Last week, I used Aileen Lee’s excellent TechCrunch article on Unicorns as a jumping off point to analyze the role of the MBA in creating these unusually valuable companies. This week, I want to take a local lens and analyze these special companies that have been created in Boston. As was the case last week, I was ably assisted by HBS 2nd year MBA student Juan Leung Li.

In order to have a reasonable population of companies to assess, we tweaked Aileen’s definition. We looked at the companies in New England (call them “Boston and surrounding”) that had exited in the last 10 years (2003-2013) with greater than $500 million in market valuation.

The Amazon AWS public cloud offering has set the stage for a massive transformation of enterprise IT from being premise-driven (servers, switches, data centers, etc.) to being services driven (APIs, services, consoles, etc.). This transformation promises to produce a new crop of winners and losers.

2014 should be a pivotal year in the emergence of hybrid cloud, as Microsoft and VMware enter the cloud space with their own offerings, and compete directly with Amazon for the $1 trillion+ enterprise IT market once protected by moats of complexity, specializations and proprietary hardware.

The AlwaysOn X Fund finished the week up 1.0%, while the NASDAQ was down -1.5% and the S&P 500 declined -1.6%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 66.6%, the NASDAQ is up 32.5%, and the S&P 500 is up 24.5%.

Facebook’s Instagram announced that daily users now make up half its total unique users. By comparison, Facebook’s total DAUs/MAUs were at 61% as of Q3, while Twitter’s were at 43%. Additionally, Instagram unveiled a new messaging tool that lets users share pictures and videos directly with each other, putting Instagram in direct competition with Snapchat. For the week, FB shares soared 11.2%.

Recently I wrote the first post in a series on board meetings, entitled, “Why You’re Not Getting the Most out of Your Board,” which focused on the need to prepare properly, set good objectives and discuss mostly strategic topics.

Even if you follow this game plan meticulously your board meeting can be taken off course by well-intentioned board members who lead you down a rate hole.

Here’s how it happens …

I’ve been railing about the evils of software patents – how they stifle and create a massive tax on innovation – since I wrote my first post about it in 2006 titled Abolish Software Patents. Seven years ago this was a borderline heretical point of view since it was widely asserted that VCs believed you should patent everything to protect your intellectual property. Of course, this was nonsense and the historical myths surrounding intellectual property, especially the importance and validity of software and business methods, have now been exploded.

My friend Bijan tweeted this last week:

One of the hardest things to watch is a company having an identity crisis

— Bijan Sabet (@bijan) November 27, 2013

He’s right, but I would go further. One of the hardest things to do in the venture business is to stick with a struggling investment.

There are four chapters that Malcolm Gladwell did not publish that I read.

I wanted to call the book David and Goliath and StartUpery. It’d be a sequel to David and Goliath. David and Goliath and Larry Chiang has four live-action business case studies of Davids vs. a Goliath.

Chapter 10 (chapters 1 to 9 are David and Goliath.): Confinity takes on Western Union

One of the great innovations of the 21st century are products that are cloud-connected and update and improve automatically. For software, gone are the days of having to buy a new version of physical media (disks or CD’s.) For hardware it’s the magical ability to have a product get better over time as new features are automatically added.

The downside is when companies unilaterally remove features from their products without asking their customers permission and/or remove consumers’ ability to use the previous versions. Products can just as easily be downgraded as upgraded.

Hi kids. I’m back from hiatus to expose, expound, and expand on a pretty smart networking maneuver I pattern recognized. While attending the slew of first-week-in-December holiday parties, I discovered…

The fake girlfriend signature move.

You see, as a VC, there are women everywhere, all-the-time. It’s tough to stay monogamous. Sometimes, having a significant other is not a deterrent, it is a catalyst (

Venturebeat reported yesterday that US startup valuations have reached ten year highs. You can see from the charts above that median valuations have been increasing at all stages from seed through to Series D or later. Series A valuations have increased more slowly than other Series’ which shows that there is a bit of a squeeze at this level, but suggests the ‘crunch’ isn’t that dramatic.