February 2012
1 post
Ungerminated: Trouble with Seeds - Passionate... →
Quantity, quality, and size of early-stage seed financing has recently given rise to speculation about a seed funding bubble. Ex-founders, Hollywood personalities, the rich and the powerful, the smart and the cool, all seem to be foregoing or, at least, de-emphasizing the usual trappings of wealth (homes, cars, planes, baubles) and taking center stage at pep rallies preaching lean,...
November 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Tinfoil wraps up Web security issues →
RTP: The first 60 days →
My first sixty days of RTP Ventures
October 2011
1 post
Stanford+NYC: Googler: NYC Needs Stanford and... →
stanfordnyc:
Serge Kassardjian (picture above in NYC) works at Google as a Strategic Partner Development in Mobile Commerce.
New York City is in a unique situation right now. It’s changing.
Several industries are core to New York: media, financial services, advertising, fashion,…
September 2011
1 post
Next move: RTP Ventures →
August 2011
1 post
When do VCs make mistakes? →
A blog post about some patterns I’ve come to recognize.
July 2011
6 posts
Getting Funded: Step 5, The Legal Grind →
Final post in the six-part “Getting Funded” series
Getting Funded Step 4, Due Diligence →
Part 5 of the series.
Getting Funded: Step 3, The Partner Meeting →
Part 4 of the “Getting Funded Series”
Getting Funded: Step 2, The First Meeting →
Part 3 of my step by step guide to getting through the funding process. Advice for both entrepreneurs and VCs.
Getting Funded: Step 1 – Getting VCs to notice →
New post: Getting Funded: Step 0 - Prepare →
First of a multi-part series on what it takes on getting a company funded. What investors expect and what you should expect in return.
June 2011
3 posts
blog.thansys.com →
New post: Innovation: process vs. product
Innovative products and people who build them make my work in venture capital enjoyable . In my mind, VC investing means feeling innovation’s pulse. Over the years, I have started to classify creative ideas into two broad categories: : process innovations and productinnovations. You need some combination of the two or no deal. Here’s how I...
New post: Getting Funded: Market, Product, Team →
Some thoughts on things I look for in a new investment.
“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her...”
– Another thought on my SF departure anniversary (via Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ancient Mariner). This stanza echoed in my head during my last three years there.
May 2011
7 posts
New post: Why Open Source is Good for Russia →
New post: Technical Co-founder: first "hire"? →
Link to the post on my new blog.
MOBILE CONTENT APPS NEED NOT SUCK →
Link to the post at my new hosted blog: http://blog.thansys.com
This blog has moved here →
2 tags
Back to WordPress
… I like Tumblr. It was an easy way for me to start blogging, something I used to do regularly in a past life.
However, following the last service outage and some of the flexibility limitations of the platform, I think I will start shifting my main blogging activity back to hosted Wordpress.
Have a Wordpress.com account, but if you’re going to geek out, might as well geek out.
...
10 tags
B2C or B2B, place your bets
A recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out the lopsided investment patterns now seen in Silicon Valley. According to the WSJ, a lot of money has been poured into consumer companies, lured by the high valuations of high traffic sites like Facebook (king of them all) and Groupon, and hopeful consumer plays like Color and FlipBoard. Less and less is being invested in “old fashioned”...
Accepting Failure
After several months of negotiation with a large enterprise software company, the face-saving acquisition of my third startup, a cloud computing company called Elastra, broke down and the company officially shut down last week. Coming off a successful exit (when I was in my 20s) and a very successful one (when I was in my 30s), it’s hard to admit failure in my 40s. But a failure it was.
Why blog...
April 2011
1 post
4 tags
Paying for social: Google hits middle age
Last week, we read about Larry Page’s attempts to focus his company on winning the battle for the social graph of the internet. Most agree that Google is far behind and many argue that for the content graph winner, the social graph is already lost. Facebook is big, Facebook is smart, and Facebook is getting smarter by hiring away some of Google’s best.
One of the measures, like...
