Venture capital firms all have different practices on how they make decisions for new investment decisions.  The number of investors in the firm, its style & approach, and the specific criteria for new investments yields vastly different processes (or sometimes lack thereof).  My partner Rob has previously blogged about our framework on how we make decisions at NextView, as […]

This week’s Friday Fun-ism goes hand-in-hand with a previous, “It moves slow until it moves fast.”  The venture fundraising process for founders has a certain rhythm to it, and so a lot can be read into the timing and pacing of the conversations.  How quickly & intensely the communications & responses are moving between parties […]

Slack dropped their S-1 a couple weeks ago. Even before that, we all knew that it was among the most rapidly growing SaaS companies in recent years and a product used (and loved) by millions of people. But now we have a chance to really dig in and understand Slack’s business a bit better. I […]

A number of blog posts recently have mentioned this, but we seem to be experiencing a rise in repeat founders starting new businesses and raising seed capital. We’re also seeing a wave of folks who were not founders, but were star players among the first 25 folks at a unicorn company also starting new companies. […]

We are going to try to establish a fun new blog series every Friday called “Friday Fun-isms”. These are a collection of phrases and sayings that we often say internally at NextView or with the founders we work with. These posts aren’t meant to be super detailed, but a bit of a peak into our […]

Throughout human history, our working environments have gone through several huge shifts. From hunters and gatherers to farmers and traders, from farmers to industry factory workers, and from factory workers to the modern day office employee. Today, we are starting to see the next big shift in our type of work environments. With the click […]

When we talk internally about our themes at NextView, the focus is less on areas or sectors, but more about shifts in human behavior and preferences. We share some of the categories we are interested in on our website, but the themes we pursue are based on the way end-user behavior is changing as these […]

2019 is off to an exciting start for IPOs of VC-backed startups. In just the last month or so we’ve seen Lyft go public (my analysis of the company’s S-1 here) and more recently, Zoom and Pinterest. Zoom is a B2B company Pinterest and Lyft are obviously B2C companies. All three have different business models… […]

It is the one message-space on your phone that you always pay attention to: SMS text messages. Not just “messaging” broadly, as there are numerous apps where people send and receive communications & messages.  Couple that noise with the flurry of AI/messaging startups from a few years back (set off by Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition), in […]

The last thing you want to do is go through all the time and energy of finding and hiring a new employee only to find out, after you’ve extended the offer, that they’re not a good fit. It happens all of the time. People who look great on paper, and can charm in interviews, may […]