Venture Capitalist at Theory

About / Categories / Subscribe / Twitter

Trends

2024

Why Databases Won't Charge for Storage in the Future

March 12

What If LLMs Change the Business Model of the Internet?

February 27

AI Design Patterns

February 5

Experience as a Status Symbol

January 31

2023

Step-Ups & Duration : The Shape of Things to Come to the Series A in 2024

December 14

Snow Angels Come Early to Data : Snowflake's Strength Spells Success for Startups

November 29

The New Threat to a Data Leader's Career

November 27

Sudden Disturbances in Rapidly Moving Objects : The Implications of the OpenAI Fiasco

November 20

Top 10 Trends for Data in 2024

November 9

Gas Gas Revolution

October 27

The Convergence of Data & Software Engineering in the Age of AI

October 20

Centaurs & Cyborgs : The Jagged Frontier of AI

October 1

Artisanal Emails

September 26

Building Applications with AI - Lessons from LangChain, Hearth, & Context.ai

September 21

Whispers of the Future

September 8

The Rise of Data Lakes in Software Architecture

September 7

The Dawn of AI : Pricing Power & Profits in NVidia's Business

August 23

Seizing the Moment: Strategies for Startups to Outmaneuver Competition in a Turning Economy

August 17

Surprising Data Points about the Venture Capital Market

August 8

How Will a Venture Capital Recovery Feel? Observations from 2008

August 7

The Paradox of AI and Data Roles: How Automation Will Increase Demand for Data Professionals

July 28

Signs We've Touched the Bottom

July 26

The Fracking of Information

July 11

What 70m Thread Users Mean for B2B Marketers

July 7

Picking Teams in AI

June 26

What if Every SaaS App Spoke English?

June 11

Web3 in SaaS Clothing

June 8

Microsoft's Billion Dollar AI Business

April 26

Software Spending Growth Will Accelerate by 40% in 2023, But it Doesn't Feel that Way

April 24

Why Every Startup Needs an AI Strategy

April 19

The 4 Questions Startups Should Ask Themselves about Building with Generative AI

April 7

Which Increases Productivity More : The Advent of Personal Computer or a Large-Language Model?

March 21

When Will SaaS Budgets Increase Again?

March 17

How ChatGPT Will Restructure Engineering Teams & Create Opportunity for Startups

March 7

A Flare Across the Clouds : Cloudflare's Earnings Report

February 14

Venture Capital, Withering & Dying

February 10

When AI Favors the Incumbents

February 2

The Future of Startup Office

January 31

Rabbits on Firetrucks : Generating Images for B2B Blog Posts Using AI

January 13

2022

Five Predictions for 2023

December 18

Top 10 Posts of 2022

December 4

Napoleon's Influence on the Modern Data Stack : hyperdimensional Analysis with Malloy

November 30

9 Predictions for Data in 2023

October 26

10 Predictions for Data at the Impact Summit

September 26

Messaging: the Bottleneck for Web3

August 4

The End of Web3

July 8

The Macroeconomic Signal to Watch for Software & Infrastructure Startups

June 1

The 4 Startup States During a Recession

May 16

Cash Flow Shockwaves

May 5

5 Key Data Points about the Early Venture Market in Q1 2022

May 4

Product-Market Fit in Different Capital Environments

May 3

Imagine You're a Venture Capitalist...

April 25

$112m of Market Cap per Engineer

March 31

Startup Self-Repricing as a Recruiting Tool

March 25

Do Data Startups Command a Premium in the Fundraising Market?

January 11

2021

Passive Investing in Venture Capital and the Parallels to Public Equities

October 8

You'll Never Login the Same Way Again

August 23

The Decline of Venture Debt at the Early Stage

July 24

The Figures that Will Move the Venture Capital Market in the Next 3-5 Years

June 6

The One Force that Will Govern How We Return to Work

May 3

Never Raising, Always Raising

April 22

The Identity Crisis Facing Open Source Companies in the Cloud

April 2

The Feedback Loops in Data that Will Change SaaS Architecture

March 2

The Most Popular Startup Domain Suffixes - .com, .co, .gg - Which is Best for Your Business?

February 21

The Five Flavors of ARR - New Definition, Same Great Multiple

January 27

The Secret to Keeping Your Software Running and Keeping Customers Happy

January 26

The Fastest Growing Sectors of Startup Fundraising in 2020

January 18

Why Remote Work Changes the Nature of Leadership, and the Kinds of Leaders to Recruit in Startups

January 4

2020

5 Predictions for 2021

December 17

Where to Start if You're Curious about Macroeconomics Today

December 14

Rediscovering the Power of the Command Line

December 9

The Supercharger Boosting Startupland Fundraising and Exits

November 20

Why IPOs, Direct Listings, and SPACs Will Flourish in Startupland

October 19

The Five Important Trends in Data, and the One Megatrend Powering Them All

July 31

The Unforeseen Benefits of Online Events

July 19

An Economic History of the US in Five Stock Market Crashes

July 17

What I've Learned about Modern Monetary Theory

July 13

Cloud Data Lakes - The Future of Large Scale Data Analysis

July 9

Two Charts that I've Been Wondering About

June 30

Where are Most Unicorns Headquartered?

