But there would be no way to

1. automate the transactions
2. show the website visitors that they’re actually donating and to whom.

Stripe also launched Stripe Connect and since I’m pretty interested in APIs, payments and OAuth (the reason I work at Betable) I came up with a very simple project and completed it in a couple of weeks last October. Stuff happens and I never got to launch it, but today, I’m officially unveiling my 4-months old 2-weekends-project: donat.io.

Donat.io is a web application that will automatically make charity donations based on a % of the revenues of a business. It works in this way:

1. A business connects its Stripe account.
2. The business inputs the percentage they’d like to donate every month.
3. At the end of the month Donat.io calculates the revenues for the current month and triggers the charity donation on Dwolla.

In the meantime, the business gets a “badge” button they can include on their website. It links to their donat.io profile where customers can confirm with Donat.io what % the business donates.

The plan is to add more features, obviously. I’m open to ideas, but for now I’m leaning towards:

• making it available to individuals soon, so they can donate a % of their incomes to charities.
• adding charity selection.

Please get in touch if you have any feedback or suggestions.

I’d like to thank John at Stripe for his feedback and Michael at Dwolla for taking into consideration my feedback and implementing some features in a matter of days.

I unfortunately missed some of the talks (updated with notes from all talks!). Sorry about typos and incompleteness. Videos of the talks should be up on Udemy in June.

Keith Rabois

Value -> Growth -> Growth Hacking.

You have to create value first, prove growth at a first scale, before trying to do growth hacking.
Examples:

• LinkedIn -> Indexing profiles in search engine.
• Paypal -> Buttons
• Youtube -> Embeddable Players

Growth Hacking is not only data driven, mostly an observation data. It’s a logical science.
Marketing is dead. Feature design is the new marketing.
Square growth -> The product was so good that it was a magnet and it’s what drove the initial growth
“My job is to add zeros to the dashboard”
Facebook had a growth team and it worked well so now everyone wants a growth team. People in the valley tend to think like that, investors included. It might not make sense in every company. Sometimes a product leader who can think like a growth hacker might be enough.
There isn’t a lot of growth hacking content. There’s a natural sense of timidity, it’s very hard to find good stuff.
Perfect growth team: 1 designer 1 engineer (+ 1 analyst). 2-3 person team.
How did you structure the marketing team at Square? Everybody has different definitions about marketing (and APIs).
Difference: 1) customer acquisition 2) brand marketing. 1) is more important than 2) in the beginning. But the right brand can help A LOT. Real hard question: how do you get the two to work together and prioritize it well enough.

Sean Ellis

Product/Market Fit -> Transition to Growth -> Growth
He spent a lot of time in the second phase. Examples coming.
This applies to most but not all businesses.
Mark Andreessen -> “Focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit”.
So what is product/market fit. “You know when you’ll have it.” “Products flying off the shelf.”
A lot of luck, inspiration, responsiveness, etc.
As a marketer it’s EXTREMELY RISKY to get in a company before product/market fit. That’s the founder’s risk. Only get in after product/market fit.

• Implement user analytics
• Identify “must have” benefits of your products
• Map benefit to an effective hook
• Optimize business model too
• Optimize conversions
• Hire growth team

Problem: slow growth. We stopped trying to grow. We mapped the funnel with very good analytics and found out that very few people had a good experience with the product.
Asked customers: “Is there anything preventing you from downloading the product?” People didn’t think it was free so no-one was converting. Changed messaging and tripled conversion. (They phrased it: “Download the free version or a trial of the paid version”).
At the end 1000% increase!! They also did this: when people downloaded the free version, they would give them the pro version automatically for 30 days.
MOST GROWTH HACKS WON”T WORK IF YOUR PRODUCT IS SET UP WRONG

1. Increase desire
2. Reduce friction -> this might be even more important

Asks first open ended question to customers, then drills down with closed choice questions to identify the “must have” of the product.
KissMetrics -> Optimizely -> Unbounce

