ReadWriteStart

It's not easy to build a great Web application. While open-source tools, readily available APIs, social platforms and cloud hosting providers have made it easier in many ways, being a Web entrepreneur is still not for the faint of heart. It's challenging to design, build and deploy software. It's also challenging to attract and retain a loyal community of customers and users.

This is one of the reasons that it's so important to have a good co-founder. Although you certainly can make the case for a single-person startup, it's so much easier to have a co-founder and we've covered in the past tips on finding a good one. In this post, I'll focus on a few keys to helping co-founders work together to build a better product. A quick note, while I primarily talk about co-founders, the same principals should also be applied to interacting with all early employees as you really are partners on the mission to build a great product.

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008. Last month, we started researching this with our new partner, ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Launched in February 2009, ChubbyBrain is a New York City-based information services provider that democratizes startup and investor information. Early-stage investing is so important for the innovation economy, and the data we were seeing was either incomplete, only available quarterly, or presented with a negative slant. That is why we are presenting this data every month.

With this interview, we are again branching out. Naval Ravikant is not a traditional VC. He is an angel investor, a serial entrepreneur, and he writes the very entertaining and informative Venture Hacks blog, a must-read for entrepreneurs. Listen to the MP3 below if you want to learn more about how to get viral growth, how to think about native revenue models for social media, and why hackers are making serious money with virtual currencies.

Do you remember the headlines about VC investment "falling off cliff" after some data was reported by NVCA in early April? We took a contrarian view, saying the trend was down, but challenging the doom and gloom that was jumping from the headlines. This was based on our own online research and some anecdotal data from interviews. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures also dug a bit deeper. The more we looked into this, the more we saw that the underlying data was not as authoritative as one might imagine. Many people popped up in the comments offering additional data. One was a New York City-based startup research firm (founded as recently as February 2009) called ChubbyBrain (great name!), which tracks this kind of data for a living. So this month, we relied on ChubbyBrain to help us dig deeper and get you the facts.

The Internet started in America, but the big growth in the coming years may come from Asia. We recently interviewed a VC in India. Clearly, it was time to get a perspective from China. So we spoke to Richard Lim, a Partner at GSR Ventures, a China-focused VC fund.

Here is why China is a fascinating opportunity for Web technology entrepreneurs: the number of people online in China is more than in the US, yet the revenue from ads and e-commerce is only 10%, compared to 12% in the US. Why? About 50% of users are students, who spend very little. But imagine what will happen when they graduate and start earning money.

In the last two months, we have interviewed six VCs. In each case, we asked the same question: "How is early-stage financing doing during this downturn compared to the last one in 2001/2002?"

In this post, we consolidate all the responses, to see if a consensus among VCs emerged. But we also dig a bit deeper. We have been tracking Series A deals since the global financial crisis started. There is some concern that VCs are not walking the walk, that they say all the right things about investing through a downturn, but they may not actually do those things. In this post, we shine a light on that question.

This is the first in a weekly series of interviews with venture capitalists. We chose True Ventures to kick off the series because it closed a Series A deal for Syncplicity in the dark days of October 2008, earning it a spot on our A-Team. When it closed a second Series A with Loopfuse in February 2009, it joined a very small contingent of VCs that have done two Series A deals since the financial meltdown.

Dave McClure has fingerprints all over the social media map, so you have probably seen him on his blog, his Twitter account (which has 15,880 followers as of this writing), or Facebook. Dave is an angel investor who recently joined a VC fund (the Founders Fund).The accepted wisdom today is that angels have buried their wallets and run for the hills. So it seemed like a good time to interview an investor who is very active at the seed level.

True Ventures got our attention by closing a Series A deal in the dark days just after the financial meltdown, funding Syncplicity. It has just announced that it is funding LoopFuse, a late entrant to the very crowded marketing automation space. Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse, confirms that the Series A investment is $1.4 million. This puts True Ventures into the very elite class of VCs that have sealed two Series A deals in web technology since the financial meltdown (the other VC is Emergence Capital).

We first reported on VC Series A deals in the web-tech sector in October 2008, following the financial meltdown, and we updated our coverage in November, reporting some improvement. Now it is time for the good news from December and January. The amount invested by VCs in Series A deals for web-tech ventures went up from $19.1 million in November to $28.8 million in December, and up another notch to $30.3 million in January. Looking very good.