Author Archives: Duncan Davidson
Something Funky Happened at the Facebook IPO
Facebook: Fakebook, FailBook, FacePlant, pick your favorite euphemism for the epic fail tepid offering on Friday. It hasn’t failed, yet, although perception here seems to have become reality – no pop, fail. The first half an hour of trading was a mess, and some retail trades ordered right away didn’t get filled until after hours. […]
Crappy Patents Spoil Nest
Honeywell sued Nest for patent infringement. Nest is the innovator, started by Tony Fadell of Apple, a friend of mine and the genius behind the iPod design. Tony will do more to create the Smart Home than Honeywell has done, or ever will do; and yet the entrenched incumbent is trying to drive true innovation […]
The Re-Fragmentation of Social
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” – Yogi Berra In 2007 I was involved with one of the first mobile social companies, Xumii. This is before the iPhone, before Android, and in the days where the only apps that mattered were games on feature phones. Xumii was solving the problem of many sources of […]
The Facebook IPO is No Netscape Moment, and Shows the Need for a Small IPO Market
The digerati are obsessively focused on the imminent filing of the Facebook IPO. The hope is that it becomes the next Netscape Moment. They also thought LinkedIn might be, but in our view, that IPO reflected a pent up demand for tech IPOs, not a seminal spark to a new boom. This chart shows that […]
Why We Invested in Byliner, the Pandora For E-Books
Byliner is a digital publisher that is promoting a new format designed for e-readers: the “e-single,” a two-hour read of 10-30K words that fits between a magazine article (3-5K words) and a book (75-200K words). We have seen this sort of disruption in music, where iTunes brought back the single and liberated songs from the […]
TechCrunch Tokyo: Series A Crunch
While at TechCrunch Tokyo I had a good chat with the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, who gave a great intro to the conference, discussing the Cambrian Explosion in startups. He asked me to expand on the theme, especially around how the lean startup had given rise to a Lean Finance Model of Venture Capital. You can click here to […]
TechCrunch Tokyo: Venture Revolution Keynote
Bullpen was asked to TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 both to keynote and to join a panel. This event was crowded – over 600 attendees, a combination of eager found entrepreneurs and senior management at leading Japanese companies like NTT, Sony, etc. Booths out front touted new ventures, and the sushi at the networking event was great! […]
Venture 101: Capped Convert Confusion
The venture industry got comfortable with valuation “rules of thumb” in the follow-on rounds using the typical model of Series A, Series B etc. Bullpen plays in the “rational B” follow-on round , and we see both priced seed rounds coming to us as well as unpriced convertible notes. We have been on both sides […]
The Promise of Secondary Markets
At our upcoming Venture Shift conference in NY, we will discuss the impact of secondary markets on venture finance. We ran a similar panel this summer at our SF event to a lot of interest. There is a tremendous promise to SharePost and SecondMarket and other secondary sales exchanges. They already are providing liquidity to investors […]
Re-Imagining the Camera
The iPhone has been a weapon of mass destruction. It’s predecessor, the iPod, revitalized the music industry, and now the iPhone is rolling over wireless. Walled Gardens have been opened, Nokia and RIM have been humbled, and markets not in the direct line of sight are stumbling – none more than digital cameras. The vast […]
