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Month: March 2025

Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Om Malik wrote an amazing piece (Skype is dead. What happened?) on the demise of Skype and there are lessons to be learned here for founders – and investors.

At launch, Skype was a seminal technology that upended communications. Prior to the launch of the peer-to-peer network, long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive. Suddenly, one could call anywhere in the world for free, as one can do with so many services today – now, even video, of course. At one point, like Zoom, Skype was a verb.

As for the lessons: Read More...

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

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Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay

Startups are often put under the microscope when they go belly-up. The press is quick to do the forensics on what went wrong. What about the investors who put in the money? Where’s the scrutiny there? We’ve seen the bar raised for founders, but what about that other side of the table?

“Here’s the problem: this entire system optimizes for investor survival, not startup success,” said Paul O’Brien in a LinkedIn post. “A 90% startup failure rate? That’s not an inevitability…But no one in venture has an incentive to change. The funds get raised, the 2% management fees roll in, and the game continues. If investors actually cared about optimizing startup success, they’d be applying First Principles thinking, not just playing the same old VC lottery. They’d be using frameworks like the Bell Mason Diagnostic, which systematically assesses startups based on real, stage-appropriate criteria, rather than some partner’s gut feeling on whether the founder has “the right energy.”

“But most firms don’t do this because, why fix a system that already benefits them? Read More...