By Semil Shah Some people are operators, some are investors. Few have so effortlessly moved from one side of the table to the other — and back — as Satya Patel, who over the course of his career has held such roles as VP of products at Twitter, partner at Battery Ventures, senior product manager […]
Homebrew
The Opportunity: Servicing the New, On-Demand Service Worker
While consumers wade through the ever-ballooning list of brands wanting to wash their clothes, clean their homes, park their cars and deliver them dinner, a newer crop of startups has begun catering to the needs of those contract workers who make the on-demand economy possible.They’re smart to be zeroing in these independent contractors. On-demand employees […]
Four VCs on What’s Happening Now in On-Demand Startups
Last week, at the On-Demand conference in San Francisco, StrictlyVC interviewed a panel of venture investors about the many companies they’re seeing – and funding — that deliver food, massages, and medical advice in real-time. We talked about the opportunity presented by these startups, as well as the many open questions that on-demand companies have created. […]
Hunter Walk on Thinking Longer Term
It seems like yesterday that Hunter Walk and Satya Patel officially closed their first $35 million venture fund, but it was actually early last summer. And in the life of a seed-stage firm like Homebrew — where Walk and Patel have two-thirds of their capital reserved for follow-on investments — that’s an eternity. No wonder Walk – […]
VCs and Twitter: A Simple Relationship Turns Complicated
Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham wrote of Twitter that it “seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another.” If Wortham is becoming disillusioned […]
Homebrew Separates Itself from the Pack
This summer, yet another San Francisco-based, seed-stage venture fund was formed. Called Homebrew, the firm’s cofounders are Hunter Walk, who spent much of the previous decade working as a product manager at Google, and Satya Patel, who has bounded between operating and investing roles over the last 15 years, including most recently at Twitter, Battery Ventures, […]