Elliot Shmukler

(ex LinkedIn, now Wealthfront)
- How to build a growth machine

1. Set growth goal
2. understand drivers of growth
3. optimize

Goals: needs to be measurable. The growth team needs to have a measurable goal and it should be measurable quickly.
Facebook growth goal: “10 friends in 13 days”. Get as many users as possible to have 10 friends in 13 days.
You would have thought that it was monthly active users, billions of users etc.
If they had 10 friends in 13 days there was a very very high chance they’d become active users. The best part is that you can measure it in 13 days.
Impossible to measure MAUs in under a month. Ability to measure the user that signs up today, is going to be very slow: will have to measure users for months.
You need to get results of experiments very quickly.
At Linkedin they had signals to understand if you’d become MAU in just 1 day. Immediately measurable.
Goal needs to be aligned with product and business model.
Make the goal a SINGLE number. A single goal.
To understand growth drivers: work backwards from the goal.
Understand the steps/channels users use to get to the goal. If you have a diagram with all the steps and all the channels that users go through, each box will be optimizable.
Optimize each step and channel.
3 ways to optimize:

• 1) reduce friction

Make something simpler / easier to do. Reduce steps / clicks, etc. LinkedIn form went from 10 fields to 4 fields -> 20% better conversion.
If you need all of the data: split the form apart. Break it up into many small steps. (microquestions, 3 bullets and ok.) LinkedIn changed their data entry flow to microquestions.
LinkedIn endorsments: 1 click. As low friction as you can make it.

• 2) increase incentive

Give me a better reason to do something.
Make the product reasonate with the users, but something else you can do that doesn’t have to do anything with the product:
- Give aactual numbers of savings or something similar.
- Social proof – these other people that you know are doing this. Tried at LinkedIn in different places. Every time it DOUBLED the number of people that completed the step
- Material incentives: Dropbox give space, you can give discounts, etc.

• 3) increase exposure

Underutilized by growth people.
ASK ME TO DO IT MORE OFTEN, MORE PROMINENTLY and IN MORE PLACES.
Don’t expect that the user will find something do to, or that they will do it when you ask them. Keep asking all the time.
LinkedIn growing profile data: added “Improve my profile” button so people didn’t have to go change the data. Took it one step further and now they pop up blue boxes with questions and other stuff to do
When you have a user that has done action X once, ask them to do it again.
Don’t push this too far: you can vary how often you show it and vary what’s there. Test both. Vary what’s there a lot. (eg. people you may know, always different people which is suboptimal in the short term but optimal in the long term to avoid blindness.)
LinkedIn’s goal was signups that imported an address book.
Constantly retry things and experiments that have failed, but have other people work on it.

Mike Greenfield

(LinkedIn – Circle of Moms – 500 Startups)
Circle of mom grew on Facebook to 6m users. The Facebook channel had dropped sharply. Traffic down 50%. 1m active out of the 6m.
Had an email digest that sucked.
Email was extremely successful for them.
Lots of steps

1. inbox delivery – getting into people’s inbox. MAKE SURE EMAILS GET DELIVERED. Sendgrind vs Return Path. Simplicity vs effectiveness.
2. One item focus! In your email have one prominent piece of content + customized subject based on that.
3. Quality – initially all user generated content, so quality kind of sucked. Hard to remove bad content and surface the good one.
4. Subject optimization – Not a small project. They built their own full A/B testing product.
5. Winners and losers – distinguishing
6. Personalization – they build a predictive model for each user and email, then run tests and pick the email which has the best odds of converting.
7. Frequency – test different options holistically on a huge number of different stats. Not just the clicks. If quality was high, they could do up to 4-5 times per week.

Quora has a very high quality email flow.

Alison Rosenthal

(Goldman Sachs -> Stanford MBA -> Facebook (end of ’05) -> Executive in Residence @ Greylock)
Goal at FB was growth. MySpace was the enemy.
3 obvious things: look at the data (people navigating from mobile and other countries, out of college, high school), find easy wins (carriers were seeing increases in traffic to fb and myspace), BD for mobile growth
Really understand users. Who are you building for?
- pay as you go internet access
- screen size

