Google Ventures Blog

Google I/O kicks off this Wednesday in San Francisco (and streamed live online). We’re looking forward to meeting the entrepreneurs who have built incredible applications and companies.

Last month we teamed up with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz to form the Glass Collective, an investment syndicate that provides seed funding to startups in the Glass ecosystem. We’ll be at Google I/O, so if you’re developing for Glass, please stop by to say hello to us in the Glass Sandbox.

You can also find many of our awesome portfolio companies in the Developer Sandbox. Here’s where they’ll be, and hope to see you all there!

Day 1, Wednesday

• Floor 2

Kabam in the Google+ area

Kamcord in the YouTube area

Glass Collective in the Glass area

• Floor 3

HelloFax and Pocket in the Chrome & Apps area

TuneIn in the Android area

• After Hours

Take a quick break before the official After Hours party to swing by the Paperless 2013 Meetup, brought together by a number of startups dedicated to paperless solutions compatible with Google Apps and Google Drive.

Day 2, Thursday

• Floor 2

Kamcord in the YouTube area

TuneIn in the Google+ area

Glass Collective in the Glass area

• Floor 3

TuneIn in the Google TV area

UberConference in the Chrome & Apps area

Day 3, Friday

Arrive bright and early for a 9:00 a.m. session by Google Ventures design partner, Braden Kowitz: An Engineer’s Pragmatic Guide to Design. It’s a good one.

• Floor 2

Kamcord in the YouTube area

Glass Collective in the Glass area

• Floor 3

DocuSign, HelloSign, Pocket, and UberConference in the Chrome & Apps area

I’m pleased to announce that MG Siegler is joining Google Ventures as a general partner, focusing on seed and early-stage investments.

Over the years, MG has tracked the development of hundreds of startups, first through his work as a journalist with TechCrunch, and later as a general partner at CrunchFund, where he has helped build a portfolio which includes Airbnb, Betable, Crowdtilt, Ifttt, Karma, Mailbox, Path, Square, Uber, Vine, and Yammer. MG will continue to contribute to TechCrunch, and we’re thrilled to add his unique perspective to Google Ventures, and our portfolio.

Welcome to the team, MG!

If you want to read MG’s take on his new role, check out his post on parislemon.com.

Glass is a potentially transformative technology. Maybe you’re one of the millions who have already tuned in to get a sense of what it feels like to wear Glass.

It’s a window into the world’s information, and a new way to share experiences with those you care about. That information is available, when you need it. Without your hands. And that’s sort of amazing.

Marc Andreessen, Bill Maris, and John Doerr

So what will the future be with Glass? Well, the truth is, no one can honestly predict where this new technology will take us. Not yet. And that’s exactly what’s exciting. We do know that smart entrepreneurs and engineers are going to develop amazing experiences through Glass. Glass will evolve quickly, just as the cell phone grew from this to this.

The Glass Collective is an exciting experiment as well. We thought the potential for Glass was significant enough to invite our friends at Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to join Google Ventures in exploring this big opportunity. Together, the Glass Collective is a new type of investment syndicate that will provide seed funding to entrepreneurs in the Glass ecosystem to help jumpstart their ideas.

If you’ve been mulling over a brilliant idea for Glass, let us know. And to read more about the Glass Collective, check out Marc Andreessen’s blog, John Doerr’s blog, and our Glass Collective site.

Last month we launched #UXmarch to help companies build better products. I asked people to pledge to conduct a scrappy UX study in March. The reaction was amazing: 1,002 people took the #UXmarch pledge! That’s about 48 UX studies per weekday in March.

Most of these people work for startups or other small firms. But the list of companies also includes a surprising number of household names, as well as universities, nonprofits, and companies from around the world.

The personal notes I’ve received from pledgers further confirms my belief that user research is a key ingredient to great design:

Aigerim Shorman, Triptrotting — “We pledged to #UXmarch and it has completely transformed our view on how we make product related decisions. Our team conducted multiple weekly interviews for our weekly releases and got incredible insight from our users. We were able to move quickly, iterate fast and make right decisions.”

Jerome Tave, UberConference — “#UXmarch happened at a perfect time, as we were beginning to think about making some changes to UberConference. After attending Michael’s workshop we had all of the tools to go conduct interview sessions, in person and over the phone. The feedback we received was amazing, and the outcomes of this research have put us on the right path.”

Margaret Grobler, Gyft — “I could kick myself for putting off formal usability testing for so long! We’ve watched friends and investors use the app and tested vigilantly for bugs, but the insight (and reward!) you get from running a real user test is unparalleled.”

Ben Hadden, Shotgun Software — “Conducting our first usability study as part of UXMarch felt like shining a giant light on our design process. We now have much more clarity on what’s left to build for this release, which is going to help us ship better, more usable software to our users in less time.”

March is over, but it’s never too late to build better products by adding a little user research to your design process. Use these materials to start reducing your risk, accelerating your progress, and validating your priorities.

• Video of my User Research, Quick ‘n’ Dirty workshop
• Complete worksheets and slides from the workshop
• Design Staff guide to research
• Promo code (3forGV) for three free tests on usertesting.com

And remember: Friends don’t let friends launch before testing.

