Good grief! Not only do they force me to link to the article (which I might add, I had already added), but they included a link to their subscription page, and a Twitter reference to boot.
This is unacceptable. Why should someone who happens to see a headline on my news feed be accosted for cash? Wouldn't the best people to try to get to subscribe to a magazine be those who read the article and thought it was interesting.
You can see an interesting conversation about how to add this sort of feature to web pages here on StackOverflow. I was curious how a site could control your clipboard, since that would seem to be a major security violation. The trick, apparently, is to change the selection in the screen itself. Thus, when you select text, the Javascript adds additional content elements to the selection behind the scenes, so that when you copy and paste, the added text is copied as well.
Nifty. My question is, can we develop a means of stopping this manipulation?
Competitive Landscape/Market Maps
Customer Development
Metrics
Entering a Market
Competitive Landscaping
Competitive Landscape/Market Maps
Customer Development
Metrics
Competitive Landscaping is about finding what companies already exist in a given market
What is a
Market Map?
What is a
Competitive Matrix?
How do I find my competitors?
Example
Alternative Investing Startups
Tools
Media Sites
Tip: Use keywords like “funding” and “competitor” in Google to find similar companies
Crunchbase
Tip: Use tags to find similar competitors
AngelList
Quora
Entering a Market
Customer Development
Competitive Landscape/Market Maps
Customer Development
Metrics
Our goal:
Who wants
our products?
Most Important Decision Ever Made by a Startup:
B2C or B2B
For American Consumers:
Read Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report
Key Similarities
Mobile first, mobile always
Entertainment is key
Influencers matter a lot
Key Differences
Limited time – driving by car versus subway
Lower density, slower virality
Highly diverse – different consumer groups
Building a Product
for a Consumer
Start with a simple value proposition
Great recent examples: Secret, Medium, Warby Parker
Try it out on customers – get feedback
Open communications
Make customers your ambassadors
For B2B
Incredibly challenging for those outside of US
Things to think about
Size of customer - small business or Fortune 500?
Target customer – founders, marketers, etc.?
Sales cycle – how long to get a sale?
Price – what amount of the wallet?
Entering a Market
Metrics
Competitive Landscape/Market Maps
Customer Development
Metrics
In a popular story published in Dealbook, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen discussed his views on the popular virtual currency Bitcoin. The article is a good, decently level-headed discussion on the current Valley thinking about Bitcoin and its potential.
One thing that bothered me though was this line early on in the article: "What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014."
References to these sorts of "revolutions" or "waves of technology" are always interesting to me as an on-and-off again historian of science and technology. Revolutions are never point events, but rather process events – they have significant antecedents and gestation periods, and their effects are often time-delayed.
Take the personal computer. It is actually really hard to point to exactly when the PC revolution took place. Was it the launch of a specific model, the development of a particular piece of software, or maybe a particular marketing campaign that made it take off? The answer, of course, is no. The PC developed over two decades (possibly more), and over the years, the hardware and software co-evolved, supporting each other in growth.
Now take the internet. The internet has been in existence since the 1960s, and email has been available since the early 1970s. Andreessen uses the year 1993 as his benchmark, but the National Science Foundation didn't even allow commerce on the internet until 1995. The internet is still evolving today, and it is almost two decades later.
Now, what about Bitcoin? Clearly, the currency has a huge opportunity given the number of digital transactions going across the web. The question I have is more mundane though – how much of an improvement does Bitcoin make over existing
There isn't too much to say about this unique sculpture sitting out here in South Korea. Other than the human jaws, I guess.
JAWS – Coming to a Theater Near You! Photo taken from 시사주간.
One plastic surgery clinic in Gangnam, in order to demonstrate its extensive patient list, received more than its share of marketing publicity after commissioning this scupture made from human jaws. Gangnam is a popular area for plastic surgery, and advertisements are nearly overwhelming when walking through its busy streets. Clinics are always looking to get one jawbone, er, leg up on the competition.
Police here in Seoul are investingating the clinic to determine if the clinic failed to properly dispose of any of the remains, a violation of the medical health laws.
Ironically, the fact that they have removed so many jaws doesn't really demonstrate their capability of building beautiful faces. After all, the fact that vampires drink blood doesn't make you an expert serologist, nor does getting a Communications degree from Stanford mean you can give post-game football interviews in any sort of fluent way.
In a famous routine from 1972, comedian George Carlin presented the "seven words" you can't say on television (ironically, you also can't say them on this blog!). Carlin was lambasting the FCC's censorship regime, which at the time felt more reminiscient of the 1950s than the far more permissive culture of the 1960s.
Here in Seoul, such controversies are fairly frequent given the tighter sexual mores on the public airwaves. Still, a controversy this week over the movie poster for Pompeii has had many here questioning where censorship builds a safer public discourse, and where it flagrantly denigrates the fundamental right to freedom of speech.
In Korea, all movies are expected to go to the Korea Media Rating Board, which determines the ratings for domestic and foreign films and posters, as well as other types of media. Unlike in the United States, where film ratings are handled by the Motion Picture Asssociation of America (which is privately owned by the six major motion picture studios), Korea's rating board is publicly owned and operated by the national government.
So, what do the film judges have to object to? Take a look at the poster for Pompeii that was originally submitted in Korea:
The originally submitted poster for Pompeii
You might be wondering, what exactly is the problem with the poster? According to the translator of the film, the issue is that the couple is too intimate in the picture, foreshadowing that most horrible of actions, S - E - X (got to watch those censors!). Here is the new poster, which presumably I will start to see in subway stations all over Seoul:
The modified poster for Pompeii
I am almost certain my high school prom allowed a shorter distance between opposite genders than what is depicted
Oh no, the barbarians are entering the sacred domain! The Securities and Exchange Commission has truly opened the floodgates with the repeal of the prohibition on general solicitation, so I expect to be completely destroyed in T-Minus 60 days. I guess I am supposed to feel some sort of fear from startup crowdfunding platforms, considering their ultimate goal is to disrupt venture capital, and by extension, me.
And yet, I have no fear.
I do not doubt that crowdfunding investment platforms will have an impact on venture capital. I strongly support allowing anyone to invest in a broad range of private securities. Democratizing finance means making finance open to more investors, even those who are supposedly less sophisticated because they don't already have money (the definition of an accredited investor). Start-ups will ultimately be the beneficiaries here by allowing non-traditional investors into their rounds who might offer special skills, networks, or ideas to propel a fledgling company forward.
But the "secret" to this industry is that it is fundamentally a hits business.
This is very different from investments like equities, where returns on index funds are often quite compelling. Sure, one can dump all of their money into Facebook, or Amazon and reap a great reward. Yet, it is just as easily to lose massively with such a strategy, which is why research continually shows that most people are better off picking a stable index fund to hold over the long-term.
Venture capital investing is the complete antithesis of this approach. Returns in venture are marked by a power law, in which one or two investments out of 30 will often carry an entire fund. Placing your capital in fewer, but higher quality companies can actually create significant increases in returns. This is
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Partner, Research at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
