metarand

Paul Graham: Venture Capital – A Primitive, Multi-Celled Sea Creature

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has written an excellent Fundraising Survival Guide that I encourage all entrepreneurs, venture guys and anyone who has any form of interest in the art of the start (as Guy Kawasaki calls it) to read.

It is a long essay. Stick with it.

[Picture courtesy of CompoundEye]

App Stats Get More Useful On Facebook

Facebook, the Palo Alto-based social network, has released a new suite of Insights into application usage.

Rodney Rumford sums up why this is important for app developers:

For the first time i really feel like i have insights in to users behaviors and how a specific app compares to the average app on facebook across multiple criteria and data sets.

This will ultimately help app owners gain insights into how people use thier applications and areas where they can tune the application. While the insights are great; it merely means there is more data to sift through and analyze. This is a good thing if your mission is to align with the new focus of facebook on useful versus viral apps.

Pingg Party Hots Up With Twitter

New York-based invitation creation and management site, pingg, has expanded its invitation distribution platform to now include Twitter.

Pingg has developed what they call surroundSend technology, which allows a party host to send their custom invitations via email, SMS, print (they will print, stamp and mail for you), the web, social networks and Twitter.

I’m looking forward to giving this service a whirl in Palo Alto soon!

How Much Do You Rely On Google? Web Services Redundancy Is A Big Issue

Reading this post from Steven Hodson I am forced to wonder whether putting all my email eggs into Google’s basket is a good idea.

I use gmail almost exclusively these days. I even route my corporate email through Google’s mail solution.

He makes a good point regarding customer service, but as a user, we should also seriously consider some form of redundancy when it comes to the web services we rely on. I don’t have the answer here, but believe this is a very serious issue.

VentureWrap: Friendster, SpaceX Raise $20M Funding

One of the earlier social networking pioneers, Friendster, has continued its Asian-led comeback with a $20 million infusion from IDG Ventures and previous investors [Benchmark, DAG Ventures, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins].

In addition to the cash Friendster has secured Richard Kimber, formerly Google’s South Asian Regional MD, as CEO.

Also raising $20 million is SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led space transporteer. The round was provided by Founders Fund. Musk is a former South African and founder of Paypal and Tesla. The recent test of their Falcon 1 rocket hit a snag with stage separation lock. This led to the craft not achieving orbit. Elon has unequivocally stated that they are still on track – the message from this funding round backs him up.

Founders Fund are having a busy time of it lately. One of their other portfolio companies, Facebook, is apparently contemplating empowering staff to sell off a portion of their vested stock. This accords with the philisophy of letting founders cash out along the journey, which has been a key Founders Fund differentiator – extending it to all employees is an interesting move.

Incidentally LinkedIn is also reportedly [via VentureBeat] contemplating this route.

Union Square: Open Venture Capital

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, a New York venture firm, has done a great job opening up the financial drivers for VC firms. For other venture guys his comments may be nothing new, but for most entrepreneurs they represent an excellent and somewhat rare insight into the VC black box.

Why is this important? Entrepreneurs can greatly improve their prospects of getting venture funding and of a good relationship with their VC partners post funding by taking the time to understand what motivates a VC.

Read Fred’s posts on the venture model behind Union Square here and here.