Category archives: News
Welcoming @Occipital!
Today, I am pleased to welcome Occipital in to the K9 Ventures portfolio. The company announced today that it is raising $7M in a Series A led by the Foundry Group.
Read moreCongratulations @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 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 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 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 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 […]
Read moreTips for TechCrunch50 DemoPit companies
Yesterday, while attending TechCrunch50, I tweeted some tips for the companies presenting at the conference and those participating in the demo pit. By popular demand, I’m aggregating these tweets in a blog post:
Read moreIncorporate ‘yesterday’
Ever since I found the blog Startup Company Lawyer, I’ve had a high regard for its author, Yokum Taku, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Yokum’s posts are always chock-full-of-good-information. His most recent post was on the topic of When do I need to incorporate a company? I’ve spent some time thinking about this before, and, in […]
Read moreInsane Perseverance in the Face of Complete Resistance
It was 2:00 AM and I was still sitting in ‘The Cave’ — the name we affectionately gave to the cubicles in the bowels of Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon. It was called ‘The Cave’ because it’s all under ground, with no natural light portals whatsoever. The cave was kinda like Vegas — once […]
Read moreRajeev Motwani: A pillar of Stanford CS & Silicon Valley
I was in complete disbelief when I read the first tweet yesterday evening that Stanford Computer Science professor Rajeev Motwani had passed away. I was still incredulous and hoping that it was untrue until the sad news was verified in a email sent to the department. Even now as I write this with Rajeev’s picture on my screen, it’s still hard […]
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