Gagan Byiani

Lyft is probably the fastest growing local marketplace
growing faster in LA than SF.
Strategy is very different than what is usually talked about.
Future of growth hacking is being successful at branding as well as customer acquisition.
True brand building: Lyft uses pink mustaches and fist bump.
(Uber: multi-time entrepreneur, Sidecar: venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Lyft: people with transportation experience).
Secret: true understanding of the customer.
Service originally for women, because they felt unsafe with cabs: -> pink: feeling of safety and fun, even when a random car picks up you with a person you’ve never seen before.
It wasn’t a marketing play.
After you get in the car it’s super super awkward. Fist bump to break the ice.
That was not the brand.
The brand was what was underneath: the community.
In order to make this work we need thousands and thousands of suppliers, and we have to vet and interview every single driver. VCs freak out at this. BUT, they were able to create a community out of that.
More rigorous insurance and background checks than the taxi industry. More regulation out of the regulation.
User life cycle.
Before they buy -> First purchase -> Repeat purchases -> referral -<
In LA pink mustache is not an advantage anymore. So what worked in SF didn’t work in LA.
LA grows faster because of the understanding of the life cycle.
I hate change -> what is this -> what was the name of that app again? -> oh dude you should totally check this out -<
advertising -> conversion -> retention -> virality
Customer development applies to growth too: get out of the building.
LA: pitch people in the streets with a pink mustache all night for 3 hours.
After that mobile ads, which out converted every body because he spoke with all the customers and knew them really well.

Akash Garg

(Twitter, Director Growth Engineering)
- Multi channel
- Quality metric – try to quantify quality or find other metrics that can give a sense of the quality
- Holdbacks
Teams: full stack engineers, problem solvers, metrics driven, #shipit
The products you build are really only as good as the people who build them: hire world class teams.
50 people on growth team: product managers, designers and engineers
If growth team builds a product which has success, who manages it? For now growth team still manages everything they build.
Keep track of all metrics, see the whole picture (eg maybe some feature increases follows but decreases tweets).
Is the success of a feature very country dependent? Usually yes.
Always slice metrics by country.

Matt Hudson

(Product Manager, YouTube)
Video and media is accelerating much faster than anyone could imagine.
Fundamental shift of how people think about media, it’s now a two way street.
YouTube doesn’t have a top of the funnel problem. 72h uploaded every min. 1b monthly actives.
But TV is much bigger, YouTube is missing something.
3 lessons:
1) focus
For a long time they optimized around number of views.
They then shifted to watch time. Very difficult cause everyone really understood views but not watch time. Partners, users, etc.
Choosing the right metrics matters a lot. Painful to change.
2) leadership
Started a forum called YT stats, where executives managers and engineers would talk about all the metrics, and anyone could ask questions?
Monumental impact.
12 to 15 people meeting, went to 150 people. All the important decisions made there.
Culture change starts with great questions.
3) Alignment
YT has teams siloed by feature (watch, homepage, etc.)
So they started a growth team, horizontal.
Failed. They reorganized everyone into horizontal, everyone is on the growth team.
Align yourself around the user.

Stan Chudnovsky

(Tickle-Monster-Ooga-Paypal)
It doesn’t need to be complicated.
- Goodreads: how do you make people write reviews?
They originally put them in chronological order. They then realized English majors students were writing most of the reviews. Many people will read the same book at the same time.
If any of your friends wrote a review, it will now show up first.
Now people know that their friends will read what they write.
5x more reviews.
Invites went out! People write a review and want to show to everyone how smart they are. People who are invited read the review immediately.
All they did was change the order of how the reviews were displayed.
- Facebook photos: conscious decision not to compete with photo sharing sites.
Everyone thought that having the original image was the most important thing. Facebook was throwing away originals! But they did do tagging. You get an email saying you were tagged.. There is no way you’re not clicking that email.
Lyft and PayPal have different flows for merchants and users because they have different teams. People think of themselves like people so there should be one flow and one teams.
Growth is not just one simple thing. It’s manu small and complex things.
Volume is a competitive advantage: more volume means faster optimization.

Growth is not only about the onboarding flow.
Neither about gamification.

Gamification should only be used when it provides utility.

Use existing members who enjoy your product to drive growth. 70% of members should come from there.
Inviting people from the onboarding flow has limited utility.

Growth is:

• retention
• failure (all the time)
• patience

takes years to get growth. no overnight successes.

