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From Seed To Market, A Peek Into Fall 2014

There is a certain excitement, a certain uptick in pace, in the Fall around these parts. This year, I feel like I’ve seen enough interesting early-stage founders and companies (so much of it falls into patterns) that I sort of have a picture of what we may be talking about as September and the final months of 2014 unfold. Keep in mind that this list is about the Series A level, when bigger institutions get involved — and is by no means an indication of overall success for anyone involved, investors included. (Also, of course, we will all be chattering about Apple and the other big tech giants, as a given.)

In no particular order, here’s what seems to be entering either the echo chamber and/or mainstream conversation:

  • Parking: Yes, I’m obsessed with parking startups. No good reason other than I can’t wait to see the #Parkageddon hashtag spread.
  • Apps That Support On-Demand Economy Companies: See a company like Checkr, which helps the Ubers of the world perform better background checks and processing of labor. These startups and companies will likely need a whole set of services and have likely built their own, as well.
  • Apps That Support On-Demand Economy Workers: This is a category where I’m seeing tons of startups. Like Mailbox clones designed for “the enterprise,” I’ve passed, but I’m just waiting for one to have a clever hack around distribution — most likely to be the preferred vendor of a company like Instacart or Postmates, etc. There’s an opportunity for a new Intuit for 1099’ers out there, but it has to grow like a weed.
  • Block Chain Apps: There will be a few companies that get bigger institutional funding which leverage the block chain to handle business processes, most notably the creation, enforcement, and settlement of contracts. Yes, some of these can be mediated in Bitcoin, but it’s not required to do so.
  • Mobile Commerce: This is the area I’m most excited about, even more than parking! If you’re working in this space or have an app you love, please tell me. I like mobile commerce experiences that either leverage a phone sensor; or have a clever logistics angle; or leverage a proprietary data set; or even those that hold inventory in inventive ways. Of course, I’ll rarely turn down any mobile marketplace, and my old fears about mobile platform fragmentation crippling liquidity is now gone. iPhones, all the way.
  • Consumer-Grade Artificial Intelligence: This totally snuck up on me and I will admit I missed it, even though it was right under my nose. For the first time, I saw an app/service that uses a combination of AI and ML to do a job better than a human and solve multiple problems in the process. Then I started to think — if it can do it for this one task, why not other mundane tasks? I see no reason why not.
  • Interactive iPhone Notifications: No real surprise here. Borrowing from Android, iOS developers now have the power to allow users to take action on an item directly from push. Let’s go back to Uber. The app knows you’re about to leave work (you’re a pattern). The app pushes to you — “Call an Uber?” You gently slide over the push and tap “Yes.” Never go into the app itself. That is huge, and apps like Wut, Yo, and others, as well as the push notification ESP equivalents like Kahuna and AppBoy, are well positioned to secure their place in this new landscape.