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On Wednesday, it was announced that a game called Minecraft had hit a million sales. This probably isn’t the first time that you, a denizen of the internet, have heard that word. But unless you’re in the habit of following up on every mention of every indie game you happen to see, there’s a good chance this particular title might have slipped under your radar.

So what is this Minecraft, and why is everyone talking about it? And more importantly, why should you care?

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Tim Ferriss is a 33-year-old Silicon Valley angel investor, consultant, Singularity University advisor, and former entrepreneur who in 2007 published a book called The 4-Hour Workweek; in 2008 won Wired‘s “Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time” prize; and last month published a sort-of-sequel, The 4-Hour Body. His books seem roughly equally divided between really worthwhile, interesting advice and totally ridiculous crap. What’s most interesting about them is their approach. In his own bizarre yet effective way, Ferriss has become the world’s first hacker-guru. And I hate to admit it, but I must confess: I have halfway become a devotee.

The 4-Hour Body attacks self-improvement in the same way Silicon Valley startups strive for success: data-driven decision-making, A/B testing, iterative development, willingness to pivot. (Watch Andrew Keen’s TCTV interview with him). This isn’t new. A sizeable subset of the hacker community has been “hacking their body” for years, and sites like Lifehacker have grown around that approach. Ferriss, though, is the first to promulgate that ethos to the general population – and he has been wildly (and deservedly) successful. 4-Hour Body rocketed straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

It helps that he’s obviously a really charmingly enthusiastic guy, and a good writer to boot. But it’s his commitment to evidence-based decisions that sold me. Ferriss can’t stop citing the science behind his conclusions, had a blood-glucose monitor implanted in his body as part of his three years of research, and writes proudly about the time he spent weighing everything that went into or came out of his gastrointestinal tract. Better he than me. I’ve known for years that I’d eventually have to start paying attention to my diet to maintain my fitness level; so my girlfriend and I decided that this painstakingly researched eating plan – an iteration from the paleolithic, South Beach, and low-glycemic diets of yesteryear – was for us.

Not that it’s just a diet book. There are sections about ultra-endurance running, optimizing the female orgasm, living on less sleep, gaining muscle, and “becoming superhuman.” (See the “ridiculous crap” caveat above.) But it’s his data-driven slow-carb eating plan that struck me most, because, well, it’s wildly effective.

I spent a day in headache-ridden sugar withdrawal at first. Who knew I was a junkie? Since the first week, though, it’s been bizarrely agreeable. Our general mood and feeling of wellbeing has improved. The mid-afternoon downbeat lull no longer hits. Judging from my weightlifting and running, I’m near a lifetime apogee of fitness. Our desire to eat bad food has diminished. I do miss beer, but wine and Laphroaig fill that void. (I have, however, not stopped eating fruit. Sorry, Tim.)

And the weight loss was startling. I wasn’t that interested – I’m not particularly thickset – but when I boarded the 4-Hour train, our fancy-schmancy scale reported that I weighed 197.6 pounds. Ten days later, after morning coffee & protein? 187.0. (For calibration, I’m 6’1″.) I assume most of the difference is water weight, but still, that part actually seems to work as advertised. I expected no less, given the the data that drove it.

I know, I know: “why are you writing about your lunch on TechCrunch?” Because my lunch is a data-driven iteration from the previous state of the art – in other words, a technical innovation. Look beyond the Valley (and its counterparts around the world) and you’ll find that approach can and will pay dividends almost anywhere.

The next generations of telecom technologies are called “LTE” or “4G”. China’s Huawei believes that by 2015, it will hold 15–20% of the worldwide patents in these technologies, and that these will earn it at least 1.5% of the sales price of every device—every cell phone, laptop, and tablet—that uses them.  Huawei is on track to achieve its goals: in 2007, it held just 152 patents; by the end of 2009, it had applied for 42,543 patents, of which 11,339 had been granted in China, 215 in the United States, and 1282 in Europe. Huawei’s rival, ZTE, claims to hold 7% of the world’s LTE patents and plans to increase this to 10% by 2012.

