Here in Denver I subscribe to a monthly car wash membership for my black SUV which allows me to bring the car in as many days as I want for the same price. Since I have a black car I use this a lot, especially in the winter months when the car is constantly getting splashed with dirty slush. I rent my car out on Turo, so year round I use this service quite a bit (after each transaction) and also let my passengers know they are welcome to take the car in anytime they like. You’d be surprised by how many do! Denver people are the nicest.

I’m fascinated with subscription business models (I just got an unlimited monthly subscription for my eyelash extension fills!) and this one seems ripe for a WeWork-style startup to score real-estate and create a consistent U.S.-wide (or even global) car wash experience BRAND. They could buy up existing car washes. They could partner with them and provide McDonald’s-style “university” to help franchise owners maximize the value of their property with best practices. They could use collective bargaining to get better deals on equipment, supplies, etc.

Does this startup exist? Are you building it? How would you start?

Update: Thanks to Sachin Agarwal for pointing me to Spiffy, who recently raised $8 million in Series A financing

In this podcast interview on “Founders Talk” with Adam Stacoviak we talk about the decision to sell my startup Mattermark, the process of getting the deal done, managing psychology and explore the many choices along the way.

Listen to the full interview here or download and listen on iTunes

If you’ve been following along on social media, you might have heard me say “I’m on sabbatical” lately. It’s true, I’m no longer an employee anywhere and this break is self-funded (some folks pointed out saying sabbatical sounds like something that I’d negotiated as part of the acquisition), so I’m not sure what to call it. Yesterday was the start of my 9th week of this new phase, and I’m not planning to work for the rest of 2018 (more on what I am up to coming in a future post).

This interview with Adam is my first deep dive into the process of selling Mattermark, and I hope it will be helpful to other founders who might find themselves in similar circumstances. I’ve tried to present the story with as little spin as possible, both on the positive side and also on the negative side. The truth is that I’m not devastated by this outcome and it is certainly still much better than that typical startup result (a total shutdown without any sale at all). I am proud to have “landed the plane” and I’m sure I was not the perfect CEO, but believe I have acted with high integrity at all times and generosity wherever it was possible. There is certainly a grieving process as I shed the roles, rituals and perks of being a startup founder and CEO but I am starting to see things in a more balanced light.

The coverage of Mattermark’s acquisition in December certainly wasn’t the kind of ending I’d hoped for after an exhausting process, but by that point so many other things had happened that it was really just another thing to survive. I was living life day-to-day, just waking up and putting one foot in front of the other, and I needed a break from the hyper-transparent life I’ve been leading on the Internet. Instead of the typical crappy acquisition fluff post TechCrunch tends to do, our deal details were leaked and the media angle was primarily a criticism of my tone in an email to common shareholders (I said “I have great news!” before telling common holders they’d been wiped out — not my best choice ever, but also not deserving of so much of the Internet’s asymmetrical ire in the Twitter outrage machine). It sucked.

When the story broke, I was so sleep deprived standing in my furniture-less rental house in Denver with the deal less than 24 hours from closing I could barely stand. Friends had a variety of pieces of advice, “You have to respond and defend your reputation! Your fans deserve to know the truth! Perhaps a mea culpa?”

After my head stopped spinning I puked in the sink, rinsed it down, and texted my board for advice. “Time to get off the Internet” they said. I focused my last dregs of energy on completing the deal (it closed the next day) and did just that. I’m proud of that, I knew I was strong but this was definitely the most I had been tested since some of the most stressful moments at Twilio… and the stakes were much higher.

I resumed work 3 weeks later and in total spent 6 months not only transitioning Mattermark but also running the Product organization at FullContact as a member of the exec team, professionalizing the Product org, establishing process and training, eliciting input from across the organization and establishing a roadmap aligned with the company’s strategy. I’m proud of the work I did there and truly believe I left things better than I found them. I loved getting to know my team and we’ve formed friendships that will last a long time, and we never would have been able to accomplish so much in just two quarters without their commitment and tireless engagement. Mattermark has been successfully transitioned, and continues to operate as a revenue-generating part of the FullContact product portfolio.

Now I’m a free agent.

