We are now approaching the one-year anniversary of the fund and are looking to hire our first Senior Associate to help us scale. The role of the Senior Associate will be to develop new investment strategies, identify promising investment opportunities, articulate and defend investment recommendations to the investment committee, and assist entrepreneurs as either a board member or observer. The Senior Associate will work directly with the Greycroft partners and represent the firm externally. The primary requirements are a minimum of two years of prior venture capital or private equity experience as well as insights into how technology is going to impact the retail sector over the next few decades.

The fund is targeting early stage opportunities (Seed, Series A) and has an average initial check size of $1 million per investment. We have a similar mandate to existing Greycroft early stage funds and are looking to invest behind world-class entrepreneurs in sectors that are big enough to support billion-dollar outcomes. While Albertsons is a strategic partner, the companies need to stand alone and build valuable independent businesses.

We have made seven investments in the fund so far and three early themes have emerged:

1. Next-Generation Retail. As we have watched the success of Amazon Prime, Shipt/Instacart, and StitchFix’s Styling Fees, we believe that membership models are the best business model in eCommerce. We also think that the next generation of marketplace businesses will be “intermediated”, with a marketplace that provides value-added services or products in exchange for a larger cut of the gross merchandise value. We are looking at new and emerging models on this theme that are in both the B2C and B2B space.

• Direct-to-Consumer Products. Our early emphasis in this category is around the pharmacy department, where products are daily use, high gross margin, and have a favorable value-to-weight ratio that lends itself to profitable eCommerce.

• Workforce Automation. We are looking at various B2B technologies that automate tasks for retailers, from reporting and compliance all the way through stock-outs and predicting product demand to reduce food waste.

If this sounds like an opportunity that you or anyone in your network would be interested in, please shoot us your (1) resume, (2) a one-page representative writing sample, and (3) any other social media accounts (Blog, Twiiter, etc.). We can be reached at seniorassociate@greycroft.com.

Many of my high school friends from Akron still live there, and they are understandably heartsick about LeBron leaving. They feel his decision was a personal referendum on their town. Akron can’t compare to the bright lights of Los Angeles they say. The town does not have enough to keep LeBron, and he had to move to get access to media and industry. And in some ways they are right. Plenty of people move to the coasts to find jobs that they couldn’t get at home. I did.

But after two decades away, I know a few things that LeBron will have to learn for himself. Cities are wonderful, but there is a certain homesickness that you feel when you are born in a small town and move to the big city. It sets in when you realize that city residents spend every waking hour within 10 feet of another human being. The minute you leave your house you find bumper-to-bumper traffic with red lights to the horizon. The weather report will say “today is a bad air quality day” and warn against going outside. And your kids grow up faster, exposed to sights and sounds and thoughts that you can’t shield them from as a parent. My daughter found a crack pipe in a NYC public park when she was two. You have to be the type of parent you always hated as a kid – the one who hovers over their kids and schedules every day – instead of just letting kids run outside.

LeBron said that his decision to move to Los Angeles was the best thing for his family. And that may be true for the James family. But there are a lot of wonderful things about growing up in Akron, or any small town, and now that I live in the city I worry that my kids won’t get to experience the childhood that I had.

For instance, I used to spend to my Fourth of July chasing lightning bugs in the park, with daylight that stretched on to after 9pm. Akron is at the end of the eastern time zone, so you have these incredible summer evenings that go on forever. My neighbors and I played outside and made up games – running through woods and yards. We had an acre of grass in our side yard that was large enough for home run derby, football games, and soccer. In our front yard we had a small stream for fishing, and in the backyard we had a wooded area where our dog would run off and inevitably find skunks. My mom would keep tomato sauce at the ready to take out the stink and we would spray him down with a hose.

When I was a kid I bought bike parts from Eddie’s Bike Shop and assembled a trick bike with pegs. I could ride almost anywhere on the local roads because there were so few cars, but we spent a lot of time racing down the neighbor’s steep gravel driveway, always on the verge of losing control.

Many of the things I miss about Akron are hard to describe unless you grow up there. Our house had an attic fan, and on cool nights my dad would open all the windows and turn it on, sucking all the hot air out of the house. I would fall asleep with my window open and wind blowing on my face, listening to the sound of crickets. And in Akron you don’t need to look up in the sky to see if it is going to rain, you can tell by looking at leaves on the trees. The air itself turns a shade of green.

