I grew up in New Jersey and played sports and rode my bike around. It was a really nice time - kids didn't have cellphones then - and you knew everyone in the town.
— Aileen Lee
Savvy companies are quietly changing up their boards of directors and teams, and this is giving them better collective intelligence, more community admiration, and better financial results.
Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web.
If you're a digital startup, building and highlighting your social proof is the best way for new users to learn about you.
If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users? I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web.
Immigrants play a huge role in the founding and value creation of today's tech companies. We wonder how much more value could be created if it were easier to get a work visa.
There is very little diversity among founders in the Unicorn Club.
You have to get under the hood and spend some quality time with someone to understand what they're really good at.
There's an opportunity to make your board - and your company - smarter by adding diversity, especially of gender.
Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.
Consider the social proof of a line of people standing behind a velvet rope, waiting to get into a club. The line makes most people walking by want to find out what's worth the wait. The digital equivalent of the velvet rope helped build viral growth for initially invite-only launches like Gmail, Gilt Groupe, Spotify, and Turntable.fm.
History suggests the 2010s will give rise to a super-unicorn or two that reflect the key tech wave of the decade, the mobile web.
Some investors may grumble about entrepreneurs wanting 'unicorn valuations.' But let's be honest: most investors want them, too, and are supporting the massive capitalization of these companies.
Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.
I've learned that you really cannot judge a book by its cover.
Women are thought to be more social, more interested in relationships and connections, better at multi-tasking.
Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer Internet and e-commerce companies.
What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.
When companies are private, founders can share more about their future dreams with investors; report less; and the shares are illiquid, constraining short-term changes in valuation.
Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns - companies that could change your life to work at or invest in if you're not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder.
Why do investors seem to care about 'billion dollar exits?' Historically, top venture funds have driven returns from their ownership in just a few companies in a given fund of many companies.
