I work in an Ad Tech company and this week is crazy. We also try to make a code freeze but the reality is many deploys in production to fix things thursday evening...
I've spent 3 years as an associate in a VC firm. I graduated in computer engineering. And I was invited by the CEO of a rapid growing company (www.inlocomedia.com) to be a product manager of their new Data products.
I think the tech background is important, but the most important thing is to be able to talk to all stakeholders. As a product manager you will have many interfaces with marketing, management, operations, biz dev, and your team (the engineers). You have to be able to communicate well with everybody and provide context and value.
You are missing the real statistics. Only 11% of all apple revenues come from services (app store, Icloud, itunes).
apple makes money from selling phones and computers. If you want to sell a $1,799 notebook (or even $2,399 for the 15 inch version), they need to think on power users.
Maybe a merge with Valve. So they will become the platform to build and to sell the games. They will have all the developers and resources on the game development world.
If George Hotz came in HN and asked about the feasability of doing a self driving car by himself, people would say the same thing, tell him that was impossible. Lucky for us he neither asked HN if he could hack the iphone or the playstation 3 because if he did he could be desencouraged.
My advice to you is study really hard and make it happen. use other people work to leverage your software and go faster. And after that show me and the others what have you made.
You can send to him "The Phatom Edit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit. It is already widespread all over the internet (even in youtube) and has the same objetive of your edition (Jar Jar binks is gone as well).
I think the author (or his friend at least) entered in the event to test his Speculative Stock Warrant. (It is a ways to get a small kick-back if startup goes big 10 years later)
So he already entered in the event to only get an shadow option of a potential good company.
He complained that Billy did not valued enough their weekend hacking and put an outside parter in the company. But he already only had 0.4%. If I was Billy I wouldn't think of someone who had this kind of deal with me as a cofounder.
I think it would be easier to get all these LP's, make a big fund and make follow-on investiment in all of companies portfolio.
better than a LP investing direct in a early-stage startup. This is bad for both, the startups gets an unexperienced investor and the LP don't get to manage portfolio the right way.
We always put a new CFO in the company. But non of them are from the VC firm.
This method you talk about is way more commom on large deal, like Private Equity, LBO, etc. Those companies make 2 to 4 deals a year. 10-15 deals isn't a small number of deals.