The Equity Kicker

There is a great opinion piece by Lawrence Lenihan on Business of Fashion today arguing that we are killing many fashion startups by over-capitalising them relative to their market opportunity. Right-sizing funding is a topic that is dear to my heart, but the interesting point here is why over-funding is becoming a problem. Over funding is [...]

The FT had an article over the weekend about the job creation in China that has come off the back of Alibaba’s amazing success. According the Chinese Ecommerce Research Centre in the last year alone the Chinese ecommerce industry created more than 12m jobs directly and more than 12m indirectly, and Alibaba controls over [...]

When I was growing up I was lauded for being ‘smart’ because I excelled at maths, played a mean game of chess, and partook fully in the political debates that our family used to enjoy over Sunday lunch and at other family occasions. My cognitive intelligence was high. Since then I’ve come to believe [...]

There is a good post up today on Segment.io describing how they used Kickstarter as a lean startup tool to validate demand. First the background:

Kickstarter is the perfect way to validate an idea. By definition, a successful Kickstarter campaign has a ton of people who’ve already put their money where their mouth is.

It’s [...]

Steve Denning, one of my new favourite writers recently wrote on Forbes about Leadership in the three-speed economy. This concept of a a three-speed economy is powerful, although I think ‘three-sector’ would be more accurate. For a while now I’ve been struggling to reconcile vibrant growth in parts of the tech industry with lack-lustre [...]

CRM startup close.io just blogged about how they sweat the small stuff when it comes to UI and UX design. They gave four examples:

Updated the contact entry form so it parsed details entered and automatically identified them as emails, phone numbers etc. Made it so pasting email addresses always produced a simple email address ‘[email protected]’ [...]

In 2009 AirBnB’s revenues were stuck at $200 per week. This quote from a blog on the First Round Capital site explains how they got back to growth:

At the time, Airbnb was in Y Combinator. One afternoon, the team was pouring over their search results for New York City listings with Paul Graham, [...]

Fred Wilson has a post up this morning title Return and Ridicule which talks about the dangers of herd investing. Fred quotes Bill Gurley saying that ‘you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong’ which I think is spot on. If lots of people share your idea [...]