January 2011
2 posts
3 tags
AppStore: Another game-changer
I remember the good old days — heading to the computer store, buying software on cassette (I turned 44 yesterday, so I’m not that old). I still recall waiting in line for Atari cartridges. Later, the no-name computer store was replaced by Egghead, 3.5” floppies, and eventually GameStop and CDs. I remember Tower Records and gradually building my CD collection, disk by disk (I...
4 tags
"Game dynamics" = the new black
I recall a 1995 conversation with Mike Moritz from Sequoia, a VC on the verge of fame, and a board member of my first startup regarding his recent investment in a new company called “Yahoo.” In passing, I asked Mike about the company’s revenue model, and, when he answered, remember saying something like… “Advertising? Are you kidding me?”
That was then, this...
December 2010
4 posts
philipsugar asked: Very well written blog. Best regards.
3 tags
Unfortunately, there's no word for privacy in my...
Maybe it’s because I grew up speaking Russian, a language that has no word that exactly means “privacy.” Maybe it’s because I’m a libertarian at heart. But the latest waves of furor over browser cookies, location-based profiles, and iPhone App preferences puzzle me. I think part of the problem is that marketers accused of exposing our intimate secrets cannot explain to the political podium...
4 tags
What's in a (company's) name?
Today, I was reading the blog for RockMelt, a cool new social browser that makes Google’s chrome look, feel, and act a lot slicker. I came across a post:
Behind the $12 Name – How RockMelt Came to be RockMelt
I remembered, fondly, how we came up with the name for Plumtree Software, a company I started with a few friends in 1997. I have been asked about the name quite a few times over...
1 tag
A New Year's Promise
I think I will follow up with a detailed list of more traditional (and some not so traditional) resolutions for 2011. It will be a part of this one.
I have gotten quite a few comments on my lack of blog output for the last two months. Mea magna culpa. Since September, I’ve been heads down doing some serious coding on an AdTech project in Manhattan while waiting for my new VC job to come...
September 2010
2 posts
2 tags
So simple, my mom gets it
“Can you explain it so my mom would get it?” — I often heard that phrase during VC presentations. Sometimes addressed to me, sometimes addressed to the poor engineer who is forced to reduce his life’s passion to a few simplistic sentences. I didn’t like it then and I still don’t like it.
There is nothing wrong with moms. I have one. My mother is not a...
8 tags
Easy reading is hard writing
I learned to write in high school. Now, in my early 40s and having spent the last two decades of my life either reading someone else’s writing or trying to express myself on paper, I think writing prose was the most useful skill that I could have been taught. Sure, I wrote and read a lot of poetry and code, put together countless slide decks, and have stood in front of audiences giving speeches...
August 2010
3 posts
7 tags
How to "visualize" the competition
In a previous post, I mentioned how I am a big fan of Edward Tufte. One of the best things coming out of the Tufte school of thought is that you should be able to visually represent complex systems on a single sheet of paper that is dense with information while still making the general patterns inherent in the systems visually comprehensible. Single graph, complex system. It’s a...
7 tags
How to model "cash runway" for your startup.
Even before getting any funding, VCs always ask “how long will this money you are raising last?” After funding, the question is still the same but phrased as “So, when is our cash out date?” They are absolutely right to make this ”running out of runway” a top concern at a young startup.
Running low on cash makes you do stupid things, like…
Turns...
4 tags
Some sense to startup frugality
I am not a frugal individual. I like to live well, spend money, buy expensive toys, and fly first class. My money, my choice. I always believed in what I once expressed to my friend Glenn Kelman in his early days at my first company: ”Glenn, the idea is not to spend less, but to make more.”
I have made plenty of mistakes when it come to costs in the past. I have learned my...
July 2010
2 posts
6 tags
Techs and MBAs: the startup dilemma
New York is no Silicon Valley. And while it may be a much better place to live (which is why I am never going to live anywhere else), it has a lot of learning to do about what it takes for a technical company to be formed, funded, and grown.
