From the Investors
Boris Wertz of Version One Ventures is seeing more pitches from female founders, and announces in “The Rise of the Female Founder” that 50% of their investments in 2014 are female-led companies.
David Lee of SV Angel uses Mary Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends Report to discuss opportunity and the global adoption of mobile in “Inflection Point”
Angel Investor Armando Biondi explains why customer development is the most critical thing you can do, and how to do it, in “Why Should You Care About Price/Market Fit Early On”
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures notes that successful freemium companies do three things: leverage data to improve their product, gather data to identify and target customers, and use their space for educating and marketing, in “The Common Characteristics of Successful Freemium Companies”
Joshua Henderson of Springboard Enterprises gives a playbook for growing your startup’s team in “Five Recruiting Strategies We Use for Our Accelerator”
From the Operators
Ellen Chisa of Kickstarter says Stop worrying about finding a mentor and find what you want to learn in “Have Some Coffee”
David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp argues for the virtue of sticking it out—even when you’re successful—in “One Hit Wonder”
Tomio Geron of Exitround shares some key findings on 200 exits below $100 million in the last five years in “The Exit Curve: Exitround’s Report on Tech M&A”
Craig Newmark of Craigslist advises “young nerds” to control their branding from the beginning in “If I Were 22: Nerds, Hack Your Career”
From the Community
Wearable World presents GLAZEDcon 2014: The Dawn of the Wearable World. GLAZEDCon 2014 brings the most inspiring and innovative executives in Wearable, IOWT, government, gaming, health and fitness, and lifestyle industries to this year’s conference. The conference takes place on Tuesday, June 3rd and Wednesday, June 4th in San Francisco. For more details and an exclusive discount for Mattermark Daily readers, click here. Promo code: glazed_mattermark.
Featured Founder
Sasha Eslami of Eversnap. “Eversnap makes it ridiculously easy to collect ALL your friends’ photos & videos from a trip or birthday party all in one secret online album.”
Mattermark: How did you come up with your startup?
Sasha: We crashed a wedding, and got inspired to solve this pain originally for weddings. After doing 5,000 weddings, we were inspired by our users and our pain to solve this problem for all group experiences, trips, parties, family gatherings, etc.
Mattermark: What is a recent milestone that your team celebrated?
Sasha: We’ve acheived 50% average monthly growth for the 4th month.
Mattermark: What is the most interesting trend in your marketplace, and how are you navigating the change?
Sasha: There’s more an more trend towards privacy and sharing privately. We have built features that users can share photos & videos among their friends secretly.
Mattermark: What is a piece of advice you wish you could give yourself one year ago today?
Sasha: Meditate & work out the mind.
Mattermark: Tell us about your team.
Sasha: We’re five full-time people and a few interns. Half of the team is Italian, due to my better half, my co-founder. We live in a 7-bedroom house.