Writings about technology, startups, and venture capital.
Reading OnStartups (pp. 31-50)
Chapter 4: On Market Positioning and Strategy Enterprise Software Markets As the industry evolved and matured, the market for enterprise software became increasingly challenging. Enterprise customers became dissatisfied with the terms being offered by enterprise software vendors, especially those involving high upfront fees. Power shifted to the customer as competition increased and the ROI of…
Pre-Seed Considerations
There are the founder biases that I want to see in a Pre-Seed founder: A strong understanding of the market opportunity and an equally strong use case; a POV that is contrarian in a meaningful way to the incumbents in the space; a tendency to lead fast-moving teams and launching products; a sense of who…
Founder Due Diligence
I read the Pitchbook article Discovering the Next Unicorn Founder with great interest this week and have been giving it consideration over the last few days. It’s been a great one to mull over. With the abundance of capital being put to work, this moment reminds me of the late 1990s pre-Internet Bubble, although it’s different in many…
Diligence at the Pre-Seed stage
I’ll try my best to share how I think about diligence at the Pre-Seed stage in 2021. The main idea I try to keep in mind here is that the right amount and type of diligence can create the same conviction pre-traction that we need at the Seed and Early Venture rounds. The diligence is entirely different, however. Let…
Reading OnStartups (pp. 11-30)
Chapter 2: On The Entrepreneurial Leap p11: 56% of Americans dream of starting their own businesses…:disengaged” from jobs and seeking the entrepreneurial experience (Judson, Go It Alone) p11: What makes software developers different from others. Tend to have software development background, having worked as programmers in larger, more established organizations and then decided to take…
Reading OnStartups (pp. 1 – 10)
p2: Thesis will analyze the patterns and practices of contemporary software startups, specifically the intersection of software startups; p2: blogging at OnStartups as a part of the thesis writing experience. p5-6: Table of Contents summarizes the paper’s major discussion points, from a startups cradle-to-grave, i.e. entrepreneurial leap, financing, market positioning, product development, business models, startup…
An Afternoon at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus
I wanted to quickly thank Claudia Whitehead at the Phoenix Community and Economic Development for hosting me at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, which will host many pioneers in translational genomics and molecular profiling in the future; right in the heart of Phoenix,Arizona. The City of Phoenix healthcare and biomedical ecosystem is comprised of nearly 9,400 enterprises that supports more than 221k jobs. This…
AZ Fortune 500s: Q1 2021
The State of Arizona’s Fortune 500 incumbents are quickly being replaced by its tech companies. Former “blue chips” are having a tough time keeping up with locally founded tech firms. In 2015, two of the state’s Top 6 companies were in the tech industry (Avnet and First Solar). Today, in 2021, tech has taken four spots with Carvana, Microchip Technology…
Concur’s Perfect Trip Fund
Exploring Concur’s Perfect Trip Fund “The Perfect Business Trip is the one that gets the job done.” Steve Singh, CEO, Concur Steve Singh’s quest is the perfect business trip. His solution is the Perfect Trip Fund. In a video posted on Youtube on May 6th, Steve Singh,CEO, Concur Technologies, shared his vision for the Perfect…
SaaS Pre-IPO Revenue Growth (2013)
While curating the daily and weekly news releases of public SaaS companies, I began to think about what pre-IPO life was like for them. Naturally, my first questions centered on pre-IPO revenues. So, I dug through their financials and found some pretty neat things. Just three footnotes before pressing on – In the figure below,…
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Ruminder D. 