Above the Crowd

This morning, Intuit announced its agreement to acquire one of Benchmark’s portfolio companies, Demandforce, for $424mm. As with Instagram, Benchmark Capital is the largest institutional investor in Demandforce. Unlike Instagram, which is a consumer application and is extremely well known, Demandforce focuses on local professional businesses and has chosen to keep an intentionally low profile – a strategy that has served them well. Great entrepreneurs often blaze their own trails, and the founder and CEO of Demandforce, Rick Berry, is no different. In a day and age of social media, where many companies project a persona much larger than reality, Demandforce chose […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] A few relevant scenes from the recent blockbuster Moneyball: Peter Brand: Billy, Pena is an All Star. Okay? And if you dump him and this Hatteberg thing doesn’t work out the way that we want it to, you know, this is…this is the kind of decision that gets you fired. It is! Billy Beane: Yes, you’re right. I may lose my job, in which case I’m a forty four year old guy with a high school diploma and a daughter I’d like to be able to send to college. You’re twenty five years old with a degree from Yale and a pretty impressive apprenticeship. I don’t think […]

Frequent comparisons to Facebook leave many confused about the true value of Twitter. [Follow Me on Twitter] “In a brand new direction A change of perception On a brand new trajection” – UB40 [Disclosure: Benchmark Capital is a major investor in Twitter, and my partner Peter Fenton sits on the Twitter BOD.] Twitter is having a remarkable year. Active users have soared to over 100 million per month, with daily actives now above 50 million. Tweets per day are over 250 million. Most top actors, athletes, and artists are all active on Twitter. Every news and sports program proudly advertises its Twitter account handle. No one would consider […]

“It’s funny how fallin feels like flyin, for a little while…” – Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart Soundtrack On July 1st, Google announced its intention to acquire ITA Software . ITA owns a primarily B2B airfare search and pricing system called QPX. Several of the leading online travel sites, like Orbitz, Kayak, and Bing Travel, use information from QPX to power their airfare search. Many in the industry view this move as a seminal event in Google’s history, as the company makes a decisive step from being a general search engine, into more structured vertical search. Certainly, Google already offers vertical search in Images, Videos, Maps, News, and several other categories. Despite […]

“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” […]