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Leveraging Ideas

Ideation on economics, media, venture capital and startups

Founder Exchange Fund for Incubators?August 29

Last year, First Round Capital made an announcement that I thought was pure genius: FRC was the first venture fund to offer an exchange fund for entrepreneurs. Portfolio company founders were given the option to trade a small piece of stock in their personal venture in exchange for a piece of the action of the larger pool of all FRC companies that choose to participate. This is a great way for founders to help hedge personal risk, and it probably encourages more support/camaraderie across the portfolio. If I was an entrepreneur actively seeking a venture round, you can be sure I would go talk to First Round.

I believe this same approach can and should be applied to incubator programs.

I like the model at the incubator level because it provides a small hedge on what is perhaps an even riskier endeavor that raising a VC round (working for peanuts for three months with no guarantee of even an angel round). In fact, the exchange fund model has been used successfully by founders at later stage companies for years.

If you were participating in TechStars, or Y Combinator would you take advantage of such an offering?

Hack: Hire Someone on Craigslist Using RapportiveJuly 24

I wanted to share a quick hack I’m using this weekend.

My sister is in the process of moving from New York to Baltimore to start business school. I suggested that we get some movers to help us on each side of the trip, figuring we’d pay $40 an hour and provide some food and plenty of water. I used Craigslist to post a basic advertisement about 48 hours beforehand.

In the past I have used Craigslist to find handymen for a number of jobs such as moving furniture and brush. The response rate has always been high, but filtering to find the best/most trustworthy of the bunch is always a challenge.

However, this morning it occurred to me to run Rapportive and see if I could find Facebook or Linkedin profiles of some of the applicants (Rapportive is an awesome app for Gmail that surfaces that shows the social profiles for various email addresses). Sure enough, we had a total of about 40 responses and about 10 showed up in Rapportive. After scanning their profiles to eliminate anyone who looked like a serial killer I picked a jazz musician in New

What Non Profits Can Learn from StartupsJuly 22

I am republishing this Letter to the Editor I wrote for my B-School magazine. In summary, I believe non-profits can learn a great deal from the lean startup movement by focusing on actionable, quantitative metrics.

Data-centricity

As an entrepreneur who has worked closely managing expectations from venture capital investors, I thought Rise of the Philanthropreneurs by Mat Edelson [Fall 2008] hit several hot-button topics that transcend any one industry.

Over the last 12 months I have watched a new movement take shape across the Internet startup world. Startups are moving away from speculative, “waterfall”-style development processes. Instead these early-stage companies are embracing a new “lean” mentality, focused on the insights gained from a rigorous approach to numbers and metrics. In particular, Eric Ries and Steve Blank have championed this lean approach, arguing that before a startup can be ready to accept venture investment, it must develop a “scalable and repeatable business model” made clear by establishing a “product-market fit.” Only when this scalable model is obvious (i.e., clear underlying metrics to evaluate success) does it make sense for a startup
to accept significant third-party financing.

I see significant parallels between this new attitude among startups and the approaches championed by Venture Philanthropy Partners

Is Offline the New Online?July 11

Several years ago I worked on a project backed by a now prolific angel investor on the west coast. I found the idea extremely compelling, but the for a couple reasons the project failed to reach the next step. The most major reason was that our users were not totally comfortable with the new type of social interaction our model was predicated on: staying at someone else’s house (and thereby undermining the $120M+ lodging market). Fast forward a few years and it’s really exciting to see the concept validated by Airbnb.com (backed by Sequoia and gaining real momentum): the two concepts are almost identical. The difference is that Airbnb.com seems to be emerging just as people are becoming more comfortable opening up their lives – offline, as well as online*.

People tend to forget that it’s not only technology that evolves, but also users and their willingness to embrace new mediums at scale. Social dynamics often lag the models themselves (

Great Summer Internship for NYC Startup FanaticJune 28

I recently volunteered to help the NYCEDC with a forthcoming project called NYC Venture Connect. NYCEDC and Bloomberg are really doing some awesome stuff to promote entrepreneurship and startups in New York and I’m happy to be doing whatever I can to support the cause.

NYC Venture Connect needs a summer intern to gather great content and compile resources. The specifics of the PAID position are here and the job will run through August.

If you know anyone in college, etc, looking for a cool gig dealing with startups in NYC please have them apply or get in touch with me for more info.