I grew up in a simpler time, without cell phones and with fewer distractions. We knew almost everyone in our town, and they knew us. And family lived nearby, with grandparents on both sides just a short drive away. I went to public school with largely the same group of friends from Kindergarten through 12th grade. To this day most of my best friends came from that period in my life. And nobody can beat us in a game of Euchre.

I have since learned that you can’t recreate an experience like this for your kids. They have to grow up on their own. And as a parent you make career decisions by weighing a lot of factors. But my friends in Akron need not feel bad about LeBron leaving. We should wish LeBron well and hope he finds fulfillment in Los Angeles. However I am sure that there will be a moment over the next few years when he will be stuck in traffic on the 405, just like everyone else, wondering why he left home.

Being part of an index is critical for companies today. Many institutional and retail investors use passive strategies that automatically buy indices, which means that index companies get more demand for their shares and trade at higher multiples. This gives index companies a big advantage over their non-index peers.

Under the new rules from FTSE and S&P, joining the index now comes with downside. Single class companies have fewer protections against activists and momentum investors, who optimize for day-to-day movement in a company’s share price. Activists often force companies to use stock buybacks and other such nonsense to drive up the share price in the near term, making companies less competitive, or even bankrupt, in the long term.

Compare this to the interests of long term investors. If you are the CEO of a public company, you and your key employees have short windows of time around earnings announcements where you can sell stock. Otherwise you are prevented from selling because you have insider information. VC shareholders have lock up provisions that make them hold stock for at least 6 months after an IPO, often much longer. As a result insiders are all unified around structures that create the best long term performance, which is why so many tech companies have opted for dual class structures that keep management in control.

I believe there is a simple solution to this problem. Use a single class of stock, but the number of votes you get is equal to the length of time in years that you have held the shares.  The counter starts at zero on the day you acquire the stock. If you hold it for one year you get one vote, two years you get two votes per share, etc. All shares trade at the same price since there is only one class of stock, and holding periods can be easily tracked thanks to innovations like blockchain where each share can be registered.

If implemented, this change would empower long term investors over fly-by-night shareholders, and enable companies to fend off spurious attacks. It seems like a simple solution to the voting rights problem.

Many people don’t think of VC funds as a “business” – we get put in a different group called “investors” – but just like all the companies we invest in, Greycroft has a business plan, too. Every now and then we dust it off to see if it still makes sense. Usually this is in conjunction with the timing of a new fund, since investors want to know what we are investing in too.

I went back to our most recent plan, and here are the five criteria we use to identify Greycroft investments:

1.) Companies that are in the Internet and mobile sectors.
2.) Companies that have gained some level of commercial adoption (except for a small segment directed to seed investing).
3.) Companies that have reasonable initial pre-money valuations.
4.) Companies that are capital-efficient.
5.) Companies with experienced management teams.

You will notice, our plan is intentionally silent about sector focus.

In our early days, we used to say we would fund a pizza chain if it delivered pizzas over the Internet. That was funny in 2006. But now we have a half-dozen companies that actually deliver pizzas online (Foodsby, Shipt, Boxed, Thrive, Plated, and Munchery to name a few). These six companies will do about $700MM in revenue this year, so it turns out people like pizza.  Who knew?

We intentionally left our sector focus vague because the market we invest in is constantly changing. Nobody could have predicted that the largest VC acquirers in 2016 would be General Motors (Cruise Automation), WalMart (Jet.com), and Unilever (Dollar Shave Club). It is only a matter of time before the Internet invades every sector of the economy.

So, if you go back to our list above, the secret is that every dollar we make comes from point #5. When people ask me what I am investing in, the real answer is “Great entrepreneurs”. That comes off as short and glib, but it is the truth. One meeting might be with a company that sells software for power utilities and the next with a tele-health company, but as long as they are both run by great entrepreneurs I am interested.

You may wonder what a great entrepreneur looks like. This is hard to decipher unless someone has an extensive track record, so a couple years ago I made a two question test that I ask myself for each investment:

Question 1.) Is this entrepreneur someone I would work for?

Question 2.) Can I learn something from this entrepreneur?

The first question is the most succinct way I know to describe all the things I look for in a manager. It is also one of the reasons that many great VCs have been around for a long time, because evaluating talent is a tough skill to learn.

In terms of the second point, I have come to realize that the best entrepreneurs I work with teach me far more about business (and life) than I teach them. If you had to put all the good parts of being a venture capitalist on the table, learning from smart people is probably the best.