I’d love to engage with readers who  been through acquisitions, life and career resets, and other major transitions as I figure out what I would most like to do next. Start a company? Join a startup? Join a larger company? Switch industries? Become a full-time investor? Become a full time writer? It’s all on the table.

P.S. I am still actively angel investing in startups and funds, and you can learn more about how we are supporting female founders at XFactor Ventures. As reported by Forbes last month, we have big plans to raise a larger second fund.

After many years, the newsletter that was the genesis of my former startup, Mattermark Daily is sending its final missive today. It was such a pleasure to read the Internet and scour for posts to share 4 days a week with more than 100K readers, 60K of whom opened the Mattermark Daily each day at the peak of her awesomeness.

I started the Daily and wrote it for the first 18 months, and then it was the labor of love and dedicated efforts of many subsequent Editors in Chief who made it fantastic (and also made sure it published on schedule!). My deepest gratitude goes to Kevin Morrill, Andy Sparks, Sam DeBrule, Wade Vaughn, Nick Frost, Alex Wilhelm, Jonathan Kressaty, and Ashley Lozito for scrolling through thousands of articles to bring readers the best hand curated startup reading over the years. I am especially proud of adherence to our editorial standards, never-ending search to find more female authors, occasional wit, inside jokes, and exposure of new and up-and-coming startup blogs.

Below are a selection of links covering the Mattermark Daily, a wonderful product I am proud to have built and that brought happiness to many people. R.I.P.

• Ryan Hoover: Blog First Startups
• ValueWalk: Here’s What the Most Iconic Tech Investors Read Each Morning
• Fast Company: 5 Successful Startups That Started as Blogs
• Next View Ventures: Inside the Mattermark Daily, Principles & Process
• Teamwork.com: How to Turn Your Boring Newsletter into a Customer Acquisition Machine

Thank you to everyone who tweeted, blog commented, Hacker News commented, Quora posted, and otherwise spread the Mattermark Daily organically through word of mouth.

If you are looking for something new to read, I am sorry to tell you I am not starting another newsletter (the editorial schedule is grueling — much respect!) but Product Hunt does have 6 alternatives to the Mattermark Daily listed, and it would be awesome if you submitted more to them!

Did I miss a great press clip about the Mattermark Daily? Let me know in the comments so I can save it in the archive. This will be fun to look back on in 5, 10, 25 years 🙂

At FullContact, our vision is to “make relationships better” and I’ve spent the last few months wrapping my head around what this *really* means in the context of profiles of people and linkages between their different online identities. The fundamental idea behind this vision is that more data is better for decision-making, and that customers can craft advertising. marketing, and product experiences that are deeply human when they make decisions about what to say, do, offer, etc. with the full richness of understanding a person.

This is a significant departure from my day-to-day obsession with companies, financing events, mergers and acquisitions. To help me explore this head space I’ve embarked on a reading syllabus that encompasses neurobiology, psychology, sexual education, parenting, and much more. Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

• The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples by John M. Gottman
• Achtung Baby: An American Mom of the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children by Sara Zaske
• Your Brain on Love: The Neurobiology of Healthy Relationships by Stan Tatkin
• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide by John M. Gottman
• How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
• How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Gregory Berns
• NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish
• Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
• Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
• How to Create A Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil
• The Neurobiology of ‘We’: How Relationships, the Mind, and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel MD

On June 8th, 2017 I made a list of 20 companies that looked ripe for Series A… it has been nearly 4 months and I just checked to see how my predictions are going. 1 out of the 20 has announced their Series A so far: ClearMetal announced a $9M Series A from Innovation Endeavors and Prelude Ventures.

I love to publish picks and then see what happens, and back in February 2014 I shared my fantasy VC portfolio of 7 companies, and then updated it in February 2015 showing a nearly 9.1x* increase in total funding (*excluding the Uber pick) from my initial selection. This group is now at 14x* total funding since my initial selection date, with 2 exits.

Ugh, nothing like embedding a Google Docs spreadsheet to make me wish I was still working on GitSheet!

