By Ravi Viswanathan (published in Silicon India Magazine) Unicorn. Cloud. Wearable. Big Data. SaaS. Internet of Things. These are just a few of the trendy tech buzzwords that have permeated the media, startup pitch decks, and investors’ daily lives over the past few years. It is our job as VCs to look past the hype and sift through the buzzword-bandwagoners to find true innovation and value—and this has never been truer than it is with the hot [...]
I wrote a blog on my experience with wearables a couple of years ago (My Wearables “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”) - it basically was a lamentation of my journey to find one (or any!) that excited me. I would characterize this initial generation as v1.0 - klugey products with limited or poor functionality, lack of real aesthetic appeal, and power/battery/connectivity issues. Since then, a lot has happened in the wearables world. Many have gone out [...]
By Ravi Viswanathan and Scott Sandell Frustration. Impatience. Disappointment. Anger. These are feelings associated with a negative customer experience...and the old adage that an unhappy customer complains to 10 others? No longer true. Thanks to social media that now sits at 1,000 or more! Furthermore, the cost of acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times that of retaining existing ones, so the effects of poor experience can be absolutely devastating. Poor experience can result from a number [...]
By Ravi Viswanathan and Rick Yang The size of an opportunity has a direct relationship with the potential for outsized returns. Again and again, we’ve seen that the companies with the largest magnitude of success are those that target massive markets, primed for innovation. Over the course of NEA’s 35+ year history, this market opportunity-to-success ratio has fueled disruption in industries from software to healthcare, to energy, to education, and beyond. Long story short: if the [...]