All of the following notes are by Dinesh Gomes

Greg Tseng, Tagged

Growth v/s Engagement 

Tagged as a case study:
Launched feature (newsfeed)
NOTHING happened
Surveyed people
Learned an insight, people didn’t want to network, wanted to meet new people
Theme of Social Discovery
Pivoted
Itereated and learned how to position this
Pre-product Mket fit learnings

• Sustainable value only comes from REAL user engagement
• Focus on engagement
• A STARTUPS FIRST GOAL: PROVE PRODUCT MKT FIT
• Only do growth to help achieve Product Market FIT

Ensure enough sample size when doing A/B Testing
(exception is when the product is the network, like messaging)
Viral marketing is a tactic not a religion

Noah Kagan, Mint, Blogger

How to make your first dollar

- Asked question on shoe lace v/s spending half an hour for a dollar
NO ONE WANTS TO PAY TO TIE SHOES
- Do each of you have a dollar in your pocket? Do each of you have a problem in your life?
LOOK INWARD
Try the coffee challenge> app sumo.com/coffee
Go to starbucks and try to get a 10% discount on your next cup of coffee
The #1 problem with starting a Biz? FEAR
HOW DO YOU VALIDATE THAT PEOPLE WANNA USE YOUR PRODUCT
ie. Will they pay me? Will they use it?
Eg. How would you validate AirBnB?
A. Put an ad on CL
Eg. How would you validate square
A. Go to a farmers mkt , put a fake master card sticker, photograph the card, and tell your friend to purchase the pmt
If people will pay you for that information, then you have a business

Josh Elman, Twitter, LinkedIn

Habits – from Inception to Adoption

Noticed that his talk is listed here

https://sites.google.com/site/growthhacking/josh-elman

Inception> Awareness>Habits
Inception>
Not just what do you need to solve to ? but…
Who are you solving for
How is it solved,
How often is it solved
Case study – Twitter signup: Autofill had “I don’t get twitter” before “I don’t get drunk” – how to fix?
Learned that Twitter isn’t for everyone. Twitter turned out to be “whats happening with people and orgs you care about”
Awareness>
“Come join me because <This is the value I bring to you>
Habits>
The only metric that matters: How many people are really using your product
- At the frequency you expect
- with the confidence that they’ll convert
- They will pay (someday)
Figure out who comes back
State diagram of twitter users types
Core
Curious -> New    +   +     -> Casual
Cold

1. Define your purpose
2. Incept the right understanding of product
3. Teach people how to use as they adopt
4. Create real habits and understand how to keep them
5. Define & monitor only what matters
6. Look for A-Ha moments and design around them

Thanks again to Dinesh Gomes for providing the notes on the talks I missed.

Thinking of starting a company? You’ve got to step it up. Startup quality is growing at a very fast pace.

I hadn’t been to a demo day in a long time, but recently went to both the 500 Startups demo day and the International Demo Day, yesterday night.

And one thing that I immediately realized is that the quality of the startups presenting is just insanely better than just a couple of years ago.

I was at 500 Startups during the Summer 2011 demo day and was already pretty impressed with most of the startups pitching at that time, but I must say that the average quality seen at 500′s last demo day is just an order of magnitude higher.

Same goes for international startups. I attended a very large number of pitching competitions and demo days in Europe during 2011, and the quality of the companies that presented yesterday was just unthinkable at that time.

I could spot some major differentiators between some years ago and today:

Beautifully designed, functional products

Most teams had a functional product live with users and a beautiful design and user interaction. MVP has taken a whole new meaning from the old Launchrock page.

Traction

Most companies had revenues. Just out of an accelerator and pre-seed round! That was just not the case some years ago.

Customer development results

You can clearly see how companies embrace customer development, and how they bring back and incorporate their findings in their pitches.

Competent and relevant teams

Teams are just great. People know what they’re talking about. They are attacking markets they know well and have the right experience for.

Better market understanding and sizing

This is probably the biggest difference. Market sizing finally makes sense in most pitches.

If you’re thinking of starting a company or raising a seed round, keep in mind that your competition has a product live, with users, revenues and the right team to build it. You have to step it up.

