'venture capital' Category
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Queasy about corporate share buybacks
October 21, 2018Cash-rich corporations in America have been making a record volume of share buybacks recently. According to DataTrekResearch, S&P 500 companies have repurchased $646 billion of their own stock from July 2017 to June 2018. Furthermore, some experts estimate the total will surpass $1 trillion for the 2018 calendar year. In and of themselves, stock buybacks […]
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LINE Messenger’s HTML5 Quick Games
October 7, 2018Our portfolio company CoolGames launched Daily Sudoku on LINE Messenger’s new Quick Games section the other day. The game is a fun little distraction, so I encourage LINE users to give it a try. These HTML5 games are monetized via interstitial ads. Curiously, my first time playing triggered an ad from Facebook: So I suppose […]
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Messaging platforms: a game-changer or a mobile distraction ?
September 12, 2018Here are two relevant extracts from my portfolio company CoolGames’ presentation at the PocketGamer conference in Helsinki yesterday. On the potential for games on messaging platforms worldwide: On today’s key challenge for games publishers on these platforms: Here’s a fun little 1-minute video which highlights the flow of gameplay:
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Portfolio job opportunities – S2 2018
September 4, 2018As summer holidays draw to an end and the work/school season resumes for much of the Northern Hemisphere, here are some job opportunities inside my startup portfolio. [As a reminder, a search on the ‘jobs’ tag on this blog will reveal a more comprehensive list at any given time, scattered with some opinionated career advice.] […]
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Health care and the future of work in Japan
August 19, 2018Anecdotally, two of the most popular investment themes in Japan these days seem to be “Future of Work” and “Aging population.” These terms are so popular that they have almost become cliché among investors here. However, a valid rationale for these investment themes exists. Aging population… It’s well-known now that Japan faces one of the […]
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Digital innovation in the Baltics
August 12, 2018I spent part of this summer returning to Europe’s Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Over ten years had elapsed since my last visit, so a return trip was overdue. Not to mention that I had never been to Latvia. It’s incredible how digitally-connected these small countries have become, and how much they continue to punch […]
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RudeVC Summer reading list 2018
July 14, 2018Time for the RudeVC summer reading list again. Here are my picks for the summer of ’18. Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History, by Stephen D. King. Grave New World presents one of the starkest accounts I’ve read yet of the technological trade-offs facing our era. After the fall […]
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My personal GDPR
July 6, 2018Following a talk I gave in Tokyo last month about European innovation, a number of Japanese corporations have been asking me about GDPR, and whether it applies to them. My answer has been consistently to encourage them to check with their own legal counsel, but that there is a good chance that they fall under […]
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Japan has its successful Unicorn. Next it needs its first Unicorpse.
June 22, 2018[Note: The Japanese version of this piece can be found here: 初のユニコーンを手にした日本、次に必要なのはユニコープス? ] Japan witnessed its first successful unicorn take flight this week in the IPO of Mercari. Since its launch in 2013, Mercari has become Japan’s leading online flea market platform, allowing people to buy and sell secondhand items on a smartphone app with […]
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Are you a 0 to 1 person, or 1 to 10 person ?
June 1, 2018I was having coffee the other day with an entrepreneur I admire who has recently come to the realization that, as he put it, he’s “a 0 to 1 guy not a 1 to 10 guy.” I, too, use this expression a lot to describe people. It has even become a bit of a cliché […]
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Portfolio job opportunities
May 23, 2018Upon request I’m going to make an effort to post job openings in my various portfolio companies at a frequency more commensurate with their pace of growth. Here are a handful of the more notable employment opportunities at some of the companies in which I’ve invested. [As a reminder, a search on the ‘jobs‘ tag […]
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Consent is King: GDPR arrives
May 16, 2018Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes enforceable on May 25th. Intended to ensure data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union, GDPR is essentially a law about consent. GDPR aims primarily to give control to citizens and residents over their personal data. GDPR applies to any company that processes personal data […]