May 28

California Dreaming - Is Silicon Valley Still the Best Place to Start a Company?

May 25

How Would You Manage Your Business Differently if Shelter-in-Place Lasted 18 Months or More?

May 13

The Fundraising Market Has Changed, But Not in the Way I Thought

May 6

Bullwhip and Base Rates - The Two Major Forces Impacting Startups in Q2

April 26

The Startup Sectors Most Impacted by the Coronavirus

April 6

Observations about Silicon Valley Two Weeks into Quarantine

April 2

What Will this Crisis Accelerate in Your Ecosystem?

March 25

Estimating the Impact of the Coronavirus on Growth

March 16

What Could the Venture Market Look Like in the Coronavirus Era

March 12

What I Expect in the Next Few Months in Startupland

March 6

Cloud Prem Architecture - The New Way of Serving the Enterprise with a Hub and Spoke Data Model

January 29

Has VC Become So Big It Must Be Disrupted?

January 27

The Health of the US Venture Market in 2020

January 7

2019

5 Predictions for 2020

December 19

The Top 10 Posts of 2019

December 15

What I've learned about IPOs and Direct Listings

October 21

Design and Open Source: A Potentially Powerful Combination

October 14

The Radically Different Early Stage Fundraising Market

October 7

Which Categories of Seed Startups are Thriving? Which Aren't?

August 8

The Strategic Question at Seed Today

July 19

Observations from the Enterprise Tech 30 List

July 15

The Benefits of and Questions Facing Remote and Distributed Startups

May 28

The Fundraising Environment in 2019 - Three Major Shifts

May 13

The Four Strategic Questions Facing AI Agencies

April 14

Eugene Wei's Novel Mental Models for Technology

January 23

The AI Agency - A Novel GTM for Machine Learning SaaS Startups

January 17

2018

Just Where Are SaaS Companies Priced After the 2018 Correction?

December 26

Predictions for 2019

December 18

SAP Buys Qualtrics; 2018 Catapulted to $65B in $1B+ M&A Volume

November 11

Normalization of Valuations in the Public and Private Software Markets

October 9

What Does AirBnB's 'Shares for Hosts' Idea Imply for Blockchain?

October 4

Three Observations About the Adobe/Marketo Acquisition

September 24

Access is the Scarcest Commodity in Startupland

September 3

1% of Salesforce's Revenue Makes a Unicorn

August 26

Jacob's Ladder in the Startup Fundraising Market - How Startups Today Skip a Round of Fundraising

July 23

Why Series As are Much Easier to Raise in 2018 than the Past 5 Years

June 24

The Blockbuster Software M&A Market of 2018

June 12

The 5 Forces Driving Startup Valuations Today

June 3

The Most Important Book You'll Read All Year

May 29

When Will the Next Wave of UI Advances Happen?

May 20

The Effect of Flush Private Markets on Software IPOs

April 30

Is Geographic Dispersion of Seed Dollars Really Happening?

March 8

Private Equity as an Exit Option for SaaS Startups

February 27

The Impact of Blockchain on SaaS

February 11

7 Predictions for SaaS in 2018

January 4

2017

An Antifragile Thanksgiving

November 22

Just How Disruptive Are ICOs to the Classic VC Model?

November 5

The Rising Stakes in SaaS

October 22

Maximizing Productivity on My Commute

August 27

Has SaaS Become Commodified?

August 23

The Limiting Factor of Voice and Dictation Adoption

August 18

Three Big Ideas on Technology Innovation Cycles

August 11

Labor Arbitrage Comes to Silicon Valley

July 25

What the Online Advertising World Can Teach Us about the Evolution of Machine Learning in SaaS

June 20

Ethics in Machine Learning - An Opportunity for Startups to Lead

May 30

The Unbundling of Excel

May 24

Data Middleware - The SaaS Ecosystem's Response to Fragmentation

May 19

My Algorithm is Better than Yours

April 26

When Machine Learning Just Isn't Enough

April 19

How Machine Learning Can Benefit Your SaaS Startup

February 13

2016

The Top 6 Posts of 2016

December 21

Implications of Monoclouds for as-a-Service Startups - Why Differentiation Matters More than Ever

December 5

The Customer Support Experience of the Future

November 10

Are We Seeing the Beginning of SaaS Consolidation?

