection”
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures responds to Marc Andreessen’s tweetstorm defense of Silicon Valley in “Silicon Valley: A Place or a State of Mind?”
Tren Griffin of Microsoft shares the lean and tenacious mentality of Fred Wilson in “A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Fred Wilson”
Ali Hamed of CoVenture defines bad revenue as something that distracts you, has no clear milestones, or forces you to deal with a bad client, in “Problem 2 of 99: There is Such a Thing as Bad Revenue”
Semil Shah of Haystack Fund predicts Snapchat, Coinbase, and five more platform companies will surpass $10b in enterprise values — “The Decicorns” (this name is getting a little corny)
Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures plays devil’s advocate for Reservationhop in “Reservationhate”
From the Operators
Des Traynor of Intercom views one-touch interfaces, data prediction, and ambient awareness as the secrets to a successful UX in “On Magical Software…”
Paul Gebhardt of BonusBox wields hiring criteria, lead management, and sales motivation in order to raise the scaffolding on the perfect sales team in “How to Build a Boiler Room”
Chet Kittleson of UP Global distills the lessons of biz dev to relationship management in “The Power of Being Human in Business Development” (via Brad Feld of Foundry Group)
People Are Talking About: Khosla, Page, and Brin
On Thursday, Vinod Khosla of Kholsa Ventures hosted Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to discuss their vision of the future with Google. The topics ranged from machine learning, to driverless cars, to income distribution. Watch the video or read the transcript here.
Kanyi Maqubela of Collaborative Fund reflects on businesspeople’s emotional impulses and how successful businesspeople “educate” their emotions in “The Power of Patience”
Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz picks his favorite quote from the discussion to emphasizes the long time-horizon of the best CEOs in “It’s Pretty Difficult to Solve Big Problems in Four Years”