Agile VC

My idle thoughts on tech startups

Agile VC: 

My idle thoughts on tech startups

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I watched the first episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley last night. Yes I know I’m several weeks behind at this point, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to get into this series (still not sure actually). FWIW I’m […]

Lee Hower
April 28, 2014 · 3  min.

Like most folks in the tech ecosystem, I’m still slightly slack-jawed this morning by the announcement late yesterday that Facebook is buying WhatsApp for approximately $19 billion in total consideration.  There are so many remarkable aspects of this event… from […]

Lee Hower
February 20, 2014 · 2  min.

It’s widely known we VCs focus on just a couple of key dimensions when making our investment decisions:  team, market, product / technology, and investment parameters or “deal”.  While all of these parameters are loosely connected and there are many […]

Lee Hower
February 12, 2014 · 3  min.

Most consumer web/mobile companies focus on user growth and usage early in the company’s lifecycle before shifting to monetization.  This is a logical thing to do… when we started LinkedIn, my mentor Reid Hoffman instilled a mantra of Growth –> […]

Lee Hower
February 5, 2014 · 2  min.

Change Collective announced their seed round today, in conjunction with their broader launch of the company.  I thought I’d share a little of what makes us enthusiastic to partner with Ben, Derek, and their team to help them as they […]

Lee Hower
January 22, 2014 · 2  min.

I was recently talking with another member of LinkedIn’s founding team.  It’s been awhile since we worked together on a daily basis so a lot was just general catch up, but one of the primary reasons for our chat was […]

Lee Hower
December 19, 2013 · 4  min.

As many of you know, in the past I’ve done a series of posts deconstructing the S-1s of VC-backed internet startups going public. A few years ago this was sort of a novelty… not that many startups were going public […]

Lee Hower
November 6, 2013 · 6  min.

I believe we’re going to look back in 2-5 years and realize that we’ve been in a once a decade boom for internet & software startups. It doesn’t feel much like a boom actually.  The macroeconomy has been stuck in […]

Lee Hower
October 1, 2013 · 3  min.

We all woke up to the news that Microsoft is buying Nokia for ~$7B (ok, not the carrier infrastructure biz but the main part of Nokia that anybody cares about).  This isn’t totally out of left field since they’ve had […]

Lee Hower
September 3, 2013 · 4  min.

I was having breakfast this morning from someone I know from the LP world.  We were talking about what’s “working” in the broader VC ecosystem and this person expressed their enthusiasm that today there are a range of different models […]

Lee Hower
July 24, 2013 · 4  min.