I’ve made enough different prediction posts at this point, not to mention actual investments, where it seems like a good idea to start wrangling them all into one place. Eventually, one spreadsheet. But for now, let’s continue to time travel…

In June 2013 I flagged 10 Pre Series A Companies to Watch in New York, which included my initial call for Digital Ocean (who had not yet announced any outside funding). Of these companies, 3 raised a Series A, 3 were acquired, 2 shut down, and 2 are still going strong.

To be continued… there are definitely more of these posts hanging around.

when my light’s burn out
you’re the only one, you’re the only one
you’re the only one left
I will answer to
when my lights burn out
you’re the only one, you’re the only one
you’re the only one here
who can switch out the dud

honey you’re a patient man
living in the moment
everything I am is not everything you wanted but
here we are side-by-side in bed every single morning
I am old

you can’t keep my pace
and you can’t see the flash beneath my veins
but you’ve got time for days
to watch me drift, and sink and swim in a hundred different ways

when my lights burn out
you’re the only one, you’re the only one
you’re the only one left
I will answer to
when my lights burn out
you’re the only one, you’re the only one
you’re the only one here
who can switch out the dud

honey you’re a patient man
living in the moment
everything I am is not everything you wanted but
here we are side-by-side in bed every single morning
I am old

you can’t keep my pace
and you can’t see the flash beneath my veins
but you’ve got time for days
to watch me drift, and sink and swim in a hundred different ways

when my lights burn out
you’re the only one, you’re the only one
you’re the only one left I will answer to

It’s been a couple years since we shifted our product development focus at Mattermark to supporting sales and marketing deal sourcing, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my love for speculating on which startups are most likely to raise funding next.

Living in San Francisco these past 8 years, I’ve noticed there are often companies that appear seemingly out of the blue and then raise a boatload of money. This was part of what inspired me to start Mattermark in the first place. Can we detect these companies earlier if we were paying closer attention to data exhaust they produce? If we were watching the web traffic, social media, mobile app downloads, and other signals around companies climb – even from super small numbers at first – could the slope of that growth tell us something about what a hot emerging company looks like in it’s earliest days.

I’ve spent over 4 years working on exploring these questions now, and it’s endlessly fascinating. Without further ado, here’s my list of Bay Area startups who haven’t announced a Series A funding round yet but should be on every venture capitalists shortlist:

• AgriWebb
• BankerBay
• Blavity
• ClearMetal
• Fleet
• Giroptic
• Kanler
• Lattice
• Metadata
• Mozio
• MUrgency
• Nomiku
• Numerai
• Pinrose
• Quintype
• Scoop
• Thistle
• TripleByte
• Verge Genomics
• Woo

This list is influenced by growth signals found in Mattermark (which is how I built my initial screen, as explained below) and then editorialized by me, based on a combination of what I think is interesting, trendy, backed back other investors with a track record of getting their seed investments graduated to the next stage. If you feel like your company should have been on this list just go raise a Series A, and prove me wrong!

Like this comic? Steve Hanov’s blog has a bunch more!

How I Built My Initial Screen

Mattermark has ~3K companies tagged with Bay Area and “Pre Series A”, which means they’ve raised some funding by not a Series A. When we increase this filter to also include all Bay Area companies with no known funding (like unannounced seed rounds) that number jumps to ~40K.

I wrote a Series A benchmarking analysis in January 2015 that determined the average Series A deal is announced when a company is at ~15 employees. I paid attention to companies approaching this size for my selection criteria, and also made sure the net team size had increased at least 1% over the past 6 months.

I’ve raised more than $18 million in funding for my company through several rounds, and I can confirm the rule of thumb that a company raises seed funding to last them 18+ months. Knowing this, I focused on companies who had gone at least 9 months since their funding announcement. With all these criteria applied, I’d already whittled the list down to just 477 companies (and yes if you click this link and sign up it is totally free to view it!). Btw, if you save this search with a name like “hot series A opportunities” Mattermark will automatically email you whenever a new company meets this criteria. This is exactly how the most data driven top tier VC firms in the business use us!

I realized after I wrote this that I had not placed an upper bound on months since last funding, and I didn’t want to get a lot of old dead companies in my list. So I put 24 months since last funding announcement as my maximum. Down to just 167 companies.