Keith Teare: Co-founder of TechCrunch
Greetings from Shanghai! Keith Teare, Co-founder of TechCrunch, opened the second and final day of TechCrunch China’s first ever conference this morning. If you weren’t able to make it to Shanghai, you can watch it all in the live stream embedded here.
The greatest change we are experiencing now is going mobile, said to Keith. Tablet is overtaking PC as the most commonly used digital device. In the U.S media industry, the only growth in the past five years is in the mobile consumption media. This not only means the devices we use are changing, but also the software we adopted. Huge mobile companies were being built, including China’s Tencent, Sina Weibo and America’s Vine and Snapchat.
Keith also addressed a common problem for startups in the Silicon Valley as well as China, Series A Crunch, or Second Round Problem as Keith put it.
After started in an incubator, most startups may hit roadblocks in raising more capital injection. According to data from CrunchBase, 27% of startups that have got A round funding received second round in one year, 6% secured second round in five years, and 67% of them never get any investments ever.
The key factor to brave though this bottleneck is whether the startups have tractions to investors and getting them to take the risks. For Keith, traction is kind of an artistic concept and the definition for it differs for specific investors.
VCs should be taking great risks, otherwise, entrepreneurs would prefer to settle on small ideas and nobody wants to invest on small ideas.
Second round capital is crucial because they could help incubators in the long run as well as support hundreds of startups to go through the difficulties in the initial stage and to become a company worth investing.
