From the Investors
Sam Altman of Y Combinator launches YC Research, a non-profit research lab to back ideas that may take 25 years to come to fruition in “YC Research”
Mahesh Vellanki of Redpoint Ventures takes a deeper look at the public metrics underlying marketplace businesses in particular – six metrics that make these businesses tick in “This Is How Public consumer Marketplaces Are Valued”
Sarah Tavel of Greylock Partners expands on the two areas she believes are ripe for innovation in app distribution and ‘smartphone minutes’ in “Exploring Opportunities in Smartphone Minutes”
Redg Snodgrass of Wearable World recognizes that building products is hard so he unveils his ‘e2e’ framework to help hardware founders avoid common pitfalls in “Hardware is a Long Game – Let Me Give You the Playbook”
Shaun Abrahamson of Urban.us shares what he’s learned from making 19 startup investments as a Public Benefit Corporation in “Startup the $h!t Out of City Problems”
Zach Aarons of MetaProp NYC details how and why he invested in Breather, and why he thinks Breather is the future of ‘conceptual commercial real estate’ in “How the Heck Did This Company Just Raise $20 Million from Peter Thiel?”
Adam Draper of Boost VC takes pride in calling his portfolio companies ‘cockroaches’ and explains why in “Be the Cockroach.”
Hiring
FundersClub is hiring a Venture Analyst in San Francisco, CA.
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From the Operators
Tomio Geron of Exitround outlines the ‘long-term process’ founders go through when seeking an M&A outcome in “It’s All About Relationships When Selling Your Startup”
Marius Luther of Memorado introduces TAD, a unifying metric for mobile value creation in “How to Measure the Success of Your App”
Jeff Morris of Tinder insists that it’s ok for founders to get a job vs. getting caught in the cycle of testing ideas and making incremental progress in “It’s Okay to Work on Someone Else’s Idea”
Brandon Redlinger of PersistIQ understands that a sale is not made based on the tools used, but rather a structured sales process in “The Complete Guide to Building the Perfect Sales Stack”
Joel Grossman of Location Labs describes why Location Labs no longer negotiates offers with candidates in “Negotiating Comp Means Making a Deal with a Devil”
Rachel Durfee of TicketFly announces that Pandora will be acquiring TicketFly and their next steps in “Pandora and TicketFly Join Forces to Create the World’s Most Powerful Music Platform”
The Human Algorithm: Automating Startup Data Collection at Mattermark
Sarah Catanzaro heads up the Mattermark data team, where she leads a team of three analysts partnered with 3 machine learning engineers to collect and clean massive amounts of company data. Last week, she spoke at the RJMetrics Datapoint Live conference to share a bit more about how we achieve scale through automation.
You can view her keynote here.