When a visitor first comes to my site I don’t want her to view my latest post. It might suck. I want to maybe show my top post, or a selection of my top posts, and only if the latest one is time-sensitive then show that one.

Considering that people keep up with posts and new content via email, facebook, twitter and RSS (yes, people still use RSS) and that when sharing content we’re always sharing the permalinks: there is no need for the homepage to load the latest post as a default.

The era of blog as personal journals has long ended but the templates and designs haven’t kept up and are still stuck back in time. I have some “evergreen posts” that are buried and I want to display them more clearly.

I love what platforms like RebelMouse and Contently are doing. My page on contently lets me display my best posts, but I don’t think they’ve nailed it yet mostly because they’re external platforms. Medium is innovating here and I’m really curious to see how their product evolves.

If I have some time I’ll try to work on my homepage layout and experiment a bit. In the meantime I’d love to hear about cool examples you’ve seen around, I’m sure there are people who are doing this right.

Ted, let me tell you the secret to life.

Every time I make a decision about what to do on a given night, I ask myself, “What would make the best memory 20 years from now?”

So I let 20-Years-From-Now-Barney call the shots.

And it always works out.

I’m a big fan of How I Met your Mother, and in one of the latest episodes Barney reveals how he makes decisions. He calls up his future self, 20-years-from-now-Barney.

I’ve always tried to think about the long term effects of any given choice and decision but I never really framed it in this way, and I think I’ll try.

Asking yourself if 20 years from now you’ll be proud of what you did or didn’t do makes all the sense in the world. It helps you look at the problem from a much higher level and removes the urgency factor that is inherent to many decisions we have to make.

I’ve been more and more interested in the venture studio / production studio / startup foundry model, and started researching different ones around the world. I’ll also have a post in the next few days on what I actually think about the model. But for now, here are the ones I found:

“Foundries”

IdeaLab

Idealab was started in 1996 and created some massively successful companies. They had more than 30 exits on ~75 companies created. They were involved with eToys, Overture, Shopping.com, Commission Junction and Compete.

Betaworks

Betaworks is a company which builds companies in. Their studio in NYC is currently focused on Bitly, Digg (which they recently acquired), Chartbeat and SocialFlow. They also double as an early-stage investor.

Sandbox Industries

Sandbox Industries has many different activities, including a number of venture funds, but at the core they have their foundry, which has created CakeStyle, CareSimply, Doggyloot and more.

Hattery

Hattery is a hybrid foundry, venture firm and incubator in San Francisco. They invest in companies and help them out with design and other services, as well as start their own.

Redstar Ventures

Redstar is a company builder focusing on 3 different themes: aging demographics, the future of media and the underemployed. Their first startup is LoopIt.

YouWeb

Youweb is the incubator that spun off OpenFeint and CrowdStar.

Archimedes Labs

Started by a TechCrunch co-founder, Keith Teare, Archimedes is a foundry, incubator and investor, which recently spun out Just.me

Celebrity entrepreneurs’ vehicles

Obvious

Obvious is the factory of Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman which spun Odeo, Twitter and more recently Medium, Branch and Lift. The founders actually recently announced that they were “closing” the foundry to each focus on a startup, as they really like to focus.

Monkey Inferno

Monkey Inferno is Michael Birch’s entrepreneurial vehicle. The model is very interesting: everyone can come up with an idea, and if enough people think it’s valid, they’ll start testing it out. They’re very fast in killing the ones that don’t work, and everyone gets equity in every company created.

Sherpa Foundry (no site yet)

Shervin Pishevar recently announced that, on top of the million things he’s doing already, he’d be starting his own incubation company. We still have no idea what he’s working on.

Science, Inc.

Science is a new studio started by former MySpace CEO Mike Jones. It already created some very cool companies, including: EverySignal, HelloSociety and WittleBee.

HVF

HVF is Max Levchin’s new company. He seems to be focused on big-data problems with this one. Apparently Max tried the production model earlier and spun out Slide and Yelp. Not too bad. HVF stands for HARD, VALUABLE, FUN”.

Tasty Labs

Tasty Labs is Joshua Schachter’s foundry. They’re working on Jig, Skills.to and Human.io.