The challenges
Business guys — in Silicon Valley, it is often difficult to get a company to focus on the financial, pragmatic aspects of the...
feddkraft asked: Kirill,
do you receive LinkedIn InMails, or maybe there were some technical problems? I was asking about anangel investment possibility. Is that possible?
Thanks,
Fyodor
do you receive LinkedIn InMails, or maybe there were some technical problems? I was asking about anangel investment possibility. Is that possible?
Thanks,
Fyodor
June 2010
7 posts
9 tags
The problem with pure "social"
Today, we saw the long-awaited announcement of FourSquare’s $20M round. Whispered about and long in coming (well, not too long considering the company’s relative youth) my hat is off to the founders and their VCs. The “traction” (to overuse a term) FourSquare has been able to generate is remarkable. However, I, along with others in the web/blogosphere keep asking the...
3 tags
VCs, startups, and NDAs
It happens. Every now and then I see a company that is about to ask a VC for funding that is completely clueless when it comes to NDA etiquette.
The worst offenders are entrepreneurs who insist on having a potential investor sign some non-disclosure paperwork before even showing them their business plan (or even slide deck!). Offenders to a lesser extent, but offenders nonetheless, are ones...
nicolasvdb asked: I just came across your comment on Chris Dixon's blog. Did you just move to NY?
5 tags
Startups: does an MBA help?
I started three geeky software companies in Silicon Valley. As co-founder of the first, I was working all day while getting an MBA at U.C. Berkeley at night. My second and third were done post-MBA. Based on my experience, having an MBA from a good university (as is true with almost any degree from a good university) definitely helps when it comes to raising capital, attracting talent, and...
3 tags
The Real Housewives of Twitter
At first, I was a twitter skeptic. Who needs yet another way to communicate with people to whom I am “connected?” But, over the last few months, I changed my mind. Twitter, while a seemingly simple app, is not that simple, packs some robust features (if used correctly) and can provide a fairly unique way of communicating with a self-selected community that shares an interest in...
May 2010
10 posts
4 tags
"Big VCs" = big "spaces"?
Why do VCs do this? This morning I read about a $7M investment in Snapfinger, a company that lets you (get this) order food from (get this) chain restaurants via (get this) iPhone! Just what we needed… now, there’s an App for THAT.
While pining for a native iPhone SeamlessWeb app (it’s just a mobile web site for now) and wanting to volunteer to help them write one for a mere...
9 tags
Quitting Facebook tomorrow...
I know, Facebook and twitter serve different purposes, but I’m switching. And Facebook is a tremendous company that has built an unprecedented following worth a ton of money. I have nothing but respect for the group that did this.
However, I’m a grown up — and Facebook is a pointless toy. The concept of “my 100+ closest friends” is a perversion of the term...
2 tags
“One difference between myself and Obama is that he doesn’t want there to...”
– Kirill Sheynkman
11 tags
FaceBook (investors) aren't stupid
NY Times publishes this:
RIVALS SEIZE ON TROUBLES OF FACEBOOK
OK, now do you really think that with billions of dollars in market cap and investors in it for the money (Microsoft and the Russians, for God’s sake), the guys at facebook are going to let this thing just get away from them? Oooh, privacy, we’re sorry we did not warn you that we’re going to allow others to see the...
3 tags
[pool drain] - objective huh?
I have written code in most of the languages that have come and gone. Assembler, Forth, Basic, C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Lisp, Scheme, C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, Scala, Groovy, JavaScript, and, now, Objective C.
For the third or fourth time I set up XCode on one of my macs and, having a little time on my hand, wanted to write something for my Mac. Yes, that’s my idea of fun. For the third of fourth...
3 tags
Eventually, you run out of other peoples' money →
I grew up in a socialist country. I know Europeans (and Russians) who laud the European welfare state with its free this and free that, its 32 hour work weeks, six week vacations, and an economies that produce nothing while keeping everyone happy and well fed. You can not spend wealth you are not creating. I tend to think that the state’s only responsibility is keeping others away from my...