An investor friend of mine lost a deal recently. As it turned out, the founders received a higher valuation offer, and they decided to go with the other lead investor. In a world prone to an obsession with valuation, I could understand the rationale.

It is often said about the venture capital business: owning a small slice of a watermelon is better than a large chunk of a grape. I liked the analogy. But only the last few days did I realize I had mistaken what it meant.

Yesterday there were some good news. The Branch team got picked up by Facebook for $15 mn. I am really happy for my friend Hursh, co-founder of Branch. Branch had some really well connected angel investors on board from very early on. The acquisition reflected the “value” the team and investors created. It was perhaps not the behemoth exit they had dreamed of and gone into the venture with, but I surmised, the economics...

Fred Wilson posted this fireside chat between Eric Ries, Chris Dixon, and Marc Andreessen.

I’ve been thinking a lot on my experience interacting with early stage founders. We are constantly trying to understand the patterns and I have an ongoing working thesis on the type of teams we are looking for.

It’s great to see that what I believe in terms of bottom-up market sizing is important to Marc, too.

The video recording of the talk made me think about what we are looking for going into the next batch. Here are two segments that I particularly enjoyed.

• founders that break regulations vs innovate within regulations
• what Andreessen Horowitz looks for?

Here is the video and my notes on the two segments.

Healthcare and Financial services: as examples of the extremely regulated (13:05)

• founders either do radicalized disruption or within regulation
• example: bitcoin is a release valve...

I was introduced by my friend Julia to Google’s OKR system in our discussion in helping manage teams’ accountability to goals during the accelerator program.

Recently I started tracking my own project in this format, and thought about implementing this system within our team, and perhaps in the program.

A timely article on Business Insider introduced me to this post: Startup Lab workshop—How Google sets goals: OKRs by Rick Klau (Product Partner at Google Ventures).

This workshop recording is excellent. Rick Klau went over:

• what are OKRs
• how to implement
• how to adopt at your own company

His live video is here, and these are my notes.

A High Level View of OKR

Keys to OKR

• set quarterly and annually (annual OKRs are not set in stone)
• measurable
• set at personal, team, and company levels
• publicly available to everyone in the organization
• graded each quarter by yourself (OKR...

I had two observations about B2B startups doing customer development via cold calls. When founders spoke passionately about their businesses and their products (features), they got silence treatment on the phone.

JFDI’s 2013B startups were mostly B2B. They were selling to large enterprises, F&B, construction firms, SMB, blog shops, eCommerce sites, pharmaceutical, pharmacies, and consumer brands. There were some founders that were good at cold calling and getting meetings, but others got complete shut down. I sat through some cold calls with the teams and took notes. I had also done a lot of calling when I was working in research (for investment funds).

I was most curious about these: a) what techniques were successful; b) what did founders teach themselves to become more successful?

Sell Value, not Features

This was a piece of advice from one of our mentors, Simon Dale from SAP. B2B...

A couple of months ago I was trying to make sense of the onslaught of iOS and Android as a threat to the telecom companies. The relationship here is not a balanced symbiosis. Platform vs Infrastructure (de facto Standard) has been a theme that we see repeatedly over time. I believe by understanding this particular trend will open the keys to a slew of [investment] opportunities.

Part of it was about establishing a standard on top of a new standard, and in doing so, replacing the previous standard.

In the case of telephony, a lot of companies got to work and laid down cables and wires. Once the Infrastructure and the network effect was released, ubiquitous Platforms started to emerge. Platforms took certain shape. On the one end, things like ACH payment (wire transfer) company established themselves (like Western Union) as a de facto money moving Platform on the wired world. On the...

Kuo-Yi spoke with our founders about consultative selling today. In an early stage startup environment, what the founders needed to find, was the fit between their products and their customers’ visions.

Having won major contracts and signed on IBM as an system integrator for a USD $15mn governmental project, Kuo-Yi broke down his approach crossing that chasm. He shared three main pillars in closing a sale.

Who were you talking to

There were three types of people you needed to find in an organization: a) a decision maker/influencer; b) a coach; c) a champion.

Kuo-Yi pointed out that a decision maker was not defined by his or her title. It was the person that had the budget to make the decision. An influencer was not bad either; he or she could get other stakeholders’ interests aligned.

A coach was someone who could help you navigate the organization. This could be a sales person that...

A lot of our teams needed to get in front of domain experts, customers, and mentors. Most of them asked me to put them in touch, but I went back most of the time to ask them to write a short, concise email to help me make the connection.

Write in 3 sentences

One of our founders, Arthur, was very used to writing long emails that opened with “thank you’s” and compliments. This was polite, but I found that most of the people just wanted to know what you needed.

I suggested to Arthur and Veronica (another founder) to reverse the entire content of the email. Instead of [opening thank you’s] to [what we do] to [what we need from you], I asked them to flip it around.

This way the recipient could decide whether he or she could help before reading more about you and the thank-you’s. And if you couldn’t summarize what you needed or what you were working on, it would be too burdensome to ask...

Smitty is both technical and goal driven. He’s an all-star products person. At today’s mentoring session, he kicked off with a talk to helped JFDI teams focus on two things: 1) create an emotional connection with customers, and 2) make hard decisions early on.

Be funny

Most startups were battling the online noise vs signal problem. Smitty stressed the importance of striking up a relationship early on with the customers—as soon as they signed up.

He referenced Derek Sivers’s “most successful emails” and drew on his own experience building product at Spuul.com, where they crafted quirky characters to engage users. He recalled, immediately after applying this approach, their emails were inciting reactions, both good and bad from users. This made their product memorable.

This approach created a dialogue. He was also religious about getting back to each customer on every feedback...

In light of Andrew Chen’s blog post on Google Trends, I was curious about the eCommerce players in Singapore vs the Region.

This puts the size of Singapore sort of in perspective. Not scientific—though the spenders are here—Singapore is still a speck. Zalora Malaysia and Indonesia rank higher on search trends.

Looks like Zalora also did a lot of PRs the last twelve months vs the other players (the Letters on the graph indicate news headlines).

Scott Bales stopped by JFDI to talk to the teams about Persona Development. His talk was by far one of the best I had seen on this topic—simple and loaded with anecdotal war stories.

It was great to hear him explain persona to the founders. Persona Development made sense, and sometimes was deemed trivial. Scott pointed this out, but also reassured the teams that it was extremely helpful when his team had painted 32 personas for Moven.com, a mobile bank he co-founded.

Focus on Behaviors

Scott emphasized this repeatedly—he reminded the founders to focus on behaviors of the target customers. In my experience working with teams on Persona Development, this was often the point where founders brushed over and missed. Often times entrepreneurs focused on facts (ie, demographic) over behaviors.

Behaviors were great assumptions to validate because they brought together a group of people that...