500 Startups Blog

but our MISSION is to groom ugly ducklings. Then why do you make it so hard to touch base?[1] [1] http://500.co

Whether you have an advantage or disadvantage depends on your goal. If you want a series of potentially-fun lottery tickets in industries and teams you choose, you have an advantage. If you want any return (and I mean any, as in, recovering any capital), you have 3 huge disadvantages: insufficient diversification[1], a lack of dealflow, particularly great deals, and inexperience evaluating and participating in other people’s startups. These are all surmountable, but doing so is an occupation. If you don’t already read Matt Levine, the “Retail Traders” section of https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail-voters-and-i… applies to picking a small quantity of individual startups too. The reason to do it is because it’s fun (and you’re comfortable losing all of the principal), not to earn average risk-adjusted returns. [1]: Check out 500 Startups’ presentations and posts on how much diversification is required to expect average returns for the asset class. Here’s one: https://500.co/not-so-simple-math-on-venture-portfolio-size/

Don't ask us, just have a conversation with your wife, see how she feels. If you can pitch your wife you can pitch a VC. https://500.co/theglobalvc/how-to-pitch-a-vc

They were also among the first venture firms to run a syndicate focused on women founders https://500.co/500-women/

Heads are already rolling https://500.co/making-changes-at-500/ https://medium.com/@sacca/i-have-more-work-to-do-c775c5d56ca1

It's really disappointing that they didn't even look at 500 startups, one of the few VC's who've done a genuinely good job at getting diversity of partners. http://500.co/team/

More info here: http://500.co/invest "To learn more about our fund offerings, please provide us with some information about yourself and your interests ... If you are selected, you will receive access to our investor presentation and related fund materials via SeedInvest..."

Rob Walling of Startups for the Rest of Us discussed the first of a two-part article on SaaS pricing¹ by Richard White of UserVoice in episode 153². The podcast also covered collecting billing info in episode 179³ and briefly discussed handling credit card expirations in episode 184⁴. ¹ http://500.co/2013/07/18/the-data-behind-purchasing-behavior-at-uservo… ² http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-153-saas-pricin… ³ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-179-when-to-ask… ⁴ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-184

Quite a few according to the infographic linked to in their FAQ: http://500.co/2012/04/06/visualizing-the-last-18-months-of-500-startup…

How about building an open source activity stream app ? http://500.co/2011/02/08/build-a-killer-product-faster-the-secret-of-u… Use Twitter Bootstrap for the UI and just have a simple generic REST service you can push activity events to. This would also allow you to get some exposure into WebSockets. Maybe even try and do it in Play, Grails, Vert.x etc for something different. You could even turn it into a little startup.

Because the video page doesn't give any info, here is the blurb... Wed, Jan 25 from 12-4pm and Thurs, Jan 26 from 5-9pm. 500 Startups Demo Day is an invite-only showing for our 3rd batch (Fall/Winter 2011) of accelerator companies. This event is primarily for accredited investors, 500 Startups Mentors & Advisors. To find out more about the companies visit: http://500.co/accelerator/accelerator-startups/ source:http://plancast.com/p/92pv/500-startups-demo-day-jan-2012

Have you tried looking at venture websites? They often have a job board for their portfolio companies and I know for a fact that startups are desperate for interns Some examples: http://www.trueventures.com/jobs/ http://500.co/startups

Went through my Pinboard to extract all these: - https://797capital.com/ - https://www.indexventures.com/ - https://www.sparkcapital.com/ - https://www.hcp.com/ - https://hvflabs.com/ - https://www.republiccapital.co/ - https://plus.vc/ - https://www.rarebreed.vc/ - https://www.dragonfly.xyz/ - https://macventurecapital.com/ - https://parafi.com/ - https://www.chingona.ventures/ - https://www.plexocap.com/ - https://lowercarboncapital.com/ - https://www.blckvc.org/ - https://www.gsr.io/ - https://rbf.capital/ - https://www.allraise.org/ - https://betaworksventures.com/ - https://www.gfrfund.com/ - https://www.hustlefund.vc/ - https://www.atelierventures.co/ - https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/ - https://www.nfx.com/ - https://645ventures.com/ - https://backstagecapital.com/ - https://panteracapital.com/firm/ - https://femalefoundersfund.com/ - https://susaventures.com/ - https://atomic.vc/ - https://homebrew.co/ - https://www.cowboy.vc/ - https://foundersfund.com/ - https://www.kaporcapital.com/ - https://www.felicis.com/ - https://www.cleocap.com/ - https://www.ggvc.com/ - https://www.haystack.vc/ - https://www.menlovc.com/ - https://www.battery.com/ - https://www.nea.com/ - https://www.greycroft.com/ - https://group.softbank/ - https://twosigmaventures.com/ - https://www.redpoint.com/ - https://www.angellist.com/ - https://luxcapital.com/ - https://lsvp.com/ - https://www.bvp.com/ - https://upfront.com/ -…

Found this: https://500.co/marketplace-startup-mistakes/

I feel deeply uncomfortable on 500 Startups positions on this (https://500.co/making-changes-at-500/) for four reasons: 1) 500Startups considered these issues to be serious enough to remove McClure from his role but didn't publicly disclose this. This meant that he presumably could continue to meet female founders and other WIT while still appearing to be in a position of power. 2) A number of LPs in 500 have stated that they were not told this change had happened and the reasons why. This suggests that 500 were trying to keep this as quiet as possible. 3) McClure continued to represent 500Startups in his official role after his apparent removal. A few weeks ago he was deeply involved in the launch of 500Melbourne in Australia. 4) Eight days ago Tsai tweeted "Binary Capital's Justin Caldbeck accused of unwanted sexual advances towards female founders. Where's the outrage?" while at the same time being fully aware that 500Startups was not disclosing McClure's behaviour. 500 Startups has done good work in the past on diversity but this appears to extend beyond McClure and they need to adopt full disclosure and address what from the outside could look like an attempt to cover-up inappropriate behaviour.

Thanks for sharing this! I checked out your pricing plans and the way you differentiate plans based on visitors / day jumped out at me since it goes against advice I read recently from the UserVoice team. They used to price based on number of users who can vote but (in their own words)... "This was a huge failure. It created what I call a success penalty: the more successful you were in activating your users to give you feedback the more expensive the product became. On some level this made sense but since no one knew how to estimate this future usage it just created uncertainty about committing to a product without knowing the future cost of it. It was especially problematic because we were often working with young companies who didn’t know or were very optimistic about their future active user levels (and equally optimistic about what % of them would engage on UserVoice and give them feedback). It put us in the awkward position of tempering a customer’s enthusiasm about their use of our product (aka “There’s no way you’ll have 300K people on your site in 60 days time”). When we removed the usage limits, which were designed to drive upgrades, we actually saw that upgrades increased 33%!" Link: http://500.co/the-data-behind-purchasing-behavior-at-uservoice-pricing…