The Ledger
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Tech Incumbents Are the Most Nimble in History, Says Feng
“They're not afraid to directly compete with companies, copy companies, do whatever it takes because they have grown up in this next wave of innovation, and they are the savviest Strongest, most nimble, fast-moving group of incumbents that I think the world has…”
Venture Timing Is Wrong for VR and Autonomous Vehicles
“And I think for a lot of those big categories, the timing is likely not now in terms of making smart investments that deliver meaningful returns or LPs.”
Consumer Tech Startups Are Binary; Entry Valuation Does Not Matter
“Consumer companies are binary. They work or they don't work. And when they work, it just really doesn't matter what your entry price is.”
Snapchat Was the Last Breakout Consumer Tech Company, Says Feng
“The last breakout iconic consumer company that's proven today is Snapchat, and that launched in 2011, so it's been almost six years since we had that level of success on the consumer side”
Autonomous Tech Is Overhyped, Climate Tech Is Underhyped
“Most hyped, I would say autonomous. Autonomous everything. We've got autonomous chairs, we have autonomous water bottles, everything is autonomous these days. Under-hyped, climate change. I wish that we would pay more attention to the great things coming on ar…”
John Doerr Answered Flipboard Support Emails During Launch Crash
“I remember at Flipboard, for example, when the service first launched, The load was so tremendous that it actually took down the back end for a few weeks, and our board member John Doerr came by and actually answered customer support emails all night. He even …”
Consumer Distribution Channels Are Now Clogged and Pay-to-Play
“If you're social companies, you could grow off the backs of Facebook distribution and Twitter distribution, but all of those channels are now clogged down. They're now incredibly optimized and they're largely pay to play. So it's very difficult for a startup t…”
Solving Low-Hanging Mobile Problems Is No Longer Enough
“Most of those low hanging problems, they are solved. You're not walking around every day with a very broken experience. So the bar to actually create something that can provide meaningful value that consumers really appreciate and that's memorable and that's s…”
OfferUp Matches Instagram With 22-Minute Daily User Engagement
“The startup offer up the mobile Craigslist company up in Seattle. They get 22 minute average daily session times. 22 minutes. That's as much as A news app. That's as much as Instagram. That's as much as a media service.”
Ad-Supported Business Models Are Unsuitable for Early-Stage Startups
“Advertising just takes an immense amount of scale, and you get incredibly low ARPUs because It just requires hundreds of millions of users to actually build a meaningful ad business these days. So that's really hard for a startup to have to rely on that as the…”
Kleiner Perkins Builds Internal Tech Tools to Detect Venture Signal
“Here at Kleiner, we have a bunch of interesting tools that help us look for early signal in companies, look for inflection points, look for interesting derivative movements on the app store charts, look for signals in transaction data.”
Holler Browsing and Daily Engagement Rival Social Media Apps
“First is the percentage of orders that came from browse, not search. It was the vast majority. And that's amazing. It's people not going through with an intent to buy one item like you see on Amazon, but opening up the service just to discover what is going on…”