Originally published at www.pehub.com on December 7, 2015. A significant event happened in early 2013: a new venture capital fund was born. This may not sound so significant to you, but it was significant to me and my partners at Subtraction Capital…. Read more »
Originally published on Medium by Henry Ward, Founder & CEO of eShares. Below is an excerpt from a talk I gave at the eShares Town Hall in November 2015. I hope it is helpful to other CEOs struggling with hiring. TLDR Hiring Principles: Hiring… Read more »
Originally published at PokitDok.com on January 7th, 2016 by Lisa Maki, CEO & Co-Founder of PokitDok. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010, put healthcare under a microscope with its relentless focus on higher quality care at a lower cost…. Read more »
At Subtraction Capital, we invest in companies we would work for. Literally, if the fund did not exist tomorrow, Jason or I (usually both though) need to be able to say that we would be totally excited about being an employee at… Read more »
Originally published at Inc.com on October 29, 2015 by Bubba Page, Founder of QuotaDeck. I have loved getting to know venture capitalists from all over the country during my time fundraising for my company QuotaDeck and probably will be back at it again next… Read more »
He had me at “We need to dynamically append sharing urls with utm codes.” For those of you in marketing who have ever met someone like Pete O’Leary of Chefs Feed, you know what I mean. Pete is one of those rare,… Read more »
In Part 1, I reviewed a general philosophy that starts a framework for managing very talented folks in Silicon Valley. Remember, this is the Big Leagues of tech, and if you want your company to grow fast you need to attract and retain… Read more »
Trick or Treat! Really the horses have been dressing up as Unicorns for a while, but Halloween just seems like a fun day to call out the emperor’s clothes for the costumes they are in many cases. Since @AileenLee @CowboyVC coined the… Read more »
Hiring talented people and letting them execute (and not leave) is the only path to success for a startup. As I said in the “Subtraction = Growth” blogpost, bandwidth is the most critical resource of any startup. A manager can not afford… Read more »
This is my first post on working with start up companies in the area of User Acquisition and Engagement. As Operating Partner for Subtraction Capital and during my time at BEA, Red Bricks Media, Levi’s and Practice Fusion, I predominantly worked on… Read more »
I am a very visual thinker, so I like to organize the world into visual paradigms. Conceptually, I bucket two main kinds of venture capital funds, birds and turtles. Both have been around for a long long time, both can point at… Read more »
Read time = < 2 minutes What happens when primary and secondary buyers of late stage private companies want to start selling out of their positions? Many of them are sitting on huge unrealized gains. Unrealized gains are great, but eventually they… Read more »
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free – Michelangelo We are often asked why we named the firm Subtraction Capital vs a more typical name like Thermo-Nuclear Capital, “Blowin’ Stuff Up”. “I thought you were supposed… Read more »
We love Enterprise Software. More specifically, we love investing in software solutions that help enterprises modernize their businesses and run them more effectively and efficiently. We also love investing in founding teams who have a deep personal passion for solving complicated problems… Read more »
In late December 2014 I was talking on the phone with the CEO of one of our promising portfolio companies. During that conversation I began to sense that he believed his company value would cap out in the several-hundred-million-dollars range, and that… Read more »
Hear Paul Willard, Subtraction Capital Partner, talk about his past experience as Head of Marketing for Practice Fusion, Coupons.com and Atlassian. Paul goes in depth on habit forming design, channel development, SEO specifics and the importance of Agile Marketing. Listen: View the… Read more »
I am often shown results from some kind of trial or test performed in a market and asked if I think the results should be acted upon or not. And I always fall back to the same method I used to evaluate… Read more »
The use of personas for user experience design is widely regarded as a best practice and widely adopted in tech world. Designing for an archetype customer yields more usable and effective interfaces than other methods. In my memory, Alan Cooper labeled it and defined… Read more »
We’ve all heard the saying “A rising tide lifts all boats”. What I’m thinking about lately is the rising tide of startups that are all competing with each other for scarce resources (talent and capital, mostly). I’m seeing an interesting effect in… Read more »
For 15 years I ran technology product, design, and marketing teams, and every time I changed companies I had to build two things: a messaging platform and an A-B testing engine. Regardless of the vertical my company was attacking, we always needed… Read more »