Emboldened by these successes, the Chinese government has initiated a nationwide program to make China the world leader in patents in every important industry.  The New York Times reported that the government is offering cash bonuses, better housing, and tax breaks to individuals and companies filing the most patent applications. According to the Times, China’s goal is to increase the number of its yearly “invention” patent filings from this year’s 300,000 to one million by 2015. And it wants another one million “utility-model patents”, which typically cover items like engineering features in a product. In comparison, there are 500,000 invention patents granted every year in the U.S. The requirements for “utility-model patents” are so mundane that they are not even recognized in the U.S. as a legitimate criterion for the existence of intellectual property.

The Times quotes David J. Kappos, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, as saying that the leadership in China “knows that innovation is its future, the key to higher living standards and long-term growth. They are doing everything they can to drive innovation, and China’s patent strategy is part of that broader plan”. Kappos seems to believe that, with patents, China is unleashing a golden age of innovation.

Kappos is wrong.

The reality, as I explained in my BusinessWeek column China Could Game the U.S. in Intellectual Property, is that patents will neither make China more innovative nor benefit the global economy. Just as the vast majority of China’s academic papers are plagiarized or irrelevant, so will its government-sponsored patents be tainted. In contrast to the tiny proportion of Chinese academic papers that serve to expand the world’s knowledge base, however, Chinese patents will serve as land mines for foreign businesses. They will allow China to demand license fees from companies that do business there or to shut them out entirely. (And these will hurt China’s own startups.)

In the tech world, patents don’t foster innovation; they inhibit it. They are like nuclear weapons in an arms race, in that companies use them to hold competitors back or to extort license fees from companies that can’t afford the time and cost of litigation. These battles play out every week in Silicon Valley: among the behemoths—Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP—and between behemoths, startups, patent trolls, and large corporations. Startup entrepreneurs live in constant fear that behemoths or patent trolls will bankrupt them with frivolous lawsuits.

Most U.S. patents are commercially frivolous and irrelevant. The Chinese patents will be even more so. As The Economist reported, Chinese patent examiners are paid more if they approve more patents, and so routinely approve even the most dubious filings. Chinese academics, companies, and individuals have strong incentives to patent worthless ideas: with more patent grants, professors gain tenure, workers and students gain residence permits to live in a desirable cities, corporate income tax is reduced from 25% to 15%, and companies win lucrative government contracts. The reward doesn’t come from innovation, but from the act of filing a patent application.

So in the years ahead, China will have lots of patents—far more than the U.S. You can’t fault China; it is simply taking a page from Silicon Valley’s playbook. Its leaders have figured out how the American patent system works and how to master it.

In addition to the huge numbers, what will make it even more difficult for western businesses is that these patents will be in Chinese. These businesses will have to hire Chinese lawyers to search the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office database for patents that cover any of the technologies they want to sell in China. And if someone has already beaten them to the punch and filed an application for a similar invention, they must fight it out in Chinese courts—where judges are likely to side with locals. Intellectual-property lawyer JiNan Glasgow told me of a case in which this happened recently: a supplier used e-mailed design documents and product specifications and filed its own patents in China and then enforced them against the inventing company (its customer).  Rules of evidence made it nearly impossible to prove that the invention and figures originated in the U.S., because e-mail and electronic documents are not considered admissible reliable evidence in China.

This is a battle we can’t win. The Chinese economy will be littered with millions of stumbling blocks for foreign business. These companies will have to offer up their intellectual property in exchange for Chinese intellectual property—in the same way that IBM and Microsoft trade patents. Or they will have to pay license fees to enter the Chinese market. And China may challenge the U.S. globally with its new patents as it plans to do with 4G.

It’s best to disarm before it is too late.  That means reforming the patent system. We really don’t need software patents, and we really don’t need patents in other technologies that evolve rapidly. In these fields, speed and technological obsolescence are the only protections that matter. I’ll concede that in some slow-moving fields, patents do have a role. Patents successfully protect the designs of industrial equipment, pharmaceutical formulations, biotechnology products and methods, biomedical devices, consumer products, advanced materials and composites, etc. But we can have different rules for different types of products.

