Author: Paul Singh

I call this platform dashboard.io and it is a platform for funded startups to connect with and benchmark against their investors’ portfolios. Hundreds of funded startups use the platform daily to connect with the larger network of founders, employees and mentors within networks like 500 Startups, TechStars, Y Combinator, Startup Chile, Seedcamp and more.

Starting today, we’re going to begin releasing it to the networks of other investors — you can signup via AngelList here: dashboard.io

(P.S. you should follow dashboard.io on AngelList.)

Regardless of fund size, this partner will also be responsible for managing the sell-side of the transaction as well. As more investors become comfortable buying online (especially after crowdfunding becomes a reality), we’ll likely see firms liquidate portions of their holdings as well — also via online trading.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, the public markets have been doing it for years and, depending on which reports you believe, nearly 75% of daily public market trading volumes are completed entirely online.

Regardless of whether you’re a founder raising money or an angel/VC investing money, keep a close eye on AngelList’s Invest Online feature — they’re quickly becoming the NASDAQ of the private markets and it’s only a matter of time before investors begin to adapt.

• 1/2 time is coaching content (traction, vision, sexy graphs, etc)
• 1/2 time is coaching communication (verbal, body language, etc)
• If there’s any time left, we’ll work on perfecting the ask.

Building something that people use is no longer good enough — in fact, building something people want is simply table stakes at this point. If you truly want to differentiate yourself when talking to other founders, press or even new hires, learn to communicate. (Quora, as usual, has some useful discussions and tips on public speaking. For practical examples, slides and videos from 500 Startups demo days are online as well.)

The Video (~45 minutes)

The Slides (44 slides)

The Writeup

When Ashish first asked me to speak at this event, he asked me to talk about things that Indian companies could learn from American or other international startups. So, the way I’m going to structure today’s talk is that I’ll first talk about the underlying things that are changing early stage startups. Then I’ll talk about how those things are behind the underlying changes in venture capital. I’ll tie that together to talk about how fundings are changing. And, finally, I’ll leave you with a couple of crisp things you can do as founders to raise money more successfully.

EARLY STAGE STARTUPS HAVE ALREADY CHANGED

First off, you’ll have to pardon the cliché, but early stage startups have already changed. The first underlying factor that drives that change is that initial startup costs continue to drop. It’s driven by the Cloud, driven by open source, driven by the online distribution platforms available to you. It no longer costs, for example, $1M, $2M or $5M dollars to start a new company like it did when founders started up ten or fifteen years ago. With that being said, though, the cost to scale a company is rising. So it is cheaper than ever to start but once you hit product market fit, the cost to scale is rising. That’s usually driven by the fact that companies that achieve that product market fit will often kick their growth into high gear by ramping up their budgets. Separately, customer acquisition channels tend to become saturated which further increases costs at that stage of the game.

The second underlying trend is that as the web gets bigger the world is getting smaller. What that means, for example, is it that if you wanted to raise money from an American investor you might try to get their attention by showing up in their backyard and you were only really competing with a few other American companies for their money. The unfortunate reality is that there are more and more entrepreneurs coming in to the market, just take a look around you in the audience today. There are more and more entrepreneurs coming online in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Sri Lanka, China and Russia.

If you take a moment to really think about that, what I’m suggesting is that while increasing internet penetration certainly gets you more potential users for your product but it also gives me more potential companies to invest in. So it’s no longer good enough to be the best company in your neighborhood or your town or your city and frankly even your country. In fact, it’s incredibly important to be the best company an investor has seen that week. To give you some context: on average, we do probably one new investment somewhere on the planet about every three days. Roughly speaking, we do about one hundred fifty-ish new investments per year.

The third underlying trend is that tech differentiation no longer matters or, in other words, tech differentiation is not as important as it used to be. For most tech startups, if not all tech startups, traction is the only intellectual property that matters anymore. A great example of this is Facebook: they have one billion monthly active users now — that’s simply overwhelming. That’s not to say that nobody will disrupt them, they might. But the point is that it’s incredibly hard to do that. It’s much harder to beat that traction than it is to maybe, say, build a slightly better product.

The fourth underlying trend is that capital is increasingly commoditized. It certainly may not feel like this to many founders but the reality is that there is more money available to you than ever before. It doesn’t matter where you’re based. It doesn’t matter like what industry you’re in or what you do or how unique your thing is. The fact is that there’s more money available to you and it’s rapidly increasing. For example, we’ve got crowdfunding coming relatively soon. In Singapore, the NRF programs can multiply initial investments by up to five times. Then there’s Startup Chile in South America and, more recently, similar programs in St. Louis, Missouri that give startups up to $50K to relocate there.

