Above the Crowd

Today Benchmark is excited to announce that we will be partners with Jason Kilar and Richard Tom on their next exciting project — Vessel . Working with amazing entrepreneurs is the number one reason we enjoy venture capital, and rarely do you have the opportunity to work with a team that has a track record like these two. While they are not planning to disclose any specifics today about the company, you can rest assured that they plan to bring their amazing product instincts and cultural leadership that were at the heart of Hulu’s success. We are also excited to be partnering again […]

Over the past several years, I have become a huge fan of Mark Armstrong’s web service, Longreads. For those of you that don’t know, Longreads is a Twitter handle ( @longreads ), and a web service ( www.longreads.com ) that points to the best long form content on the Internet. At its core, it’s an amazingly effective editorial and discovery engine. Combined with a product like Instapaper, it creates an online/offline reading experience that feels purpose-built for a tablet world. Many short form articles can be read quickly while you browse through your Twitter feed. But the really great articles that make […]

Many journalists have offered their opinion on Netflix’s recent changes, its stock price decline, and their even more recent branding changes (Qwikster). Yet in each article, it appears as if the journalist all agree that the price move (creating separate prices for streaming and DVDs) was a bad strategic move. As an example,  Techcrunch notes : “Raising prices for those of us who opt for both streaming and DVDs would have been fine if Netflix had a deeper streaming catalog. But the gap is still too big, and the price hike seemed premature. Your customers are extremely loyal. Don’t piss them off.” The problem with this […]

“The clock on the wall’s moving slower My heart it sinks to the ground And the storm that I thought would blow over Clouds the light of the love that I found” – Fool in the Rain, Led Zeppelin More often than not, we here in Silicon Valley are prone to idealism. We see a scenario the way we want to see it, and make predictions that fit our view of how we think the world should work, or perhaps even how we would like the world to be. This is especially true when it comes to technology. Outsider “luddites” […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] We are clearly at a very important point in time when it comes to Internet video, especially video that is served to your television, but over the Internet (also known as “over-the-top” Internet video). Christmas of 2009 and Christmas of 2010 will mark the point in time that Internet menus began to show up in-mass on televisions, DVD players, and game machines. That said, one would be hard pressed to predict exactly how this market will evolve.  There are simply way more questions than answers. For example: Who will own the operating system layer? Who will own the menu “stack” […]