While our business is always changing, and the technology trends come and go, the one universal constant is the pursuit of talented people. And no matter how an investment turns out, I have never regretted investing in a great entrepreneur, because eventually he or she will be very successful.

Q.) “The stock market is down 10%, but VCs say my valuation is down by half! What’s up with that?”

No surprise, the public markets affect the venture capital market. But it doesn’t work the way most people think.

If a VC invests in your company at a valuation of $10 million, your company is not actually worth $10 million. The VC is buying an “out-of-the-money option”. In layman’s terms, she is making a bet that your business will become more valuable over time. The stock market impacts the price of this bet, but so does risk and time-to-exit.

Let’s put some context around this. Consider two companies. Company A is expected to go public this year at a $500 million valuation. Company B has the same potential $500 million outcome; however, it is going to take a few years and they only have enough cash to last 12 months.

One obvious issue is that Company B needs to be funded before they run out of money. Every financing adds risk and dilution (remember when Facebook had a down round?). That is one reason why Company B trades at a discount. But the employee side of the equation is just as important. Start-up employees are not indentured servants, so shareholders should expect a couple percentage points of dilution every year for new option grants. This adds up over time – over a ten year investment we normally see 30-50% dilution just from employee options.

In the past two years a lot of investors thought they bought shares of “Company A” and woke up to the reality that they actually own “Company B”. That is why Fidelity and others have marked down their private portfolios. Meanwhile there have been zero tech IPOs so far in 2016 and M&A in the first quarter was at a multi-year low. When you put all this together, you get a valuation drop well in excess of the day-to-day changes in public multiples.

Q.) “Is this going to change back soon?”

There is a chance that Uber could lift the market if they go public in 2016, just like Facebook did in 2012. Facebook’s momentum helped raise all valuations for a while, although in hindsight it was a temporary fix.

The underlying issue is that the US is “demographically-challenged”. Baby boomers are not only more numerous than any prior generation, but they are also the richest. Nearly half the capital in the US is held by people over age 65. This population is entering retirement and living off savings. They also survived two major recessions in the past 15 years, so they are searching for safe investments. Speculative investments are simply out of favor, and the valuations growth companies get in the public markets aren’t that attractive right now.

The upshot is that foreign investors, particularly from Asia, want access to high-growth US companies to diversify their portfolios. This new capital has the potential to help counteract some of our domestic issues. It is just one more reason why free trade is so important.

Q.) “As an entrepreneur, what can I do about this trend?”

If you raised capital at a very high price – and you know who you are – the best plan is to get profitable with your current cash. That buys as much time as you need to figure it out.

If you are in a situation where conserving cash is impractical, or impossible, have a conversation with your investors about what they expect you to accomplish and how your business will be valued in the future.

A good exercise is to compare how much cash you are spending each month with how much value you are creating. For instance, if your business is valued at a multiple of revenues, focus on the ratio of annual recurring revenue you add for every dollar you burn. Make sure there is enough leeway in this math so that you can raise capital at a reasonable step-up to your last round.

If you are just starting up and haven’t raised money yet, now is a good time to dream big. VC funds still have a lot of capital – if you look at Greycroft, we have raised $800 million since the firm’s inception (across all our funds) and about half that money is still uncalled. I expect the same is true for funds like First Round Capital, Andreesen Horowitz, Spark, Union Square Ventures, First Mark, General Catalyst, etc that all emerged around the same time we did.

By “dream big,” I’m talking about envisioning a company that has large-scale ambitions. Despite the apparent gloom-and-doom scenario painted above, there is always a market for great, visionary businesses. The start-ups we like to invest in have several things in common: Big barriers to entry; a top-notch management team; and a huge potential market. Create these, and you’re on your way to start-up success.

For more details on what we’re investing in now and why, stay tuned for my next post.

For one reason or another, many good companies have a hard time gaining traction with investors—their meetings fall flat, their messages go unanswered, or they get the “Let’s check back in a few quarters” routine.

Of course, some of this is simply out of an entrepreneur’s control. Public stock prices are down, the IPO market has cooled off, and M&A is as fickle as March weather in New York City. So the bar is high for entrepreneurs right now. That said, there are definitely common mistakes that people make in fundraising. I’ve come up with the following pitfalls—for fun I called them the “Seven Deadly Sins”—that seem to be, well, deadly, when it comes to attracting capital. Steer clear of these and you’ll stand above the rest.