And once we reform our patent system and unleash greater innovation in the U.S., we can teach other countries how to reform their systems. Innovation is a game that the U.S. can easily win at. And when we compete on innovation, it’s win-win rather than lose-lose.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Back in December, we spotted an SEC filing indicating that Union Square Ventures was raising between $135 million and $200 million for a new “Opportunity Fund.” The offering wasn’t complete and the firm could not discuss it, but today partner Fred Wilson explains in a post what the new fund (which ended up being a $165 million fund) is all about.

The fund is not about going after different opportunities than Union Square has been focussed on since the outset. It is that the size of the opportunity Union Square is focussed on—which Wilson describes “Internet services that create large networks”—is larger than ever. And the new fund will provide more dry powder to invest in network startups, whether they need $25,000 or $25 million. Wilson explains:

Since 2004, the opportunity to invest in networks has evolved. In 2004 the entire market capitalization of the social media sector was probably less than $100M. Today a single company in that sector is valued at over $50B. The amount of venture capital focused on the sector has exploded. Networks that did not exist in 2004 now consume a huge chunk of users’ time and attention, making the launch of new networks more challenging. The opportunity to invest in networks has changed, and once again we are changing with it.

Union Square is an investor in Twitter, Zynga, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Disqus—all of which fit under the network thesis. As these companies grow and command higher valuations in private rounds (Union Square sat out Twitter’s latest $200 million round), the Opportunity Fund will allow Union Square to keep participating. It will also be tapped to invest in companies in later rounds (something Union Square has shied away from so far, they like to be first) and other special situations such as spin-offs. Interestingly, Union Square is not committing to invest all the money raised. Maybe they should have called it the Dry Powder Fund instead.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Raj Lalwani, the co-founder and CEO of Hallmark Social Calendar (formerly Social Calendar), a birthday reminder app on Facebook.

In 2007, when Facebook opened its platform to developers, it seemed Facebook was using Microsoft’s playbook—let developers create apps using their platform and see what apps succeed (just like Microsoft did with Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Harvard Graphics). Then acquire or clone the successful ones (Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint) as the cash cows and leave the crumbs (relatively speaking) for others. But something seems to have gone wrong—the third-party app ecosystem is not exactly thriving and Facebook still has no cash cows like Microsoft does (Office and Windows).

Instead, Facebook is increasingly looking like Yahoo!—it does everything from Photos and Chat to Email and Places. It provides just enough features to be functional but leaves much to be desired, and increasingly depends on advertising as the revenue model.

Until recently Microsoft had the largest market cap in technology (it’s Apple now). Here is what Facebook should steal from Microsoft’s playbook.

Facebook Must Make Sure The Third-Party App Ecosystem Is Thriving

This is important for two reasons. One, it keeps the platform alive and vibrant for users—Windows would not have been very interesting or successful if all apps came from Microsoft. Two, successful ideas will come from this ecosystem. If the Facebook platform is not viable for app developers, they will continue to look for alternatives and someone will crack the social graph code sooner or later elsewhere. For instance, Apple’s iPhone is becoming a meaningful platform for app developers.

It seems Facebook has thrown the baby out with the bath water when it comes to communication channels that were being abused by some app developers. I used to play Scrabulous on Facebook. I tried playing Scrabble recently but the other player wasn’t notified that it was her move! Since then I started playing Words with Friends on iPhone and it just works. As soon as my friend makes a move, I get a Push Notification. Facebook should handle notifications the same way as publishing on the Wall—ask users for explicit permission to send a notification to a friend.

News feed stories increase engagement and discovery for apps. But the volume of stories generated has forced Facebook to algorithmically decide what stories to show on the home page. Have you visited FarmVille or Causes lately? They both prominently display friend activity on their home page. Why? The same reason that made Facebook so successful—users can see what their friends are doing—an explosive mix of social discovery, social proof and voyeurism. This is where I see the solution for resolving the battle for news feed stories between Facebook and app developers. Instead of each app trying to implement its own friend activity, Facebook should provide an easy way to display the app-specific news feed inside the app. At the same time, Facebook should continue to bubble up interesting stories on its home page.

That leaves the problem of app discovery—reaching out to new users who are not yet app users. If social discovery is going to be the killer app for Facebook (I will come to that in a moment), app discovery is just a small part of that. Showing apps used by a user on their Profile, as Facebook used to do before, is a good start. But when it comes to discovery, Facebook can borrow from another playbook: Google’s. Some developers will be happy to pay for leads. How about sponsored links just above the organic list of apps used?