The point is that none of these things existed a few years ago and that early stage money is increasingly becoming more available. Early stage money is becoming commoditized. In fact, I believe this decade will be remembered as the Rise of the Angels all over the world. But, perhaps more interestingly, I think** it will also be remembered as the Rise of the Entrepreneur and that’s because early stage money is increasingly following you, the founders**.

In fact, a subtle but very important thing to understand is that you don’t need to pitch investors. It’s our responsibility as investors to find you. Your job as the founder is to spend all of your time building your business. In doing that, you automatically make it easier for me to invest in you. Make no mistake about it, the venture capitalists in this room today (including me) want to invest in your company. And if we don’t, you should be asking yourself the hard question: is it because we weren’t able to connect the dots or because you really don’t have something we can invest in?

The fifth, and most profound, trend is that signals are available everywhere. In other words, transparency is everywhere. The best way I can make this point is to use the public markets as an example. For those of you that are new to venture capital, it’s important to understand that this industry is just one asset class in the bigger picture. Other asset classes, for example, are stocks, commodities and derivatives.

Before I go any further, let me make a blunt assertion: early stage venture capital is probably one of the only remaining asset classes that has not seen much innovation within itself. It’s not that venture capitalists are bad people, it’s just that we often don’t feel the pain enough to consider innovating within our own industry. And, as we all probably know from our personal lives, the sensation of pain tends to reduce the delta between cause and reaction. If I step on a nail, my reaction is immediate. If I eat Paula Deen’s cooking every day, checking my cholesterol will likely be the last thing on my mind. (As an aside, Paula’s advice to “just put some butter on it” may be the kind of advice that can apply to anything… including startups.)

Coming back to the point, the public markets have been using data in new and interesting ways — and they’ve been doing it for years. Consider the fact that banks like UBS are paying satellite operators to take hourly photos of every Walmart parking lot in order to make better guesses about how many people are walking through the door. They use this data to make better decisions around buying and selling Walmart stock.

Another company named Genscape is known for flying helicopters over the oil tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma twice a week to determine how much oil is in the tanks. They do this so their customers can make better decisions about buying and selling oil on the commodity markets. And, Wall Street isn’t alone.

If you’ve ever purchased home/auto insurance or taken a loan (especially for things like in-vitro fertilizaton), data was used to make better decisions about you. The point is that other industries are using data anytime it might reduce the risk. They do this because, generally speaking, the delta between when the transaction occurs and when they feel the pain/glory is very small. In other words, if I purchase a barrel of oil, I’ll often see the price change within a very short period of time.

When we used to write large initial checks to startups, it might take nearly two years (and sometimes more) before we feel the pain or the glory. If you consider all the underlying trends I’ve already explained, you’ll recognize that venture capitalists have no choice but to start innovating now — the changes in the startup world are forcing us to begin considering new ways to operate. When we write a small initial check to startups, we’ll feel that pain/glory in a much shorter time. If we’re talking about internet startups in particular, that could be in as little as a few months. That may not feel like a big change, but it’s an order of magnitude sooner than in the past.

One of the most important drivers of transparency has been AngelList. They’ve fundamentally leveled the playing field between startups and investors. (As an aside, the common argument from international startups is that AngelList doesn’t really help them yet. I call bullshit on that. If you’re not doing well on AngelList, you’re probably not communicating clearly — regardless of where you’re located.) It used to be the case that all deals would happen behind the scene but platforms like AngelList now allow you to follow investors, see who they’re following, which startups they’re interacting with and more. That’s profound.

Consider also that most founders (and, investors these days) are on other platforms such as Quora, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Not only are they on those platforms, but they’re engaged with them.There’s an incredible amount of signal within all that noise and the venture capital industry hasn’t traditionally looked to identify that signal. That’s all beginning to change now — firms like Google Ventures, Correlation Venture, Right Side Capital and many others are beginning to take a data-driven approach to early stage venture capital.

The point here is that the startup world is becoming increasingly transparent and that’s allowing founders to have easier access to investors. That transparency is allowing founders to make smarter decisions for their business and it’s allowing investors to make smarter decisions about their investments.