1) Thinking too small.
Investors want companies that have the potential to be big. No, scratch that, investors want companies that can be huge.

Just five years ago, a company with $100 million in annual revenue could go public. Not anymore. Pundits criticize Etsy for going public too early. Meanwhile they have been around for 10 years and have $250 million of annual revenues.

We see far too many companies whose only exit prospect is a tuck-in acquisition because their respective market caps out at $100 million of annual revenue. If your plan does not have IPO-sized ambitions, even under a cascade-of-miracles scenario, VCs are most likely not interested in talking with you.

2) Putting lipstick on the pig.
VCs make pretty good lie detectors. All too often, entrepreneurs, for whatever reason, feel the need to exaggerate their story. Inevitably they sound like Donald Trump at an NRA rally. Ever hear an entrepreneur say, “We are very very well positioned and nobody can compete with us”? Bottom line: partner meetings are not a good time to use hyperbole. If you sound like a certain orange-faced politician you won’t get far.

3) Lacking a “dream team.”
There is a place for coddling and on-the-job-training, but it’s not the pitch meeting. We want you to inspire confidence that you will make the right decisions, particularly when we aren’t looking. Expertise is good, but even better is a track record of achievement. When pressed, almost all VCs say that the management team is more important than the business idea.

4) Bringing the clown car to the meeting.
Just don’t do it. If our elevator doors open up, bursting forth with you, your chairman, your CFO, your banker, your admin, your hairstylist, etc.. I already know it will be a bad meeting. Bring, at most, three people. Even better, come alone. Or with your CFO if you want to go through numbers. While we’re on the topic, the CEO should do most, if not all, of the talking. Which brings us to point #5…

5) Don’t have “dad” do all the talking.
If your chairman or banker leads the meeting, that is like bringing dad to school to give your presentation. In our experience, effective leaders don’t let other people talk over them. If that turns out to be the case in our meeting, you will get a pass from us.

6) Making life too complicated.
Mark Twain once quipped, “I’m sorry I sent you a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one.” Take the time to write a short presentation. No more than 20 slides. No more than 30 minutes of talking. Practice until you get there. And if you need to cut, get rid of the market slides. VCs read thousands of business plans a year, so you don’t have to tell me your market is big. The sole exception is a single, counter-intuitive statistic that blows your mind – for instance did you know that Costco swiped more American Express cards in 2014 than all of Europe?

7) Failing to do your homework.
Good entrepreneurs research VCs before the meeting: How big is the fund? Who else did she invest in? Who is coming to the meeting? What contacts do we have in common? We are on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and your ability to mine that data is an IQ test.

One easy tip: the size of a firm’s fund dictates the size of the check they write. (Hint: Big funds = big checks, small funds… you get the point.) If you’re looking for $25 million, target people with growth funds. If you want $1-5 million, look at the Series A league tables on Mattermark. They keep good statistics even if they occasionally mess up alphabetical order.

Last, but certainly not least, keep in mind that VCs talk. Not only do we talk about March Madness, the sexcapades of famous VCs, and guest appearances on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but we also talk about companies we’ve met with. When we’re excited about a new company you can bet the word will get out. But guess what? If we’re less than impressed, that eventually gets out, too.

At DLJ I was a summer analyst, the low man on the totem pole. I wasn’t qualified to do much, and my boss (herself a “full time” analyst) reminded me of that on a daily basis. For the first time in my young adult life I had no control over my own schedule. Time outside the office was spent in constant anxiety about being called back in, and on more than one occasion I left work just to come back an hour later because everyone I knew was still at their desk. In exchange for that stress I learned a lot about finance, accounting, and PowerPoint. And I got free dinner from every restaurant within a 20 block radius of 277 Park Ave.

That summer I posed a thought experiment to my new friends, “How much would it cost for someone to buy one year of your life?” To use a Star Wars analogy, during that period you would be “frozen in carbonite” – you wouldn’t meet anyone, you wouldn’t learn anything, but you would age and make money. To us, investment banking was carbonite.

I remember the numbers my friends threw out – a million bucks for a year, maybe two million. We didn’t consider taxes.

How naive I was at 21! Nobody on their death bed wishes for more money and less time, and that reality struck me when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 29. I made a full recovery, but I still keep all the hospital bands in a bedside drawer as a reminder. I also didn’t know that I would someday have a daughter whose face would radiate pure joy the minute I walk in the door, making me constantly wish for more time. I also didn’t know how valuable my skills would be, since my resume at that point consisted of landscaping and selling cotton candy at Jacob’s Field.