Facebook Must Find Its Cash Cow—Fast

To me social games like FarmVille seemed like a cash cow. Facebook should have acquired or cloned Zynga. It seems Facebook has chosen a platform angle instead, namely, advertising and Facebook Credits, which has the potential to be a cash cow for Facebook.

However, I believe, “social discovery” is potentially the killer app for Facebook. If you are like me, you discover new restaurants because a friend recommends or takes you there. I always ask my friends about new movies—I know which friends have similar taste as me,and which ones I can safely ignore. The list extends to TV shows, plumbers, books, music, kitchen appliances, and gadgets. (Facebook’s Photos app has become so popular mainly because of social discovery of new photos uploaded by friends. Tagging is just a mechanism to facilitate discovery.) When I buy a book on Amazon.com, I should be able to publish a story for my friends (but not an automatic story—remember Beacon?). When any of my friends clicks on the action link or completes the transaction, Amazon would pay Facebook. Such sponsored feed items should be clearly marked and shown prominently just like sponsored links on Google.

Facebook should look to Microsoft for its playbook to make its platform more developer-friendly, but also sprinkle in a bit from Google’s sponsored links and apply them to social discovery.

Inspired by the epic Angry Birds for BlackBerry, Myspace VP Sean Percival has come up with a mock hypothetical of what the popular photosharing app Instagram would look like on the text-heavy and camera-weak BlackBerry platform. The above image is particularly humorous when coupled with the fact that Instagram, which just hit one million downloads, has not yet launched on Android.

Percival’s ultimate message here is intended to go beyond humor however as he’s actually posted the image to Instagram as an experiment, “With so many brands getting into Instagram I was curious how a piece of humor (or viral) content might do within the Instagram ecosystem itself. No doubt those brands will need to bring something more than that perfectly filtered photo of a kitty cat to make an impact.”

Going “Popular” or viral with “Likes” on Instagram has become a bit of a status symbol amongst the tech set as of late, and it will take some pretty creative maneuvering to get people to “Like” a branded photo of a Peets or Starbucks logo, no matter how artful.

I love Twitter for Mac. Love it. It has completely altered my day-to-day workflow. And it has changed the way I use Twitter itself. And that was before I found out about this killer little hidden feature today: Tweet from anywhere.

I don’t know how I missed it before, but apparently installing Twitter for Mac adds a new “Tweet” command to basically a ton of apps running in OS X. MacStories first pointed this out earlier today, and now I can’t get enough.

For example, if you’re browsing the web in Safari or Chrome, highlight a word or passage and right-click. At the bottom of the drop-down, you’ll see the “Tweet” command. Hitting it will populate a tweet for you with the highlighted section. And it works in TextEdit, iChat, Calendar, Mail, etc. If you read it, you can tweet it.

One thing I wish it did in web browser was automatically add a link as well as the text you’re highlights, but baby-steps. I have a feeling that will come.

And yes, plenty of plug-ins have had this ability for a while, but now it’s system-wide. It’s as if Twitter is now baked into OS X.

The SecondMarket Facebook shares auctions are back on after a holiday break, and the valuation is up big time. The last auction prior to this one closed December 15 at $22.75/share. Today it hit $28.26 per share. With 2. 5 billion or so shares outstanding, that’s a $70.65 billionish valuation. A month and a half ago shares were trading on SecondMarket at a $50 billion valuation.

What’s changed? The Goldman Sachs investment announced earlier this month increased the hype even further. No wonder the SEC is starting to pay attention to these trades.

Sounds like Accel Partners may have sold a little before the peak.

The email from SecondMarket is below:

Subject: Privileged and Confidential – SecondMarket’s Facebook Auction Update

To Facebook market participants:

Thank you to those who participated in this week’s SecondMarket auction for Facebook shares. The auction was successful and fully cleared at a per share price of $28.26. Next week, the floor price will be $26.25 and we will require a minimum sale of 25,000 shares. In observance of the national MLK, Jr. holiday, please find the adjusted auction timeline for next week below.

If you own shares that you are eligible to sell and wish to participate as a seller, please complete the attached Seller Information Form and submit it to SecondMarket at [email protected] by Thursday, January 20 at 7:00 PM EST.