EARLY STAGE VENTURE CAPITAL HAS CHANGED

Now that we’ve covered all of those changes in the startup world, it’s important to understand that venture capital has already begun to change as well. As I mentioned earlier, it’s being forced to change because the startups are changing.

Let me first assert that the state of the art in venture capital is not very sophisticated at all. If you don’t agree with me, consider the number of interactions you’ve had with an investor that included the phrases “I think” or “I feel.” Venture capital has always been a little fuzzy, but that’s changing.

The first underlying change in venture capital is that there is an unbundling of advice, control and money. It used to be the case that the investor would write the check and the proceed to offer advice and take control via a Board seat. Today, they’ll often write you the first check without requiring a board seat — they do this because they realize that Boards can’t help a startup in the early days. (Once the company is clearly gaining traction, Boards can be incredibly useful to help guide the company through the later stages.) They also do this because they recognize that they don’t really need a Board seat in order to control you anyways — they know that later stage investors will look to them to re-invest in subsequent rounds and a smart founder will need to make sure they pay attention to the existing investors.

Separately, consider the number of investors today that boast about their mentor networks (including us at 500 Startups). Many of the smartest investors I know are beginning to realize that we’re not that useful to startups — we need to see ourselves as APIs to venture capital and functional expertise.We’re starting to realize that we don’t really add much value when you recognize that founders need help in the trenches. They need tactical help with data, design and distribution. We need to build mentor networks that can provide that.

The second underlying change in venture capital is that it’s no longer just about capital, dealflow and judgement. Those things certainly are important but, today, access is the most important thing. After all, it doesn’t matter if an investor is excited about a particular company — the real question is whether that particular founder will let the investor participate. In other words, you can’t be an asshole with money anymore. The paradox of investing is that while we all we want to invest in the best startups, the best startups *by definition* don’t need us — they can create a market for their fundraising and be selective about the investors they want in the deal.

As an aside here, my theory on why most investors are perceived negatively is that the person that writes the founder a check is usually not the same person that raised money for the fund. They can’t (or won’t) empathize with the founder. What founders and investors should understand is that our worlds aren’t so different. Startups sit between their customers and their investors. Venture capitalists sit between their customers (the startups) and their investors. In any case, the point is that *access* has become one of the most important things in venture capital.

The third underlying change is that transparency is finally hitting our side of the transactions as well. At 500 Startups, we’ve openly published a checklist of the things we look for in startups. Other investors are blogging and tweeting actively. It’s easier than ever for founders to get to know investors from a distance now. What this means for founders is that you have fewer excuses when you pitch the wrong thing to the wrong investor — for example, pitching your service business to me at 500 Startups shows me that you have done absolutely nothing to learn about what we do and what we’re interested in. You’ve made yourself look like a fool before you even started.

EARLY STAGE FINANCINGS ARE STARTING TO CHANGE

Now that we’ve talked about startups and venture capital, it’s important to understand how all of those changes are being reflected in the terms of early stage fundraises.

Financing terms are increasingly being standardized. Founders are getting more comfortable with things such as Series Seed and similar documents. It keeps legal fees low on both sides of the transaction and, more importantly, it allows the founders to get back to work sooner rather than later (which is especially important in the early days). I should mention, by the way, that I’m not suggesting that the terms are exactly the same for everyone — only that the material terms within the documents are all in place and you can just tweak the numbers as needed.

Convertible notes are becoming the norm at the early stage. That’s not to say that equity deals are bad, it’s just that convertible notes (especially when they’re capped) functionally provide the same thing as equity while allowing the founder to get back to work quickly. Legal fees tend to be lower on convertible notes (usually by an one or two orders of magnitude) which can be especially important when an investor might be writing a smaller initial check anyways.

Fundraising rounds are trending to continuous, rather than discrete, rounds. Rather than closing a specific amount of money on a certain date, founders raising on convertible notes are able to quickly close smaller chunks of money as soon as individual investors give the OK. Paul Graham wrote a fantastic piece explaining this, he calls it high resolution fundraising.

Also, prices are beginning to float. It used to be that everybody in that round would get the same price and the same terms. However, especially for the hottest deals, convertible notes also allow founders to tweak the terms a bit for individual investors that might have specific needs or that can provide a specific type of value-add that is important to the company.

As I mentioned earlier, we’re seeing fewer Board seats in early stage deals. That’s not to say that investors shouldn’t provide governance but, rather, that Boards don’t provide much for the startup when they’ve raised less than $1M, are still looking for product-market fit and are testing customer acquisition channels. Smart investors are recognizing that implicit control is still there in early stage deals, even without the Board seat — after all, outside investors in subsequent rounds will be looking to the existing investors to determine whether to invest.