In hindsight, I would have sold my life much too cheaply. As would all of my friends.

This is not just about 21 year old interns though. Many professionals compartmentalize their lives – they work for money and find little joy in it. Life shouldn’t be that way.

You may not know that VCs also play the role of psychologist and career counselor. Hundreds of people reach out to me every year looking for advice: some are starting a company, others want a career change, and others want a first job (if you happen to want a job we surface opportunities on our website here). Outside of that, I generally give the following advice:

1.) There are only four things that a job can offer: compensation, prestige, education, and network. Many high achievers pursue compensation and prestige and then are surprised to find themselves unhappy.

2.) If you are just starting your career, look for mentorship and a chance to learn new skills. Whether or not you realize it, this is investing in yourself. A good boss should know that you want her job – it is her role to borrow you for a few years, teach you everything she knows, and then send you back on your way. When you interview, look for that person.

3.) If you are an experienced executive considering a start-up, treat your decision like an investment. Understand the company’s valuation, because you will be compensated based on how much it increases. Make sure you believe in management. If a CEO tells you it will be two years until exit, assume six. Look at the company’s growth and figure out if it is sustainable. Most importantly, base your decision on the employees and not the investors. You will be working with the employees every day and may never see the investors again.

4.) Lastly, if you are looking to start a company, meet with as many people as you can to pollinate the idea. There are at least four or five people with the exact same idea as you right now – simultaneous invention works that way – and early execution is about gathering the largest following. If you can’t recruit good people then team up with someone who can. Repeat entrepreneurs are successful because they already have a team.

First, an entrepreneur would demonstrate that a business “worked” in a single market. And by “worked” I mean that the price, combined with consumer purchase behavior, was adequate to cover the cost of providing the service on an ongoing basis. Only then would the company expand into additional markets. This was a slow and steady process of raising capital, deploying capital, and then raising capital again. It took FedEx a decade to expand across the US. Now 45 years later the company is a global shipping powerhouse worth over $40BN.

But over the past few years this model changed. Perhaps it was due to competition from “cloners” who sprung up to copy successful businesses. Or perhaps it was due to the low interest rate environment, which has made investors less risk adverse. Either way, every idea is now the next Uber. And billions of dollars are invested into businesses before anyone knows if they really work.

To be fair, some of this might be simple decision bias. There are many businesses that work in the microcosm of San Francisco but don’t work in the rest of the world. Like Google Glass for instance. No traditional CPG company would pick San Francisco as a test market, unless it was for a computer programmer drink that tasted like pancake batter cut with formaldehyde. Yet many venture-backed products and services begin life in San Francisco. A cautious approach for any company would be to raise $5MM to test a few markets before going big, but many companies today raise $50MM or $100MM and go national in one fell swoop. Do not pass go, do not collect a traditional Series A.

While I am on the topic of going big, it is probably worth taking a closer look at Uber. To the best of my knowledge, Uber is not yet profitable in any market. I understand that Uber could be profitable if they turned off marketing, but I don’t know what that means in the context of a company that will never turn off marketing.

When I step back and look objectively at Uber I see evidence that the company may not have all the math figured out just yet. For instance, Uber recently increased the percentage it takes from drivers by 25%. That doesn’t fit the depiction of a supply-constrained marketplace awash in cash. The company’s CEO has also said that driverless cars will soon take costs out of the system, which could be a literal deux ex machina. FedEx was never dependent on future innovation to make the math work.

And don’t get me wrong – I love the Uber service. Greycroft spends tens of thousands of dollars each year on Uber because it is often cheaper than taxis. I hope it stays that way. However our Uber expense pales in comparison to the amount we spend each year on airfare, yet Uber is almost as valuable as all the US airlines combined.

The challenge with on-demand services is that, at the end of the day, they are still services. Someone has to show up to pick up your on-demand laundry, mow your on-demand lawn, paint your on-demand house, and cut your on-demand hair. The Internet is really good with businesses that have high fixed costs and low variable costs, because these businesses benefit from the scale that occurs online. However I am a little skeptical about services that have low gross margins, or in some cases negative gross margins. I have yet to see a magic panacea to solve for that.

