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Silicon Valley Has A New Bully

May 2, 2013
Startups, Technology
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If you spend much time in Silicon Valley you’d have to go pretty far out of your way to avoid the constant tech-love-fest that is taking place here.  After all, there is A LOT of hype and nonsense attracting A LOT of money (see Hardly Working Startup Guys clip below for a fairly accurate portrayal or just spend 20 minutes reading the headlines at TechCrunch).

Every now and then it’s good to take a step back, catch your breath, and just admire the mania.  One blog does this exceptionally well: Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley.  

JC,SV is a well written and hilariously offensive reprieve from the non-stop, disrupt-the-world-and-get-rich-quick-while-pretending-to-not-take-yourself-too-seriously mantra that pervades the valley.  Cutting larger than life companies / entrepreneurs / investors down to size is what this blog does and it does it well. It seems the bully has finally arrived in the land where the nerds get the money and the girls.

To be fair the Valley and tech-scene is not all bad – despite all the BS and hype, it is an amazing hotbed of innovation and the world is better off for it.  So there.

*Postscript: (later that day…)

While the YouTube video embedded above is a scripted joke, the one below is not.  These guys recently raised $15M from Andreessen Horowitz.  The host’s hairdo is the icing on the cake.  It all just goes to show that the tech bubble spans well beyond Silicon Valley.  I hope JC,SV blogs about them.

Disconnect.me

April 19, 2013
Technology
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Seems like a very cool service.  I added it to my Chrome browser and I’ve been amazed to see how many sites are tracking me.  The Wall Street Journal appears to be the biggest culprit thus far.  Shame on you Rupert, I pay for access!

Disconnect.me

Mining the Series A Crunch

April 10, 2013
Business, Finance, Investing, Technology
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The Series A Crunch is a hot topic in Silicon Valley.  The overall premise is that the recent boom in early stage seed investments will result in a lot of dead or dying companies that don’t live to see a Series A investment.  Some of these companies may be valuable, whether its their team, IP, or something else.

Earlier this month a list of these companies was available for purchase for $5,000.  The fine folks over at TechCrunch / CrunchBase have put together their own list of nearly 1,300 companies available for free here.

Below is their approach / criteria for identifying these companies.  This is truly akin to panning for gold.

mining_series_a_crunch

  • Start with US companies that closed a seed (or angel) round on or after Jan 1, 2011
  • Exclude companies that have received follow on funding
  • Exclude companies that were acquired
  • Exclude companies without news or employee updates in last 6 months
  • Exclude companies known to have closed
  • Look at remaining companies where it’s been ~13 months since their last funding

Source: CruncBase blog

Green Acres Is The Place To Be

March 20, 2013
Business, Economics, Investing, Technology
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For those of you who don’t stay up to date on Ag related investing, farmland has been absolutely killing it:

There are a few structural drivers behind this and it’s expected they’ll remain strong tailwinds for the asset class:

  • Global Population continues to increase – more mouths to feed (increasing demand)
  • Maxed out Crop Yields – for a long time the amount of crops we were able to grow per acre of land increased with population growth – we became expert farmers and were able to squeeze more and more out of the land (see chart below – this also explains why everything you eat today is made from corn) that increase in yield is starting to stall (squeezing supply)
  • Reduction in arable land due to development (squeezing supply)

So how do you get on the Farmland gravy train?  Besides buying a farm outright you can invest through the new platform Fquare.  It appears to be a crowdfunding platform designed to give accredited investors diversified exposure to US farmland.  Unfortunately their website falls well short of answering even the most basic questions of how the platform works.

I don’t know enough about Fquare to endorse it or not – I only mention it here because (1) it appears to be a cool confluence of agriculture and technology, and (2) I haven’t posted anything about Ag investing until now.