Latest posts
Congratulations @BackType!
I’m pleased to announce that K9 Ventures’ portfolio company BackType (@BackType) has been acquired by Twitter. Huge congratulations to the founding team of Christopher Golda (@golda) and Michael Montano (@michaelmontano)!
Read morecard.io: Like Square, but without the square
card.io lets any phone with a camera now become a credit card scanner! Or as I like to say: it’s Like Square, but without the square.
Read moreThe Making of Lytro
The impact of Ren’s technology is so fundamental that, if successful, it will completely change an entire market. Photography and imaging will never ever be the same again. What used to be “Ren’s Camera” is now the Lytro camera. Congratulations to Ren, and to the entire Lytro team. It’s been a phenomenal journey so far, and we’re just getting started.
Read moreIdeas Matter
The idea is the seed. It is the kernel that is the start of something new.
Ideas are powerful because they invade the mind. Once you are introduced to an idea, you cannot get it out of your head.
Ideas are what provide that little twist of ingenuity that can make or break a company.
Sometimes ideas are not revolutionary, but they get the ball rolling and without them, that wouldn’t happened. The best ideas are often simple ones. Maybe that is what a revolutionary idea is — an idea so simple that it sparks a revolution.
Startups: Just say NO to outsourcing, contracting, and distributed teams
If you are a tech startup, where the technology is your business and not just supporting your business, then you shouldn’t be relying on any outsourcing, contracting, or distributed teams for developing your core product. I believe that the chance of success of a team is an order of magnitude higher when the entire team is local, in one room and working closely with each other. Bottom line: “When you stick a couple of smart people in a room together good things happen”
Read moreInvestor Nomenclature and the Venture Spiral
In the venture industry, the only way for a venture fund to grow, is to move upstream and start managing a bigger pot of money. It is the natural evolution of the venture business and funds. This is what has happened with a lot of the institutional funds over the past decade. This gradual upstream movement in the venture industry, is what I refer to as the Venture Spiral.
The angels of today, will become the super angels of tomorrow. The super angels of today will be the uVCs of tomorrow, and the uVCs of today, will become the early stage venture capitalists. The institutional venture funds will morph into what we used to call growth funds.
Read moreThe investment that didn’t happen
The story of Modista.com — a young startup that was forced to shutdown before it even really got going because of a patent infringement lawsuit by Like.com.
Read moreOur latest investment: iWalk
K9 Ventures is pleased to welcome to its kennel, our latest portfolio company, iWalk, Inc. iWalk is founded by industry veterans Caesar Shepherd and Sarah Husky, both of who have 7x the experience in the space compared to any other hot dog. Mr. Shepherd complete his PhD from a top school in Munich, Germany. Ms. Husky recently moved to the Bay Area from Juneau, Alaska, from where she could see Siberia. She is fluent in Russian.
Read moreThoughts on Convertible Notes
There has been a lot of noise in the Valley lately about how most seed stage deals are now being done as convertible notes. In fact, PG from Y Combinator has proclaimed that that it is how things will be going forward. That might well be so, but I for one am not a fan of convertible notes. I may be well be […]
Read moreCongrats Team CardMunch!
CardMunch announced today that it has been acquired by LinkedIn! The CardMunch acquisition marks the debut exit for K9 Ventures. A huge congratulations to the team: Bowei Gai, Sid Viswanathan, and Sudeep Yegnashankaran for having built an outstanding product, service, and team, that attracted the attention of the world’s largest professional network. (Disclosure: I am a co-founder of CardMunch. K9 Ventures invested in […]
Read moreInvestment Criteria
Someone on Quora asked me a question regarding my investment criteria for K9. I figured it would be good to cross post the response here as well. I use the following necessary, but not sufficient filters to qualify the startups I look at for investing through K9 Ventures: 1) Technical Founders: Founders with the ability to build their own product and […]
Read moreRevenue Development
In 1996, when I started my first company, SneakerLabs, Inc., we began by building chat servers. This was when the state of the art was click-to-refresh HTML form-based chats. SneakerLabs’ first product was a Java-based chat server and client. It worked like a charm since we could create a more interactive experience on the Web. […]
Read moreTwitter Best Practices for Startups
Twitter has become part of almost every startups marketing and engagement strategy. It’s become a channel. Since some of my portfolio companies (@crowdflower, @twilio, @dnanexus, @highlightcam, and most recently @cardmunch) have been using Twitter more, I’ve been thinking about how startups should use their Twitter accounts. Here is what I think startups should and shouldn’t do […]
Read moreCardMunch: Business Cards Solved
CardMunch is a mobile business card transcription service that allows a user to scan a business card using just their mobile phone. The service delivers the highest possible accuracy of the business card transcription by using a human workforce to transcribe and verify the information on the card. The transcribed information is returned to the mobile phone as a contact.
Read moreFriends of K9 Event
Here are some pictures from the Friends of K9 event on Monday, June 21st at the Computer History Museum. Thanks to everyone for coming and making it a very special and memorable launch for K9 Ventures. A very special thanks to Ron Yeh for volunteering the role of ‘K9 Photographer’ for the event. Really appreciate […]
Read more#20tweets (updated)
Here are the slides from a talk I gave at a Carnegie Mellon Alumni event in the Bay Area today. #20tweets is tweet-sized advice for founders of tech startups. In the presentation I went into more detail and provided some rationale/anecdotes behind these tweets. For now, here are just the tweets: #20tweets by @manukumar View […]
Read moreAnnouncing K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed stage fund
I’m pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed-stage fund. K9 Ventures, L.P. is a $6.25M fund that is designed to do concept and seed-stage investments in technology companies. The fund will be deployed over a period of 3-4 years, with initial investment in the range of $100K – $250K, while […]
Read moreThe truth about the Startup Visa
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry) recently authored an article that ran on Business Insider. The article was sensationally titled ‘The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped‘ and in it Pascal describes his reservations about the Startup Visa proposal. I don’t know Pascal, but I do hope that he, and others, will read and consider this response to his article. One of […]
Read moreStanford Roundtable discussion on US Immigration Policy #startupvisa
On Saturday, October 24th, Stanford University hosted the Stanford Roundtable. The renowned interviewer Charlie Rose moderated a discussion titled: ‘The Road Back: From Economic Meltdown to Renewal’. The archived webcast video is available on iTunes and on YouTube. At one point in the discussion Charlie Rose asked about the education system. President Hennessey remarked that: “We depend at the graduate level […]
Read moreMy story and support for the Founders Visa
In the past few days there has been a lot of discussion on the topic of a Founders Visa. The credit for starting this fire goes to Paul Graham from Y Combinator, who wrote a great essay titled The Founders Visa in April 2009. Brad Feld (Brad is an advisor to K9) from the Foundry Group was instrumental in keeping the flame alive by […]
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