Ooga Labs

Ooga is the vehicle of James Currier, former founder of Tickle. It already spun out Wonderhill, which was sold to Kabam, Jiff and IronPearl.

Expa

Expa is Garrett Camp‘s the new holding company. He is best known for having founded StumbleUpon, Uber and Blackjet.

Other Models

Prehype

Prehype is a foundry which works with corporations, acting as their external R&D studio.

Cofounder.co

Cofounder.co is exactly what it sounds like. It acts as an early co-founder for your company.

Europe

Rocket Internet

Probably the most famous one, having built Alando, StudyVZ, Jamba, BigPoint and a million other clones, but most European countries have a lot of them.

Forward Labs

Forward labs is the foundry of the Forward group, which dabbles in entrepreneurship, venture capital and private equity as well. Their model makes a lot of sense as they’re able to leverage their services in all of their companies, no matter the stage.

Fastlane Ventures

Fastlane is Russia’s Rocket Internet, they launch companies in 50 days out of their office in Moscow.

Germany also has Project A, Found Fair, Venture Stars, Rheingau Founders, Hanse Ventures  and Founders Link, Denmark has Rainmaking, Italy has Banzai, Boox, Nana Bianca, Digital Magics and H-Farm while Switzerland has Centralway. Europe is really big on the studio model, and I’m sure I’m missing many, many of them.

Let me know the ones I missed.

Others

Pollenizer

Pollenizer is an australian foundry who’s creating some really cool companies such as WooBoard and Pygg.

Innovation Works

The premier Chinese incubator.

DFR

DFR is an asian studio with offices in Shanghai and Tokyo.

Technology has never really been a focus for private equity and I think there are several reasons for it.

• Tech startups grow incredibly fast, closing the window for private equity opportunities as fast.
• It’s very hard to “turn around” a technology company. A tech company is usually trying to grab a market opportunity, doesn’t have assets and has an insane amount of product, market and execution risk. A failing tech firm is much more worthless than a failing car rental company.
• Liquidity events are much more important than in other sectors. After a massive liquidity event, dynamics completely change, key team members leave and the general attitude changes. It’s good to remember that stock options play a crucial role in our world, but not in others.
• Venture capital firms have participated in expansion and pre-IPO rounds more and more. Sometimes they participated in PE rounds too.

But my expectation is that technology in PE is nonetheless going to grow in the coming decade, mostly driven by opportunities for PE firms to acquire companies and repackage them for big industrial players that might not otherwise get in the field, but still desperately need the expertise and opportunities opened up by globalization, where tech firms in growing markets might not make good candidates for the VC path, but could still benefit from an infusion of expertise. The public markets are back at a point where valuations for tech companies are very interesting, so it’s possible to see tech firms being acquired by PE shops in preparation of an IPO.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Skype deal. Andreessen Horowitz bet $50M of their new $300M fund in the deal, a bet that everyone called crazy and generated a 3x return in 18 months. Silver Lake was of course leading the charge there. The Skype deal was very interesting because it leveraged a non-optimal acquisition (what did eBay have to do with Skype) of a massively valuable product and repackaged it for a much more suitable buyer, which desperately needed to get a leg in mobile and up its game in communications.

It’s very interesting to get out of our small seed and early stage bubble and try to think about other sectors, stages and methodologies. But I love it.

Supercell is a finnish company which is now making more than $2.4M in revenues per day. It raised two rounds of funding already, a seed round from London Venture Partners, Initial Capital (the evergreen fund of Elad Cohen, Playtech’s co-founder), Cerval Investments and Lifeline Ventures. Accel came in later leading a $12M round, long before the company released Clash of Clans or Hay Day.

Neil Rimer has an awesome post of why Index led this round, and it is a must read for any entrepreneur and investor who’d be happy making $2.4M a day. It’s a reality check that helps understand how becoming a big public company still requires massive amounts of operating capital, no matter your revenues.

But what is interesting about this round is that every shareholder of the company, including founders and previous investors, is selling 16.7% of its stock to the new entrants. That means that the founders are cashing in around $10M, and Accel is already getting back ~$4M.

