yeah, sorry fred the commenting system sucks here... overdue for Disqus upgrade. (and blog overhaul as well, however i'm more focused on http://blog.500startups.com which is using Disqus)

@Fred & others: to clarify, i am not blindly espousing "spray & pray". what i am saying is that a quantitative, high-volume investment strategy filtered based on reasonable assessment of team, product, market, customer & revenue along with domain-specific expertise, and selective follow-on investment with incremental knowledge of company metrics and progress CAN result in good outcomes.

yeah, sorry about that... someday i'll upgrade to Wordpress / Disqus.

seriously Fred, did you read anything in point #3? we are NOT just spray & pray. i'm open to criticism, but i'd appreciate if you actually read my post first.

@David DiCillo: my mother was italian. Saluto, paisan.

while i appreciate & respect David Rose and AngelSoft, there is a substantial difference between AngelSoft and Angel List. and for those who haven't seen it yet, also http://CapLinked.com (disclosure: i'm an investor)

Sramana: obviously you didn't read point #3 in my post. Spray & Pray isn't all that we do. But regardless, the assumption that "Focused" investing is better is arguably false. Let's consider doctors who do knee surgeries or lasik.... would you like to have one who performs 1, 10 or 100 such surgeries per year? sometimes the network effects of large-scale investing are non-intuitive in the other direction. to each their own, but i'm comfortable with my approach... we'll see in a few years if i'm right.

congrats on new gig at Intel Christine! Mike & Lucy are lucky to have you join their team :) and we are super psyched to have you as a mentor and venture advisor at http://500startups.com -- we need to go do some disrupting very soon. dmc

awesome stuff... especially #19 & 20.

great summary Christine... and I agree, the VCs have been moving the cheese around quite a bit lately (but then again, the market and their LPs have also been moving the cheese around on them too ;) as you noted above, seems like the stakes have been raised for startups to achieve a number of milestones before raising a true venture round (>$1-2m), and functional product is just the beginning. user experience, usability testing, conversion metrics, customer acquisition cost, and even early monetization may now be part of the set of expectations for new startups to manage and for incubators / accelerators to help guide. and yet, this is a good thing. the more rigor and foundations we can help provide new startups, the stronger & more prepared they will be when they leave the nest... or on this case, the rat race / mouse maze. better keep moving. feets don't fail me now....

@peter: not counting them out, just saying they better hurry up on the customer acquisition... and as soon as someone starts paying them / giving them discounts, everyone else will have to play that game too. "by whatever means necessary"

@MikeDuda: sometimes a little tough love is the best form of encouragement. i hope FourSquare & GoWalla do well... but i still want my $5 bucks dammit.

@nonya: i resemble that remark.

it's more encouragement than criticism. but there's a war on fer shur, and they better get Game ON.

nah, already WAY outside my price range. they'll do fine I'm sure, just gonna need a lotta capital. just what big dumb VC is made for, right? (but srsly, you need to juice basic check-in behavior with discounting, and there WILL be a war over this point, mark my words.)

ha ha -- BRING that Venn diagram, sister! (& thanks for dropping by :)

agreed adam. and PayPal + $5B in cash is a formidable combo of assets. still, requires will & wherewithal to know what to do with them. and for the life of me, i can't understand what folks over there are thinking. build, buy, or partner to do SOMEthing...

i think you got in at a good valuation, and you will definitely make money :) btw lemme know if any chance you might join us for http://SMASHsummit.com -- we'd love to have you! have a good wknd,

yes it is, and a very seldom-used LBS at that... with pretty crappy game mechanics, and no financial incentives. (however if they build it into Android phones, then it might become useful)

>> "typically inarticulate" perhaps... except that i'm not. on the contrary: i'm atypically extremely articulate, yet still like to swear for emphasis. and complaining about use of the word "fuck" is a crutch for small-minded people who can't deal with diversity in verbal expression. seriously, it's a word ... deal with it. for the record: the more power you give to "forbidden" vocabulary, the more i love to use it to shock you.

>>@foo: "MSFT is going to die b/c Facebook takes $6B in search from google? " 1) mainly talking about LBS / consumer stuff 2) i *did* say "*VERY* slowly"... as in another 10-15 years 3) MSFT isn't getting killed [just] by FB, they're getting killed by Apple (HW, OS), Google (search, browser), and many, many others. of course they'll still generate bazillions for a long, long time... but they crested years ago, except perhaps for a few interesting areas like XBox. the primary evidence of MSFT losing relevance (at least in consumer market) is that they just don't come up very much in developer conversation (other than tools, not platforms) and they don't have even the most basic strategies for delivering distribution / user acquisition, as well as monetization. they could easily fix this, but they have shown very little inclination or aptitude for doing so.. which is kind of sad. they could be a player.

buying a (very small) Jaiku is not quite the same as buying a (larger, more developed) FourSquare or Gowalla. not saying it's going to make Google successful in LBS, but it still might make sense for Google to do an LBS acquisition to accelerate development. history doesn't always repeat itself. but it does sometimes rhyme.

>>are you a betting man? ... you bet your sweet ass i am Fred ;) but anyway i'm pretty sure you'll make money on FourSquare, perhaps even at the most recent valuation (at least 3x maybe, not sure about more than that tho). still, i think FourSquare needs to raise a shitload more capital to make a go of it, and if they do get the take-out offer at anything north of $200M, i'd probably strongly consider taking it. don't know if i'd want to compete with Facebook and whomever else they buy if it's not you. in any case, my point was mainly about the need for a big raise / lot of capital to win LBS... and also that with Facebook's userbase, they'll be a tough game to beat no matter what.