Please see below for detailed results on previous auctions and for next week’s adjusted auction calendar:

Previous Auction Results:

Total Shares Cleared to Date: 2,721,265 over five auctions

Clearing Price in Most Recent Auctions:
January 12, 2011: $28.26
December 15, 2010: $22.75
December 8, 2010: $21.90
December 1, 2010: $21.01

Next Week’s Adjusted Auction Timeline:

• Thursday, January 20 at 7:00 PM EST – Seller Information Forms due

• Thursday, January 20 at 8:00 PM EST – Buyers informed of share quantity available and minimum purchase amount

• Monday, January 24 at 12:00 PM EST – Buyer Information Forms due

• Monday, January 24 at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results

• Monday, January 24 at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers

• Wednesday, January 26 at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers

• Wednesday, January 26 at 7:00 PM EST – Notice sent to Facebook, Inc.

By reading this email, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that all of the information contained herein is confidential and that the recipient will keep this information confidential. The recipient further agrees that it will not copy, reproduce, or distribute this email in whole or in part.

Please contact us at [email protected] or 212.668.3919 if you have any questions.

Please note that the information in this email does not constitute an offer to sell to, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy from, nor shall any securities be offered or sold to, any person in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

Regards,

Boyd

Garry Tan, one of the cofounders of easy-to-use blogging service Posterous, is moving on from the company. Tan will be leaving to take a position at Y Combinator, where he will serve as a designer in residence. Posterous doesn’t put much weight on titles, but Tan had a hand in the site’s engineering, design, and product development.

Posterous isn’t taking off as quickly as its competitor Tumblr, but it has a solid audience and has recently released a neat Groups feature. Tan didn’t elaborate much on his reasons for leaving, but says that it boils down to wanting to work with smaller teams, which he’ll be able to do at Y Combinator (Posterous is now at around 13 employees). He also added that Posterous is going “gangbusters” and that he expects 2011 to be “really phenomenal”.

Posterous has raised over $5 million, including Y Combinator funding and a Series A round in March 2010.

Here’s Tan’s post announcing the news on his Posterous blog:

Just as Posterous has prospered, grown and changed, so to is it time for me to evolve my role. Effective today, I’m ending my day-to-day development with Posterous and moving into an advisory role. Though my day-to-day may change, my faith in the team and the product is unchanged and unwavering. Posterous is in good hands and on the right track to fulfilling its potential. I am proud of what we’ve built together and look forward to the future with anticipation to see where the team and you, the users, take this very special community.

My greatest passions lie with the early stage of building world-changing consumer products. To that end, I’ve decided to join the team at Y Combinator as a designer-in-residence and help the dozens of top pre-seed startups in the newest Winter 2011 batch reach their potential through excellent user experience.

I am greatly thankful to our team, investors and most of all our users for all the amazing work and adventures. Thanks for all of your support.

Former TechCrunch developer Ben Schaechter left TC a couple months ago to launch his own startup and today we finally get to see the fruits of his labor. Sick of the poor analytics, lack of geographical information and little vote analysis on industry leaders like Poll Daddy, Schaechter built GoPollGo to maximize what he felt was the potential of polling services.

Says Schaechter, “The polling space is crying out for disruption and innovation. There is *so* much information that can be dervived from vistors.  When mashed up with users’ opinions, the data gets thoroughly interesting.”

The beautifully designed site is based on a freemium model. It’s simple to make an embeddable poll like this one, this one or this one. Users can then share it with friends via Facebook and Twitter, get comments or discover new polls. Premium subscribers can also access analytics on their polls, segment voting data and as well get reports like the one below.

Schaechter has already had hundreds of users and hundreds of thousands of pageviews since he launched the site two days ago and plans on opening up the premium features to big brands soon, “Think of it as a really simple method of market research.”

Schaechter’s future plans include building out the feature base and community for the bootstrapped GoPollGo as well as raising funding to potentially hire more people. “[We’re] focusing on building the best social polling website on the Internet,” he says.

You can take the “Apple vs. Google” poll here, or just have it out in the comments.

