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Heyzap Social (A Lean Success)
Albert Wenger – Mar 24, 2010
Yesterday Heyzap announced the launch of their platform for taking social games from Facebook to the rest of the web (coverage by Venturebeat and Techcrunch). This represents not only a terrific opportunity for both Heyzap and social game developers, but [...] Read more
Healthcare Reform and Sailing
Albert Wenger – Mar 23, 2010
Yesterday I tweeted the following quick thought about healthcare reform: Just wanted to quickly expand on the idea behind this, which comes from sailing (one of my favorite hobbies). With a sailboat you can find yourself “in locks” which happens [...] Read more
Communicator: Done. Replicator: Next. The Future of Making Stuff.
Albert Wenger – Mar 22, 2010
I am an unabashed Star Trek fan and was thrilled to see JJ Abrams breath new life into the franchise. The original series popularized some technologies that seemed, well, futuristic. But amazingly we now have one of them and are [...] Read more
Communicator: Done. Replicator: Next. The Future of Making Stuff.
Albert Wenger – Mar 22, 2010
My post for today is over on the Union Square Ventures blog. It is about the future of making stuff (and has lots of Star Trek references). Read more
The Sui Generis Startup
Albert Wenger – Mar 18, 2010
Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz has a guest post on All Things Digital titled “The Case for the Fat Startup." In it he makes a case for raising a lot of money and investing it aggressively. Ben’s argument [...] Read more
Winner Take All and Early Stage Valuations
Albert Wenger – Mar 17, 2010
The range for early stage valuations is probably broader than I have seen it since the first Internet bubble. I am aware of raises at the moment all the way from pre-moneys of below $2 million to $50 million. These [...] Read more
Storms in Scarsdale
Albert Wenger – Mar 16, 2010
This has been a fairly rough winter. We had at least three separate storms that dumped over a foot of snow. And then just as it looked as if spring was around the corner with a couple of absolutely gorgeous [...] Read more
Investor Signaling (Adding to Chris Dixon)
Albert Wenger – Mar 12, 2010
Chris Dixon had a great post yesterday about “the importance of investor signaling in venture pricing” that every entrepreneur should read. Leaving aside the classical economics strawman from the first paragraph (does anybody think that classical economics would apply to [...] Read more
The Future of Browser Plugins (Hint: Let’s Call them Apps)
Albert Wenger – Mar 11, 2010
At Union Square Ventures we have backed a couple of companies that use browser plugins at the core of their services (Adaptive Blue, Zemanta). We have always been concerned about the potentially lower sign-up rates from requiring someone to install [...] Read more