October 31

The Challenge Facing Deep-Learning Powered Startups

October 19

A Breakthrough in Human Computer Interaction

August 25

The Increasing Costs of Real Estate for Startups in San Francisco

July 13

The Next Big Shift in SaaS

July 11

The Key Ingredient to Disrupting with Machine Learning

June 10

Subverting Systems of Record with Chat Bots

June 8

Five Questions About The Future of Chatbots

April 14

The New UI for SaaS - The Question

January 24

The Hottest Startup Sectors in 2016

January 3

2015

The Tech Press Cycle and Unicorns

December 1

The Next Major Technology to Shape SaaS

November 2

The Turbulence in Startupland

October 13

Startup Trends from YCombinator's Demo Day

August 20

How the Changes in UX Assumptions Create Opportunities for Startups

August 6

Free SaaS Enabled Marketplaces - A Novel Go-To-Market for Software Startups

May 21

2014

Why Series A Startup Founder CEO Equity Stakes Have Grown 40% in Five Years

November 4

One of the Best Business Opportunities in the Next Decade

October 30

The Innovations Free Compute and Storage Unleash

September 12

4 Major Competitive Trends in Mobile App Stores

August 11

The B Corporation - A Novel Structure for Mission Driven Startups

August 7

The Challenge Facing Mobile-First SaaS Companies

August 5

What the Public Markets Trends Say About the Fundraising and M&A Environment Startups

August 4

What Q2 Tech Earnings Reports Say About the State of the Technology Market

July 28

The Coming Wave of Venture Capital and What It Means for Your Startup

July 23

Lessons from Interviews of Pre-Eminent VCs in 2000

July 21

The Next Era in SaaS

July 14

How Vibrant is the Hardware Startup World?

July 8

An Exceptional Story with Exceptional Data

July 2

Why Smart Watches Could be a Huge Trend in Mobile

June 26

The Disruption Debate is Focused on the Wrong Ideas

June 23

The Great Unbundling of Email

June 16

The Five Letters that Will Change the Data World: BYOBI

May 23

What's Wrong with the Internet of Things

May 20

The New Market Places

March 10

A Moore's Law for Data

March 6

Why the WhatsApp Acquisition Changes Everything

February 23

The Technology that's Taking Data Science by Storm

January 30

What the Nest Acquisition Means for the Internet of Things

January 21

My Thoughts on CES - The Six Trends on the Show Floor

January 8

2013

What Bitcoin and Internet of Things Startups Have in Common

December 6

The Tablet-First Retail Startup

December 2

The Next Big Opportunity in Mobile Advertising

November 21

The Language of the Web

November 19

The First Form of Communication that Changes Depending on Who is Using It

November 7

The Future of Journalism in the Touch Era

November 6

How Mobile is Disrupting Even the Most Successful Internet Products

November 4

The Most Important Feature In KitKat No One is Talking About

November 1

The Internet Subscription Startup is Winning

October 25

Anticipatory Commerce: the Evolution of Intent on the Web

October 24

The Two Characteristics of Seamless Mobile Payment Experiences

October 15

How APIs Will Evolve

October 8

The Developer Economy: Power to the Coders

September 26

Google F1 and The Cascade of Innovation New Databases Create

September 13

The VC Firm of the Future

September 10

How Web Development Techniques Are Infiltrating Mobile Apps

September 4

Mobile Social Networks: The New Customer Acquisition Powerhouse

August 30

The Series A Is Overloaded

August 29

Marketing’s Technical Liberation

August 22

Anticipatory Computing - The Next Big Thing Is Enabling Laziness

August 7

How CrowdFunding Embodies Amazon’s Product Management Process

July 29

Why Support Software Is the Future of Work Email

July 26

Data, Data Everywhere, Not a Second to Think

July 12

Peak Smart Phone - What Happens to the App Economy When Smartphone Penetration Reaches 100%?

July 6

The Startup Sector That’s Quietly Booming

June 27

The Return of Venture Backed Hardware

June 13

The Dawn of the Voice-to-Text Era

June 5

Investing in the Consumer Web is Dead

May 22

The Future of Human Data Interaction

May 17

The Greatest Challenge to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is Unbundling

May 9

Design’s New Frontier: The IRL Era

April 26

Machine Learning in Consumer Products

March 12

The Five Key Dynamics of the Seed Market in 2013

February 21

Salesforce’s Disruptor Won’t Be A CRM Company

February 14

There’s A 10x Hidden In That Tweet

February 12

Valuations in the Series A and Series B Market are Booming

February 5

The Power of Market Places

January 31

The startup hardware M&A market will be vibrant in 2013

January 10

2012

Data on the “seedpocalypse”

November 30

VC investment trends in the consumer web

November 27

Gigabytes under management

October 25

Data isn’t a business model - it’s much more important

September 19

Defining a Personal API

May 27