From the Investors
Only 4% of all senior VC partners are women. Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners wonders what massive event it would take to change that in “Cultural Dysfunction: The Lack of Women in VC”
Lasse Pilgaard of Creandum takes a look at the four factors driving capital to northern Europe in “Nordic Investment Activity Historically High”
Angel Investor Andrew Chen exposes the data on inactive and “forever-alone” users in “Why Consumer Product Metrics Are All Terrible”
Hunter Walk of Homebrew bombs a sales pitch and remembers what it was like to be on the other side of the table in “Last Week I Got ‘Over-The-Shouldered’ (And it was Awesome)”
From the Operators
Norman Tran, potential hire, is a big fan of Quora. Norman polls a user/entrepreneur to determine his needs before creating the task flows, sketches, and wireframes for a comprehensive mobile overhaul in “Redesigning Quora”
Matt Monahan of AlphaBoost writes an unabashed assessment of life on the razor-thin wire of the startup world in “The Intro of a Book That Will Never Be Published”
Jack Dorsey of Square pens an internal email on name-dropping in “Authority & Merit”
Matt Sneeden of New Relic wants you to sharethe pride and blame across the entire team in “QA is Everyone’s Job”
David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp escapes the perfection trap in “Captured by Quality”
From the Community
What an outstanding trip we had in Boston. The NEVYs were fantastic – our warmest thanks to the entire New England Venture Capital Association for hosting a great event. Last night, we shared an amazing evening with a few incredible founders and VCs. Thanks to Josh Bob of TurnStar, Stuart Blitz of Wellobox, Nick Ducoff of Infochimps, Mike Lisavich of Rekindle, Marco Morales of BrightLoop, Anna Palmer of Fashion Project, Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners, Sanjiv Kalevar of Battery Ventures, Moritz Plassnig of Codeship, and Farrell McClernon of Privy for making us feel right at home in Boston.
Featured Founder
Jody Porowski of Avelist. Avelist is a crowd-sourcing platform. Avelist collect other people’s knowledge and experience to save you time and give you guidance.
Mattermark: How did you come up with your startup?
Jody: I was working in the analytics department of SAS Institute at the time. Several of my friends were getting married and I watched them spend hours and hours researching the exact same things as each other. I realized that there were hundreds and thousands of people around the country who had done the exact same research before my friends did it. And then I realized that no matter what situation we face in life (planning a wedding, looking for a job, traveling to a new city), someone else has already “been there and done that”. Life would be a lot easier and more efficient if we could “search through the experiences of others” to learn from them. I decided to build a place that crowd sources experience so that we could all live life smarter and easier.
Mattermark:What is a recent milestone that your team celebrated?
Jody: We launched 9 months ago and have been focused on the quality of our user experience. We’ve watched our average time on site increase from 1:30 to 4:30.
Mattermark:If someone thanked you in a restaurant for creating your startup, what would you hope they say?
Jody: Avelist is the first place I go when I’m in a new situation. Thank you for making it so easy to find useful information!
Mattermark: Tell us about your team.
Jody: Our cofounders (Jody Porowski – formerly SAS, and Josh Jodrey – formerly Cisco) are full-time team members. We also have four part-time team members. We’re a late-night crew. It’s not uncommon to have a 3am phone call :)