We’ve seen founders and other investors take money off the table in other situations, but what I particularly like about this round is that everybody is cashing out the same percentage. The founders or single investors are not grabbing the bulk of the cash (Groupon I’m looking at you), and it is a low percentage of the full round, with more than $110m going directly into the company’s coffers.

Incentives are still very strong and aligned, with a much needed boost to morale for everyone involved, most notably the employees. For the relative youth of the company, the secondary part was probably not needed at all, but I think it’s one of the cleanest implementations we’ve recently seen.

Congratulations again to everyone involved, it’s a really awesome European success case, and I wish Supercell the best for its future as a private, or possibly soon public, company.

I’ve never felt this in other places, the valley really is unique for this. Speed factors in everyone’s life.

The pace at which companies move around here is just insane. Sometime at Betable we stop and reflect about what we’ve accomplished in the last year, and it is just mind-blowing. What’s even crazier is how much more we have to do and how little time to do it. We have to keep our speed, if not accelerate even more.

For investors speed is a constant. They need to be on top of every trend. Read every piece of news and hear about every Facebook employee that leaves to create his own company. For an early stage investor being late to the party is a disaster.

Speed is energizing. It makes you go out of your comfort zone. You feel like you’re losing control at every turn, but then you somehow get back in balance. And it starts all over again at the next turn.

The most global VC firms. Why, you ask. Well, because I believe that VCs still haven’t globalized as much as they can and I believe that in the future the biggest opportunities will be grabbed by VCs with multiple locations and meaningful interactions between those.

To compile this list I used as a criteria the number of countries, and not the number of single offices, of a firm. You could argue that having both a NY and SV office is an advantage, and I agree, but for the sake of simplicity I considered the USA as a single entity.

So for the winners:

e.ventures takes the top spot with 6 countries. It prides itself as being a firm with a global footprint and delivers, having offices in Sf, São Paulo, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo. e.ventures which was formerly know as BV capital is comprised of 5 local funds aggregated under the same brand. It recently raised a $130M fund in Brazil and has a total of ~$900M under management.

Accel takes the second spot with 5 countries. It has office in Palo Alto, New York, London, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Bangalore. Accel is definitely the most global of the Silicon Valley elite firms. Its $440 million fund IX is an epic tale in the VC world (fund X is also amazing), and was able to raise a $475M IV fund in Europe in less than 8 weeks. It has ~$8B in AUM.

Disclaimers:

• Data from each VC’s website.
• Didn’t include PE firms.
• Focused on technology venture investors in every stage.
• Might have missed some, if so please comment or email ste+vc@bernardi.me

Index Ventures has offices in 3 countries:

• Switzerland
• United Kingdom
• United States

Our firm was started in 1996 by individuals who saw the opportunity to adapt the California venture capital model to Europe, and who were committed to the creation of great, long-lasting technology companies in Europe. This remains our commitment today and will remain so in the future.

DCM has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• Japan
• China

Norwest Venture Partners has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• India
• Israel

Summit Partners has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• India

Walden International has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• China
• India

Walden International is unique among US venture firms through its focus on cross-border investments that leverage global markets and talent to grow industry-leading companies.

Matrix Partners has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• India
• China

BlueRun Ventures has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• China
• South Korea

Canaan Partners has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• India
• Israel

Investor Growth Capital has offices in 3 countries:

• United States
• Sweden
• China

Northzone has offices in 4 countries:

• Denmark
• Sweden
• Norway
• United Kingdom

Bessemer Venture Partners has offices in 4 countries:

• United States
• Israel
• India
• Brazil

Bessemer Venture Partners has offices in 4 countries:

• United States
• Israel
• India
• Brazil

Highland Capital Partners has offices in 4 countries:

• United States
• China
• United Kingdom
• Switzerland

Atomico has offices in 5 countries:

• United Kingdom
• Brazil
• Turkey
• China
• Japan

Accel Partners has offices in 5 countries:

• United States
• India
• Hong Kong
• United Kingdom
• China

e.ventures has offices in 6 countries:

• United States
• Germany
• Russia
• Brazil
• Japan
• China

A Truly Global Venture Firm. Five Local Funds. One Global Team.

Please get in touch with me if you feel I’ve missed some or you think the data is incorrect. Thanks!

Edit: added Atomico, Northzone