I have a dilemma with Ask a VC. Generally, I’m trying to do shows that are under 10 minutes, so they’re more consumable. But in the case of Ask a VC, I want to get to as many reader questions as possible and would rather not cut someone off when they are giving you business advice. So starting this week we’re going to post the whole show as usual below, and give you links to each question and answer.

That way if you don’t have 15 minutes to watch it all, you can still find out the answer to your question or a question that you are grappling with. I usually find that its easier to consume long-form videos in podcast form than during my daily blog reading, so as a reminder, you can also download the episodes of any of our TCTV shows from iTunes.

This week, Redpoint Ventures’ Satish Dharmaraj was our first return guest and we got to a good number of questions including:

Yesterday we ran a post about Cubeduel, a service that mixes the best (or worst) of Hot or Not with LinkedIn. Fire up the site and it will show you photos of two coworkers — pick the one you’d prefer to work with, and Cubeduel will present you with another pair of photos. It’s addictive, a bit evil, and has skyrocketed in usage over the last few days since it launched. Unfortunately, it took off a bit too quickly.

The service went down earlier today for reasons that were initially unclear — did LinkedIn block the site because it ranks coworkers in a way that isn’t exactly flattering to everyone, or did the site just get too popular, too fast? Turns out it’s the latter — Cubeduel has exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits (which is what one of the site’s creators, Tony Wright, initially guessed). Here’s an explanation from LinkedIn Director of Communications Hani Durzy:

We did not shut Cubeduel down. The application was using our open LinkedIn Developer Platform, which has a daily access limit that is publicly documented. Our developer platform limits are designed to protect our members, and have been in place since the platform program was introduced a year ago. We are in communication with the people behind Cubedeal to discuss how they can move forward. We are always interested in seeing our platform used in creative, innovative new ways by developers.

I followed up by asking if the site might be allowed to exceed the standard API limits, or if Cubeduel would have to find a way to restructure the site to fit within the normal constraints. The answer to that isn’t clear — Durzy says they’re still talking to each other.

Wright says that before the API limit was hit Cubeduel was far exceeding his expectations — he told me yesterday the site would get “hundreds of thousands” of ranked users by the end of the week. Now he says they were “well on our way to millions” before the API limit kicked in.

When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their venture firm, they talked a good game about things being different; about having a smorgasbord of partners skilled in different areas that could tag in-and-out of portfolio companies as appropriate. And a lot of that sounded like the usual “value-add” venture capital spiel.

But two funds into the firm’s life, that vision is starting to take shape. Witness today’s announcement that Mark Cranney will be joining the firm as a partner. Cranney isn’t some techy whiz-kid, visionary founder or even a financial wizard. He’s a sales and operations guy and his job will be to help teach Andreessen Horowitz’s predominately engineer-centric founders and CEOs to be a little bit more like those things many of them decry: a sales guy, an MBA, a grown-up manager. Look at him! He even looks like a sales guy!

In addition to coaching founders and helping them find the right management talent to hire, Cranney will be building essentially a pre-sales organization within the firm that will constantly scout purchase-level managers at Fortune 500 companies, to pave direct lines to them and know in advance what kinds of products they want to buy, leading to a shorter, almost pre-qualified sales cycle for Andreessen Horowitz’s companies. “The weakness at a lot of venture capital firms is that we know the CEOs or CIOs, but we don’t know the managers making the purchase decisions,” says Horowitz.

I asked how big this group would be and Cranney declined to answer saying that was “proprietary” (See! He talks like a grown up manager too!) but he scoffed when I called it a “gargantuan task,” pointing out he’d built huge sales teams from scratch several times in his career. “That’s the easy part,” he said. Not for the typical geeky founder, of course, and that’s the point.

Like a lot of the firm’s team, Cranney worked at Opsware with Horowitz and Andreessen, where he was the executive vice president of worldwide field operations. He grew the headcount from 10 people to 350, grew revenue from $18 million to $150 million, and had four years of 100%+ growth in new bookings. That’s just not a skill set you see at most VC firms.

If this team works as advertised, it’ll be a huge, huge advantage for the firm. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a trend among the well-heeled venture funds, especially if this renaissance in business software blooms. As Cranney says: “If you want to sell to companies you gotta put boots on the ground. That’s not changing.”