Beyond the Cold War backdrop, what made this match so extraordinary was the element of surprise.  Fisher practiced for years and years against himself, playing both sides of the chess board, developing strategies in his mind.  He didn’t test his tactics in other tournaments because that would have tipped his hand, so he had to calculate every possible counterattack by himself before risking his plan on the world stage.

And that is why Game 6 will never be replicated.  For the last 10 years, computers have regularly defeated the best humans in chess.  Grandmasters spend most of their time now in front of a computer, running simulations, testing theories, and devoting hours to rote memorization.  Humans can’t see 40 moves ahead, but computers can.  And when you look that far ahead the game of chess becomes a deterministic puzzle.

Some say that the number of potential moves in a game of chess is greater than the number of atoms in the galaxy.  It is something like 10 to the 50th power – that is roughly a million, billion, billion, billion, billion, billions.  It is a number so large that it might as well be infinite.  But computers don’t need to test *every* move to figure out how to win. They just solve for the *best* move.

If a computer can reduce the near infinite game of chess down to one move, isn’t it only a matter of time before almost everything can be reduced down to the best move?

Take for example finding a soul mate.

In 2010, 17% of couples who married met on an online dating site.  Today that number is 33%.  At the current growth rate almost every married couple will have met online in 20 years.  And to the extent married couples have kids, well then, in a strange way computers are breeding humans.

What about picking a home to buy?  Or whether you should cook chicken for dinner?  These feel like choices, but perhaps the best outcomes are knowable if you have the right inputs.

Or maybe all the inputs aren’t necessary, and all you need is to believe that computers are right.

For instance, whenever my wife and I drive we always have a debate about whether to use Google or take my “shortcut”. It is a quick debate and Google always wins.  There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that every outcome was examined and the computer picked the best.  And since it is impossible to know the alternative, Google’s best outcome becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I am a little troubled that what makes us smarter also makes us predictable.  Assuming we rely on a computer to make choices for us, a faster computer could arguably figure out what we are going to do before we do it.  That faster computer would seem omnipotent and able to predict the future.  This is already happening on Wall Street, as computers trade stocks against other computers, trying to outwit one another.

My hope is that all this technology will make us better humans.  But perhaps we will regret losing the magic of making mistakes, and wish for a simpler time when we got stuck in traffic, married our high school sweetheart, and accidentally bought a house downwind from the sewage treatment plant.  Of course, this assumes serendipity existed in the first place.

Fast forward to today, and JW Player (as the company is now called) streams about 5% of all the video on the Internet. They continue to provide a free product too, and that version is now used by over 2.5 million publishers.

I mention this because JW Player is a microcosm of what is happening across the venture landscape. In the past few years the entire software stack has been automated – marketing, sales, support, billing, implementation, customer service, etc.  Automation tools, and there are hundreds of them, allow companies to acquire new customers faster than ever before and at a fraction of the cost. This has driven down pricing in some categories to as little as 1/10th what you would have paid just a few years ago for a similar software product. It is one more example of technology’s “Great Deflation.”

As you would expect, the Great Deflation is hugely disruptive. For starters, new entrants regularly undercut incumbents on price, making it harder than ever to build a lasting business. Price competition not only hurts customer acquisition but it also hurts renewals – it is impossible to maintain pricing if an identical product is 90% less. The Great Deflation is also creating downward pressure on sales salaries. The direct-sales model with highly paid salesmen flying around the country for face-to-face meetings is dying out. The new breed of salesman (or saleswoman) makes $40K per year in base salary and never leaves the office.

On the flip side we have seen fast growth in the small-to-midsize customer segment, as well as in the international software markets. These markets are enormous with millions of potential customers, and many of them are adopting cloud software for the first time.  The best part is that you can set up shop in NYC and sell products around the world using multi-currency checkout and automated, multi-lingual support.

What I find most interesting is that we have begun to see software companies using their scale to create first party data, with the long term goal of pivoting entirely away from selling software and into selling syndicated data and insights.  I think this is the ultimate end-point for many software companies.  It is much more defensible to have a unique dataset than a unique UI or feature set.  If a company plays this right they can develop network effects in a business that previously had none.

With that background, I have a feeling that the next five or ten years will be remembered as the golden age for US-based software companies.  This may sound grandiose, but here are some facts.  On an inflation-adjusted basis, it took Oracle ten years to reach its first $50MM in revenue.  It took Microsoft eight years.  It took Buddy Media five.  It took Zenefits three.  How long will it be before we see a software company launch and end its first year at a $50MM run rate?