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There’s a force in mobile app distribution that isn’t talked about much despite its magnitude: mobile social networks. Mobile social nets are becoming the predominant mobile app paid discovery/distribution platforms.

How big is this force? Line, the Japanese mobile messenger with more than 200M users is on a $400M run rate, 60% of which is derived from app distribution. Kakao Talk will pay out about $600M to developers this year - which is about 10% of iTunes global developer payout in 2012. Remember, Kakao only serves Korea. Facebook’s mobile revenue will reach $2.5B this year driven by mobile CPI ads. In short, these networks are huge user funnels and money-making machines.

At Google, the director of my team repeated a management mantra to us quite often. “Manage yourself out of a job; make yourself redundant”, she would say. “Empower your people and then get out of the way.” Our director was a terrific team builder.

Before Google, she founded a startup where she learned to build a company. When she told us her mantra, she was sharing her learnings with us.

There’s a concept in computer programming called operator overloading that neatly describes the current Series A investment market.

Overloading means using the same code for two very different purposes depending on inputs. For example, a programmer could redefine the + function so that instead of adding two numbers, the function would multiply the numbers if one of the numbers was negative. Overloading can create lots of confusion in programming because the same function name can return very different results.

I’ve been promoting my Twitter account since October 2012 in effort to better understand social media content marketing and to promote that great vanity metric, Twitter follower count.

At the outset, I promoted my account and links to blog posts. I prize followers more than one time visits to a blog, because the long term marketing relationship provides many chances to bring someone to my blog. Promoting links sends traffic to a single blog post, but doesn’t convert to followers with a very high rate.

How much should your SaaS startup spend on sales and marketing? I’ve written about using unit economics and lead funnel performance to answer this question. Emulating the patterns of successful SaaS companies is another technique.

There are about 34 publicly traded SaaS companies that have published their revenue and sales & marketing expenses. Though their revenue growth rates are each unique, the sales and marketing spend patterns are quite similar.

Product and engineering teams are inseparable and at the core of most startups. One degree removed, sales and customer support teams ply the voice of the customer to influence product and eng. Of the five teams in a startup, marketing teams tend to have the least influence because traditional product marketers must influence others to enact change.

Marketing works with product and engineering to update branding and communication within the product. Marketing collaborates with sales to refine the product positioning. Marketing relies on engineering to provide analysis for marketing spend efficiency, customer segmentation and user engagement. Marketing teams with customer support to ensure service reinforces the company’s brand. In each case, marketing is working through others.

A team of founders who had just made their first their first hire asked me about culture and on boarding. How do they go about managing people? How do they maintain the values of the business?

The underlying question of successful management is: How can founders lead and learn at the same time?

I think a bastardized version Tolstoy’s well-worn refrain is apt:

Happy teams are all alike; every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way.

For bloggers and content marketers, choosing the right content syndication tools to distribute posts is critical to developing an audience. The author/marketer must balance four attributes: distribution, measurement, retention and brand.

Table 1: Balancing Syndication Tools Attributes

RSS’s end is nigh. Google shuttered Reader. Feedburner’s subscriber metrics of this blog swing by 50% or more. Plus the relationship between author and reader is one way (push).

Credit: Karl Scotland

When I started at Redpoint in 2008, I wanted to find every way of analyzing companies I could. Consultants scrutinize the inner-workings of companies daily and create simple frameworks for explaining their operations. So I bugged a handful of friends with experience at the Big 3 consulting firms for their most used frameworks.

Recently I came across an old friend, a framework I studied then called McKinsey’s Three Horizons in The Lean Entrepreneur, an anthology of lean startup techniques and case studies.

Over the past few years, there has been a pronounced shift in the seed market. VCs now participate quite actively in the market. As a result, seed investment volumes have roughly doubled in the past year.

But is the seed strategy working for startups and VCs? Do hugely successful businesses raise seed capital? Do those businesses include VCs in their seed rounds? And most importantly, do the VCs follow on in the Series A?