From the Investors
Kevin Spain of Emergence Capital outlines the mobile enterprise market and three attributes he finds ‘leading mobile enterprise companies’ need to succeed, in his presentation in “The Mobile Enterprise Opportunity“
Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures explains the value he sees in ‘compulsive individuals’ ‘who are so competitive and driven that they can’t accept failure’ in “Why I Look for Obsessive and Competitive Founders“
Hunter Walk of Homebrew highlights how ManagedbyQ supports their team and adds that he ‘believes that treating employees well at all levels enforces consistency and trust internally’ in “One Founder Told Me He Wanted to Overpay His Employees. So We Invested.“
George Tziralis of Openfund says ‘never give away equity to advisors’ and details the reasons he thinks it’s wrong in “Advisors & Equity“
Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers advises big data entrepreneurs to build a painkiller rather than a vitamin, build and sell for enterprise customers and to avoid data obesity in “How to Get in on a Multi-Billion Market with Big Data“
Nic Brisbourne of Forward Partner expands on Intercom.io’s post about how mobile services will be designed in the future with his own speculation in “Ecommerce Discovery on Mobile – No Apps?“
From the Operators
Dear VCs Writer criticizes VCs for requiring ‘warm’ introductions as a pre-requisite for a meeting and gives three ways to ‘solve this problem’ in “Dear VCs: Kill the ‘Warm’ Introduction“
Sasngeet Paul Choudary of Platform Thinking Labs gives his thoughts on entrepreneurial mindsets and lays out a ‘high level design framework for building a platform’ in “How to Design the Airbnb for X, the Uber for Y or the Twitter for Z“
Poornima Vijayashanker of Femgineer and David Terei of Memcachier discuss an example of a successful partnership and the value of ‘meeting the needs of your customers’ in “How to Gain Traction Through Partnerships & Avoid Becoming a Commodity“
Kyle Samani of Pristine offers founders his framework for board meetings and admits a mindset of ‘pretending the board hired me as an outside consultant’ in “CEO = Chief Worry Officer“