Author Archives: Richard Melmon
Return of the Series A Crunch
Today’s big VC brands were built by funding start-ups from birth to acquisition, IPO, or death; whichever came first. There were no Y-Combinators and other microVCs. But it isn’t true that “lean” investing strategies didn’t then exist. Electronic Arts, whose birth I have a blood relationship with, was “seeded” by Sequoia Capital, and two other […]
Apple being Apple: A Silicon Valley Fable
Apple swapping out Google Maps for its own inferior product makes it irresistible for me to present here an arcane bit of Silicon Valley history I often recall with a certain relish when enjoying a glass of wine with my young colleagues. In the early 1980’s I had the privilege of joining a little start […]
Liquidity Cometh
Ari Levy and Lee Spears of Bloomberg Newsroom write clearly about the impact of the Facebook public offering, offering little in the way of condolences for those buying at $42 in the opening confusion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/facebook-ipo-spawns-new-wave-social-media-angels-tech.html Instead, they rightly focus on how liquidity, locked up for years in quiet ponds (some bigger than others), is soon […]
A few words on Steve Jobs:
I worked directly with him on the early Apple advertising. The process was not pretty, but the results were. I have never resolved in my mind the contribution his bedside manner made to the outcome. No matter. The outcome dominated. The current non-gossip part of the conversation about him credits his genius, but in a […]
Internet Video Will Drive a Media Overturning
In the big scheme of things, Internet video is a largely yet-to-happen ‘over-the-horizon’ event. Something big is coming, but exactly when and how is not clear. Internet video deals are not hot today. The probable reason: Many of the video deals inspired by the success of YouTube and Hulu have disappointed. Why? The biggest success […]
The New Consumer Teaches the Old Enterprise
The Internet has created today’s ‘new consumer’. Our behavior is certainly distinct from a decade ago. When tweeting and messaging competes with drinking as a cause of auto accidents, a transformation is upon us. Who makes enterprises run? People do, and most of these people are ‘new consumers’, with all of the built […]
New Web Services Leverage Lean Technologies
The past fifteen years have seen a building out of Internet infrastructure stack. Buried in this stack sit what we term the the lean technologies, the crown jewels behind everything we’re seeing now. These are: rapid product integration, open source, and big data, which, taken together have allowed entrepreneurs to deliver robust services offering high […]
