Blog
Specialization and the evolution of the seed accelerators
There is a tremendous amount of money flowing into new models for venture backed corporate development. The explosion of incubators, accelerators, angels, super-angels, AngelList, seed funds, startup camps, startup crawls, etc. have created new rules around piles of money available to entrepreneurs. There are social rules, like those AngelList applies to identifying and filtering startups [...]
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Does hiring people really require strategy? Yes, I believe so.
As Thinktiv has grown our employee base over the past year (roughly 3x) we’ve faced some of the traditional challenges early stage businesses face. Who do we hire next? What is our specification for a role as we scale it? What does senior vs. associate look like? I’ve spent considerable time thinking about this over [...]
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The end of client services? Nah… the end of _traditional_ client services
Khoi Vinh recently left a design post at the New York Times and wrote a blog post on his decision to join a start-up. The article cites his reasons to take a job at a start-up product company as opposed to starting another design consultancy. His foremost point is that the industry has shifted. We would agree. [...]
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QuickGifts, pt. 3: Social Multiplication & the Power of Intent
This is the 3rd of a three-part post discussing Thinktiv’s investment strategy and the case study of our first lead investment, in QuickGifts. So far, I’ve discussed market size and multi-party value propositions (in G-50 Markets & Power Triangles), along with unit economics and distribution pull (in Fun With Math(!) & the T-Bone Corollary). This [...]
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QuickGifts, pt. 2: Fun with Math(!) & the T-Bone Corollary
This is the 2nd of a three-part post discussing Thinktiv’s investing strategy, and the case study of our first lead investment, in QuickGifts. Last week, I talked about G-50 Markets & Power Triangles. This week I’ll tackle two more variables that make us happy when we are looking at venture acceleration opportunities, and how they [...]
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QuickGifts, pt. 1: G-50 Markets, & Power Triangles
Over the past few years, we’ve built the equivalent of a nice early-stage VC portfolio around the concept of “earned equity”. In the most basic terms – this means using our human capital and acceleration expertise as a form of investment currency. In practice, we’ll scope out a venture acceleration services project for a potential [...]
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Steve Waters: My Introduction
Those of you who have been paying attention over the past couple months may have noticed that the Thinktiv leadership team is making a concerted effort to blog. We are pushing ourselves to publicly say something (hopefully) interesting on a more consistent basis about our strategy, emerging models of entrepreneurship and early-stage investing, and other [...]
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Some Visibility into Thinktiv’s Strategy
We had some exciting news that hit the wire yesterday; I think it is a great opportunity to offer an update on Thinktiv’s expanding venture acceleration model. We have always viewed ourselves as more than a “design firm” or services company. A few days ago, I published a manifesto of sorts on this topic. In [...]
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Design is dead, long live design
Design, as it relates to early stage web based businesses, is one of the more troubling words facing our industry. I believe this is primarily for three reasons. 1. If we consider a traditional definition of design, it is being outsourced and commoditized by international firms and through businesses like 99 Designs. 2. Executives who [...]
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You report to the CEO – so now what?
Last week I provided some thoughts on what it takes for a CEO to move a business from Powerpoint to production. I received many email responses and direct messages, thank you. Several of these messages asked for my perspective on what qualities successful executives that report to a CEO exhibit. I think this is a [...]
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