I’ve been watching the games and realized that they hold valuable lessons for startups. This isn’t surprising, because championship sports, like entrepreneurship, is an activity at the human edge. It requires excellence, training, practice, drive, spirit, and so much more.
Where We Are Investing Now: Vertical SaaS
The primary focus for all of our funds has moved forcefully toward health and happiness. But we will always invest where we see strong opportunity. One of the areas where that is definitely true this year is Vertical SaaS. Vertical SaaS platforms are uniquely focused enterprise software systems that provide solutions tailored for a specific […]
Where We Are Investing Now: Life Sciences, Part 2
My last blog post discussed part of our approach this year to investment in the bioscience and neuroscience aspects of health and happiness. To recognize how broad and extensible this focus is, we call it “Life Sciences.” Last week, I talked about our focus in neuro, bio, VR, and AI as each relates to helping […]
Where We Are Investing Now: Life Sciences, Part 1
Our funds center around the emerging science of health and happiness. No areas of science are more central to that theme than bioscience and neuroscience. With the initiation of Joyance Partners, our fund focused on delightful moments, we have added deep domain expertise in these areas and evaluated literally thousands of brand new startups developing […]
Where We Are Investing Now: Consumer Goods
The one area of investment focus that fully spans both our funds is consumer goods. We think these are the categories of products with the greatest emotional power in 2019.
Wellness Revolution on Main Street: The Biotanica
Within a few years, we will see the emergence of an entirely new kind of Main Street facility. I call it “the Biotanica”: the combination of biology and science with the spiritual, herbal and community aspects of traditional Hispanic botanicas.
What Will Happen to Main Street? Wellness!
Walk down the main streets of any major city and retail dysfunction radiates from the blank and butcher-papered windows of empty storefronts. In Manhattan, fully one-third of retail locations are vacant. In San Francisco, iconic retailers like the quixotic Gump’s have vanished into memory.
How To Compensate Your Sales Team
Now that you have great salespeople to work for your company, how should you compensate them?
How To Recruit Great Sales People
My last post covered tips for recruiting great sales leaders. This time, let’s look at how to recruit the best sales team members. Distill your key sales needs Before you can build the right sales team, you have to understand what your product does, who its buyers are, how they buy, and what benefits it […]
How to Recruit Great Sales Leaders
One of the questions we get asked most frequently by our portfolio company CEOs is: How can I recruit great sales talent? Twice a year, we host teaching sessions for our companies on the fundamentals of startup sales management. At those sessions, we offer this advice on recruiting world-class revenuers: The biggest predictor of success […]
Our 3 Flavors of Investment
We recently had our mid-year internal review of our funds. In going through our many investments, one factor that emerged was that we have three fundamental “flavors” of investments. We found that we actually use slightly different language when we discuss each of these investment flavors, because our perspective and expectations of the companies are distinctly different.