Jeff Bussgang

My partner, Chip Hazard, has been on a blogging tear lately on the topic of Applied AI. We are pretty fired up about this theme here at Flybridge and Chip’s recent posts provide a nice outline as to why

One of the primary areas of focus for Flybridge over the years has been to be the first institutional investor behind companies looking to transform the enterprise technology landscape with modern software. Given the explosion in the volume of data being generated globally, this theme has led to investments in companies such as MongoDB (databases) and Nasuni (storage) that operate at the data infrastructure layer of the enterprise tech stack

In my blockchain investment work (we have invested in six early-stage projects, including bloXroute, Enigma, FalconX, NEX and two stealth projects), I have been struck by the fact that decades of progress on applying the scientific method to entrepreneurship (e.g., experimental design, lean startup, design thinking), as well as decades of established governance modeled, are being effectively blown up by Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Steve Blank and Eric Ries popularized applying the scientific method to startups in an incisive fashion with the publishing of their books, Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Lean Startup, respectively. With blockchain startups raising over $5 billion in 2017 and over $12 billion through the first three quarters of 2018, it appears that this discipline of staged experimentation and fundraising is being discarded. Harvard Business School professor Ramana Nanda and I spent some time on this issue in an article we published last week in Harvard Business Review called “The Hidden Cost of Initial Coin Offerings”.

Our insight a decade ago that developers were becoming the kings of IT led to a fruitful investment thesis, led by my partner Chip, around developer driven adoption and community building (as exemplified by our investments in MongoDB, Codecademy, Crashlytics and Firebase). ’s Scott Switzer (founding CTO of the largest open source advertising exchange network) – to share best practices in community-building in the context of crypto. Crashlytics founder, Wayne Chang, likes to refer to the initial product you release to your community as the Minimum Lovable Product (MLP): a product that is “so intuitive, so satisfying to use, that your customer base can’t help but tell someone about their experience. If you can frame your work in the context of an existing trend or platform and then establish your presence in the communities and academic environments where that trend is flourishing, you can put yourself in a strong position to ride someone else’s wave and not be forced to generate all the kinetic energy to support your platform by yourself.