Finally, and this one is probably the most controversial because we investors hate to admit it, the herd mentality is stronger than ever in early stage rounds today. Founders shouldn’t complain about this, they should seek to take advantage of it instead. What I mean to say is that founders should be strategic about how they approach the market when they begin to raise money for their company.

For example, let’s say you’re raising $250,000. I’d suggest that you identify 5-6 investors on AngelList and then look for warm introductions to them one by one. Get them to invest and incrementally widen the circle to other investors — use their names to excite other investors to join the round. The important point I’m trying to make here is that founders should use herd mentality to their advantage and recognize that platforms like AngelList can help you do that to a broader set of investors than ever.

As another aside for founders, if you’re not sure what to pitch about when you’re talking to an investor, you need to understand that there are only two things that make an investor write a check quickly:

1. fear of missing out
2. greed

That’s it. Don’t tell me that you want to change the world, show me the traction. I’d like to change the world too, but I have a duty to make money for my investors. I would love for me and you to make a lot of money at the intersection of social good – love it – but let’s focus on the greed first.

TACTICAL ADVICE FOR FOUNDERS: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE TRANSPARENCY

If you asked me to roll everything up and just share the single most important change in the startup ecosystem, I’d tell you that it’s transparency between founders and investors. On the one hand, it gives founders access to more investors. On the other hand, it also makes it harder for founders to raise money because investors can now know more than ever about your industry too. In other words, the increasing transparency between founders and investors raises the bar for everyone involved.

A couple of resources I recommend for anyone involved in early stage startups:

• VentureHacks
• Video archives of 500 Startups demo days
• Archived slides from 500 Startups demo days
• Dave McClure
• Brad Feld
• Mark Suster
• Fred Wilson
• Chris Dixon

The fact of the matter is that there’s more information than ever available to you founders today. You should take advantage of it, use it all for your own good. You no longer have any excuses for bad pitches, lack of funding or anything else in between. The point here is that power is shifting to founders, especially the ones that take in all this information and use it to their advantage.

If you remember nothing else, I only have two tactical suggestions for you:

1. Focus on traction.
2. Learn to communicate and inspire.

The first one is something you’ve probably heard but it’s still the #1 issue I see with founders all over the world — they either don’t have it or they don’t make it clear. The second one is something that isn’t suggested often enough: many founders actually do have something interesting but they bury that information behind fear, uncertainty or far too many words. Instead of spending your time worrying about your slides, practice your delivery. Traction combined with a great storyteller is a very, very powerful combination.

Thank you.

When pushed for specifics, these same investors would often say something about the lack of exits and the distrust of entrepreneurs. Although I haven’t done the research, I’d bet that there’s a strong correlation between their pessimism and the year that they raised their fund: if they raised their fund five years ago and they haven’t had any good stories emerge from their investments, it makes perfect sense to now take the contrarian position on the market. Especially if they’re planning to raise another fund. In other words, when you can’t accept the responsibility of your actions, you might as well blame something else.

On the investor side (and, perhaps by extension, on the founder side), there are three main problems in India:

1. The market for private companies is not well understood by someone that has the financial capability to write checks.
2. There are other asset classes within India that have (and continue to achieve) high rates of return. (The Indian real estate market seems to be a good example of “up and to the right.”)
3. The vast majority of VCs in India simply haven’t innovated in any meaningful way. (I spoke to one “early stage VC” that raised a ~$30M fund a few years ago and he’s written three checks to date. All for less than $1M.)

The point is that there aren’t enough early stage companies being funded in India. Which means there simply won’t be enough good ones that make it to the VC level of funding.

The obvious answer here is to encourage more angels to invest in early stage companies and/or for VCs to start writing some of those early stage checks on their own. (I’d argue that the first idea is the only viable one in the long-term but that’s another post itself.) I’m sure one or both of those things will start to happen as the Indian startup ecosystem matures. (I know that we’ll play our part in helping the ecosystem evolve as well: Pankaj Jain recently joined us in Delhi, we’ve announced our tenth investment in India and, amongst other things, I’ve been running angel education events all over India for the past year.)