Blue Bottle Coffee does it. Nest does it. RetailMeNot, 23andMe, and Google do it. It’s UX research, a secret weapon used by successful companies to design better products.

As a UX Research Partner at Google Ventures, I’ve conducted hundreds of customer interviews with startups in our portfolio. Time and again we see that user studies are a key ingredient for great design. Through quick, scrappy user studies we’ve discovered ways to boost conversion, found usability issues before launch, figured out why users were behaving in certain ways, and resolved nagging internal product debates.

User research is like the flossing of product design — we all want to do it, we believe we should do it, but it’s hard to get started and make it a habit. To help with this hurdle, join me in #UXmarch, a commitment to rally your troops and run at least one user study this March. I’ll help guide you through the basic steps to getting it done.

Take the #UXmarch pledge now.

I’ll send you some materials to get started:

• Templates and worksheets:
  • Checklist for how to prepare in days leading up to interviews
  • How to write a survey to quickly select the best people to interview
  • Questions that we’ve found to reveal great info from customers
  • Instructions for creating an interview guide to structure a one-hour interview
  • Non-disclosure and consent agreement for your participants to sign.
• An invitation to a limited number of office hours offered throughout March for personal help
• A promo code for 3 free tests on UserTesting.com

For the first time I also want to share video of a class I’ve taught repeatedly for the Google Ventures portfolio at our Startup Lab: User Research, Quick ‘n’ Dirty. The two-hour class includes everything you need to know to plan and conduct a study right now.

Take the #UXmarch pledge now.

And remember: Friends don’t let friends launch before testing. Share the #UXmarch pledge with a buddy to help make sure you follow through. Let us know how it goes! We’re here to help.

In this episode of my Foundation video series, I talk with Jawbone founder and CEO Hosain Rahman. Hosain and I discuss the entrepreneurial environment at Stanford in the 1990’s, The Jetsons as design inspiration, and how his meeting with Steve Jobs shaped the future of Jawbone’s first product designs.

Hosain on Silicon Valley’s respect for founders:

“The optimism in ‘99 for ideas was incredible. It was unbridled. That optimism turned to darkness for years. I tell entrepreneurs now that it was not a founder-friendly Valley at all. ‘Come up with an idea as a founder, make it, and we’ll take it, thank you very much. We’ll hire a team, and you guys can hang out in the back somewhere.’

It was really frankly Steve Jobs and a few people like that, even [Mark Zuckerberg], who changed the course for how the investment community viewed founders running companies. You could build these great companies if you could help these guys become great managers and great leaders of businesses. I think that has been a wonderful transformation in the industry.”

In this new episode of my Foundation video series, I talk with Zappos founder Tony Hsieh about entrepreneurship, fostering corporate culture, and his latest project to fuel a thriving tech community in Las Vegas.

Tony opens up about starting his first company, LinkExchange, an early take on Web advertising which was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million. He delves into why his first startup taught him to pay close attention to company culture, outlines how founders can map company culture to their personal values, and explains why Zappos actually pays people to quit. Tony also discusses his efforts to accelerate the technology ecosystem in Las Vegas and his goal to fund at least 100 local tech startups.

Tony Hsieh’s advice on how to hire the right people to build a great company culture:

“From the beginning, company culture was always important. Is this someone I would choose to hang out with or grab a drink with, if we weren’t in business? If the answer was no, we wouldn’t hire them.”

In 2012 Google Ventures grew across the board: our fund grew to $300 million per year, our team grew to 60 people, and the number of companies we’ve funded grew to over 150.

Thank you to our portfolio companies for the impact you made this year. Reflecting on 2012, we can’t wait for 2013!

The latest episode of my Foundation video series comes to you filmed live from the Google Ventures Founder & CEO Summit last week. I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Opsware and now General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. 

Ben shares how he got his start as an intern at Silicon Graphics, and went on to found and build Opsware into a billion dollar company. He offers candid advice for entrepreneurs on the importance of establishing a thoughtful communication architecture, how to hire for scale, and the secret to getting the most out of board meetings. He also reveals what he looks for in a pitch: Above all else, he asks “does the founder have the courage to build the company?”

Ben’s advice for CEOs:

“Being nice to everybody all the time or never telling them what’s wrong turns out to be a really dangerous thing. It’s really important in general to be giving feedback always. Negative feedback, not just about people, but about what’s wrong in the company is critically important.”

Yesterday I shared some great news with the startups in our portfolio at our annual Founder & CEO Summit: we’ve expanded the size of our fund by 50% to $300 million a year.

Our mission has always been to find and invest in the most disruptive and interesting founders, and we want to do more of this. The summit yesterday brought together more than 250 entrepreneurs from across our 130+ portfolio companies.  Here are a few highlights from the day:

Fireside chat with Instagram Founder Kevin Systrom and General Partner Kevin Rose.

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin discusses Google X.

Managing Partner Bill Maris and Sergey Brin.

General Partner David Krane moderates a CEO coaching session with Bill Campbell.

Fireside chat with Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Ben Horowitz and Kevin Rose.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt shares his perspective on technology trends.