Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) are back in business. and with them, come tons of S-1. A Form S-1 is the initial registration form that private companies file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when they intend to file for IPOs. It looks like this Form S-1 Now, whether you invest or not, I totally recommend reading a S-1 because it is a gold mine! It teaches you so much not only about that specific company but also: 1. How much the company intends to raise and how they plan to spend? 2. What do they believe their moat is? 3. What is the risk they see in the future (no matter how hunky-dory the business model looks like from outside) 4. Competitive analysis of not just the company but also the industry they operate in 5. How is the company's financial performance, so that you can tie in the truths and PRs properly Reading a complete S-1 of a company is extremely time-consuming and to be honest, quite a waste of time. For example, this Asana S-1 is more than 161 ...
My experience with the mobile apps has been mixed both as a user and as a product guy. Most of the organizations, whom apps I have used, have created the apps more as an afterthought than as a planned strategy. As a result, these apps have become more like a broken and hanging limb off their body than a part of theirs. Usually, these apps are created thinking the target users being people who are connected with the Social brand. Now the intent is great, but the direction is flawed. The mobile apps are indeed are a part of your Social business than Social brand and hence there is a huge divergence in the way people look at it. I personally believe that with screen size of phone getting larger every six months, by 2015 we should see a movement more towards mobile websites from apps, since they don't need to be installed and with a bigger screen size and HTML5 adoption, most of their current limitation will get away. However, in this blog, I am dealing with one of the most c...
Steve Jobs did it by building Apple aficionados . Marc Andreessen did that with Netscape when he forced people to look web browsing as an entertaining experience and not just "a geek activity". Sean Parker , Shawn Fanning and John Fanning did it with Napster when they changed the way people look at the music. They all are/were great product guys who knew what the tribe wanted even before the tribe had laid eyes on their products. They didn't do the focus group studies or market research to know the viability of their idea. They didn't show the stakeholders, mocks of their products so that they can "fill in the blanks". But is that the only way to leave the product legacy? I don't think so. Google products , passes through at least 3000 eyes, before they get released even for the Beta. Agree, their hit rate is low but that is because they churn products dime a dozen, an evidence of their agile environment - one of the most important as...