For the Indian VCs reading this, what this all means for you is that access to few deals that make it to those larger rounds is going to be incredibly competitive. If you can’t (or won’t) write checks at the earlier stage, there’s an increasing likelihood that you won’t even be given an option to consider fast growing companies. Regardless of what happens, there’s one important thing you can do to improve your chances: build a brand. Preferably, a founder friendly brand. (One way to do that, as Naval once put it: less meeting, more tweeting.)

With that definition in mind, what we’re really talking about here today is mitigating uncertainty which is risk that is hard to measure. Particularly in India, the uncertainty (or fear) from investors is that the founders may have demons lurking in the closet. Mitigating uncertainty, in India especially, is about discovering the “unknown unknowns” behind the founders or anyone else involved.

We should recognize that risk and uncertainty are fundamentally different. More importantly, we need to start building that risk and uncertainty into our models. We need to approach Venture Capital as a startup. We need to innovate.

Quoting Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the outcome of the recent US Presidential election in all fifty states, “risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt.”

WE SUCK AT PREDICTING THINGS

We, as an industry, need to admit that we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

What disappoints me is that we expect the founders we fund to innovate. Yet we choose to stay the same. We choose to continue doing business the same way as the VCs that came before us. That’s a shame.

The big opportunity in Venture Capital is to start thinking of ourselves as the card counters at the casino. Rather than the casual gamblers that randomly play tables and hands at the casino.

THE GOOD NEWS

The good news is that most of the risk we see in early stage tech today is reasonably well understood. Most of the uncertainty can be removed by creating better systems and processes to assess incoming deal flow.

As we’ve all advised founders at one point or another, we look for warm introductions and we generally discard cold introductions. That’s one way we’ve already started reducing risk and uncertainty.

We’re increasingly moving to a co-investment model, we’re reducing the risk to ourselves.

More recently, we’re starting to request introductions to founders on AngelList. We’re friending them on Facebook. We’re interacting with them on Twitter. We’re engaging with them through their blogs. The point is that much of what we need to know about a founder is increasingly available and visible online. We’re doing all that to further reduce the uncertainty.

THE BAD NEWS

The market for private companies is especially vulnerable to the ideas of fear and greed. As an investor’s fears increase, her greed decreases. As her greed increases, her fears decrease. Economists might say that the relationship between fear and greed is an example of negative feedback. (The relationship between supply and demand is another example of negative feedback.)

The bad news is that we’re humans. We’re herd animals. As much as we hate to admit it, we look to other investors to get a sense for how we should feel. And this is where many investors begin to make bad decisions. This is where investors begin to lose money. Usually hand over hand. (As an aside, I believe committee-based decision making is one of the leading reasons why venture capital has been so good at losing money.)

IT’S TIME FOR VENTURE CAPITAL TO EVOLVE

The silver lining in all this is that there’s an arbitrage opportunity that exists for investors that are willing to think innovatively. In fact, that’s why a firm like 500 is able to exist — we’re here because there’s a gap between what early stage tech companies need and what early stage investors are currently doing.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that what we’re doing at 500 is the “right way” to invest. Rather, my hope is that you’ll see that we have a thesis that we’re executing upon at 500. More importantly, my hope is that I might inspire you to consider whether you (or the funds you invest in) have a thesis as well.

Thank you.

Early-stage investors are increasingly useless for anything other than money or introductions

My last exit was in 2009 (read: 2009 was pretty much the last time I was actually in the trenches thinking about customer acquisition, product development and anything else a founder loses sleep over). More broadly, many (definitely not all) of the investors out there today probably were never founders (or even worked at startups) themselves. To put it bluntly, being an investor is probably one of the few jobs on the planet where you’re considered a genius if you’re only right 1% of the time. The rest of the time, we get to make hand-wavy assertions (perhaps like this one…) and pat ourselves on the back while founders listen intently.

Here’s the thing though: what worked yesterday probably won’t work today — as the web gets bigger, more startups come online causing the most common customer acquisition channels to get saturated. In other words, the pace of change in the startup world seems to only increase and investors can’t help much when it comes to many of the tactical issues that founders face.

At best, investors can provide high level strategic guidance or direct introductions to mentors that have recent tactical experience in the areas that a founder might need help. (And, anyways, early stage investors are almost always better off searching for new deals rather than trying to deep-dive into a particular startup that might be going sideways. But I digress…) If a founder needs tactical advice on legal and finance, it’s probably OK to ask an investor for specific advice. Otherwise, smart founders should ask an investor for an introduction to someone that might be able to help with an issue.

Most of the tactical help that founders need is available online or through other founders

One of my favorite quotes from Michael Lewis’ Moneyball:

By it’s nature, the internet undermines anyone whose status depends on the privileged access to information.

