Vietnam’s mobile game market is strong, but can it go beyond games? On my iPhone, my screen is full of apps. It includes Duolingo for learning German, Lift for keeping up with my good habits, Evernote for taking notes, Wunderlist for my to-do list, Pocket for all of my reading needs, and Allthecooks for new cooking recipes. My list goes on and on. From apps like Uber, which have full-fledged services behind them, to native apps for websites like Reddit, my personal phone runs the gamut of apps. In fact, I’ve only got one game on my phone, and it’s just because I’m sampling a new Vietnamese title. But when you jump over to the Vietnamese App Store, as Vuong Quang Khai from VNG explained to me recently, it’s all games (with a few entertainment apps splattered in between).
In other words, Vietnamese users are just not using mobile utilities. Last week, we reported that Vietnam’s smartphone market is edging towards 33 million users in 2014. The problem arises when you have a massive community of mobile developers that are almost totally focused on games. Psychological Strategies Every Leader Should Use. TOP CROWDFUNDING ARTICLES.
In Vietnam. Freemium monetization. I told you so. The weekly Boidinarian. Tech Leaders Tell Interns What They Wish They Knew At Age 20. Hundreds of Bay Area interns lined up on Tuesday to hear some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley share what they wished they knew when they were 20 at a recruiting event called Internapalooza. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, early PayPal and Airbnb investor Keith Rabois, Indiegogo co-founder Danae Ringelmann, Yelp VP of Engineering Michael Stoppelman and Re/code founder Kara Swisher were among the 11 speakers whose advice ranged from whether or not you should drop out of school to launch a startup to how to network.
The event was organized by Cory Levy, who at 19 co-founded One, a mobile app that connects you to others with similar interests. Levchin shared a story about a PayPal intern who helped develop an anti-theft system called IGOR that saved the company when they were about to go under because they were losing millions of dollars due to high rates of credit card fraud. Pratiques d'entrepreneur. Peter thiel course. La France veut accélérer l’essor du « crowdfunding » A Dozen Things I’ve Learned From Marc Andreessen. Marc Andreessen is able to explain himself so well that I should have less commentary to add to the quotations in this post than usual.
But where is the fun in that? My primary task with this blog post has been assembling the quotations and placing them in an order which flows well, since understanding the earlier topics helps the reader understand ideas which come later in the list. Each set of quotations is a mash up from sources like the links identified in the notes at the bottom of this post.
My transcription of video interviews may not be perfect and the text is sometimes edited to reflect the brevity required in a blog format. 1/ “The key characteristic of venture capital is that returns are a power-law distribution. So, the basic math component is that there are about 4,000 startups a year that are founded in the technology industry which would like to raise venture capital and we can invest in about 20.” Why power laws? 12/ “Software is eating the world.” Like this: Essays. 10 Actions Vietnamese People Need To Take To Save Their Startup Scene Today. The Vietnamese startup community is in a crisis. New companies are struggling to scale, there’s a lack of mentors, no money for new startups, not enough investors, not enough early adopters, drama abounds, and the economy is tanking. At least, that’s what most startup people in Vietnam are chattering about these days.
But that kind of talk isn’t helping. In fact, it’s generally just adolescent startup whining. Apple and Microsoft were both founded during a recession, and more than half of the Fortune 500 companies were founded during a recession. So, get over it. We should be listening to Bruce Lee’s advice: “To hell with circumstances, I create opportunities”. The discussions in Vietnam’s startup scene need to shift away from all the whining and into a proactive discussion of what we can do to foster the community.
I’ve distilled a list of 10 things that every person in Vietnam’s startup scene needs to be thinking about and definitely start doing today. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A DOZEN THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS. Burn Rates: How Much? In the comments to last week's Burn Rate post, I was asked to share some burn rates from our portfolio. I can't do that. But an alternative suggestion was to write a post suggesting some reasonable burn rates at different stages. I can do that and so that's the topic of today's post.
The following applies to software based businesses, and most particularly web and mobile software businesses. It does not apply to hardware, life sciences, and energy startups. It is also focused on startups in the US. It costs less to employ teams in many other parts of the world. Building Product Stage – I would strongly recommend keeping the monthly burn below $50k per month at this stage. Building Usage Stage – I would recommend keeping the monthly burn below $100k per month at this stage. Building The Business Stage – This is when you've determined that your product market fit has been obtained and you now want to build a business around the product or service. One final caveat – there are outliers. Return and Ridicule. I am going down to Princeton today to talk to Ed Zschau's class on entrepreneurship today. Ed asked me what I wanted to talk about. I told him "return and ridicule". I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years.
We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. The same logic applies to starting companies. This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Chris Dixon has a great post about hobbyists. So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. Better to invest in laughing stocks. Every Company Is Up For Disruption, So Keep Your Products Simple. Editor’s note: Victor Belfor is the vice president of business development at Influitive and the former vice president of business development at RingCentral. He recently started angel investing and mentoring at 500 startups. Follow him on Twitter @vbelfor. A friend of mine told me recently that he closed a $240,000 account.
A competitor (let’s call it BigCo) was bidding for the business. SmallCo’s product doesn’t have a tenth of BigCo’s features. As products mature, companies continue to compete in heated battles with their competitors by adding more features and more functionality. As a result, what often happens is some small company comes out with a product that’s just good enough and just cheap enough for the lowest tier of customers and BigCos start losing business. There are hundreds of examples. The process of Low End Disruption is beautifully described in Clayton Christensen’s series of books: The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution and The Innovator’s DNA.