In other words, most of the challenges that startups face have already been dealt with by others and those people probably talked about it on their blog, Quora, Hacker News or some other online community.

What this really means is that founders need to stop asking for so much advice — most of what they really need to know is already online (for example, many 500 demo day pitch decks and videos are online) and the help they need with tactical issues (such as SEM, SEO, user retention) is available via other founders.

As I said earlier, investors need to lose their egos — these days, there’s little we can do to directly help a startup succeed. Rather than pretend to have superhero-like powers, let’s just try to stay out of the way until our founders call us.

On the other side of this, founders need to gain some confidence — don’t ask an investor for “feedback” on your idea, talk to your customers. The default state of your startup is failure and the only one that can change that is you.

Let’s all do our respective parts to make the startup ecosystem better. Everywhere.

1. Inspire them. Get them to fall in love with your vision.
2. Get the timing right. Catch them when they’re already making a move.

Regardless of which one you choose, have a game plan before you do anything. (The same could be said about fundraising and anything else where one side is pitching to the other.)

• Internet penetration is rapidly rising all around the world. More importantly, internet penetration within the US will begin to slow in the coming years… if it hasn’t already. (To be clear, all I’m pointing out is that >75% of US homes have internet access and, depending on which reports you believe, >60% of US cell phone accounts have some sort of internet access. Conversely, places like India and Brazil have incredibly large populations that are just now starting to get access to the internet.) The web is getting bigger, the world is getting smaller.
• As the internet becomes more accessible across the planet, early stage internet startups can increasingly operate from anywhere. From an immigration standpoint, it’s incredibly important that we encourage the best startup founders around the world to start their businesses here in the US — after all, they’re less likely to move here once they’ve planted their roots elsewhere and business starts booming. It used to be safe to think that the best internet companies would start in the US (usually because most of the money came from here, most of the customers/users were here, etc.)… but that’s not true anymore. Places like Brazil and India are seeing a rapid growth in their middle class and, more importantly, their populations are rapidly coming online. In parallel, more US investors are willing to invest beyond their backyards.
• The US’ strength, in the context of internet startups, is the functional expertise we’ve gained while building companies like LivingSocial, Facebook, Instagram and Mint. One of the big opportunities in early stage investing is to be the API to venture capital and functional expertise for companies that aren’t already in the US. In other words, let’s use our experience with things like data, design and distribution to help foreign companies climb the learning curve faster than their peers — regardless of whether they’re targeting the US or foreign markets.
• Taking the above point one step further, the US already has the most angel/early stage investors that are ready to invest and understand what early stage companies look like. If we can encourage the founders to incorporate here in the US, we’ll be able to pave the way for even more US investors to put money into the company and, whenever the company ultimately exits, the monetary gains would come right back to US citizens. As Carl Pierre recently wrote, “If you take a look at the history of wealth-generation in this country and how companies have generated hundreds of millions in returns regarding what they invested in, it wasn’t in a 2% allocation of gold as a hedge, it was from investing in privately-owned companies that triggered market growth and job creation.“

A few days later, I was selected to join the team and we hit the ground running earlier this year. We spent the first 48-72 hours getting up to speed on the various non-immigrant visa categories. In the early weeks, we also traveled to the processing centers where the bulk of the paperwork is handled. Suffice it to say, it’smuch more complicated than I imagined — USCIS is a large scale operation that must balance policy, logistics and execution.

Now, a few short months later, I can tell you that we’ve made quite a bit of progress and I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished. Amongst other things: we’ve implemented new startup/business related training, we’ve updated internal documents/procedures to streamline the information gathering process and we’ve even taken the USCIS team to visit a few startup accelerators so they can get a feel for what today’s startups look like. The bottom line is, we’ve accomplished quite a bit in 90 days and our efforts caught the eye of the White House which launched the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

There’s still quite a bit of work to be done and, more importantly, all the folks I’ve worked with (at USCIS, DHS, The White House, The State Department and more) have been incredibly supportive of the work we’re doing. So supportive, in fact, that they’ve extended my appointment for another year — we’ve accomplished an incredible amount in the first 90 days, I’m looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish over the next 12 months.

As much as I’d love to say that the next big-ass internet stories are going to start in the US, the fact is that they can be based anywhere now. If we can’t figure out how to at least help them incorporate and raise money within the US, we’re effectively shooting our own economy in the foot.