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Ryan Blair, HashtagOne: From Gang Member, To Entrepreneur, To Anti-VC

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He eventually founded and sold consumer health firm ViSalus to a public company and is now back making investments, in technology companies, as a venture capitalist here at Los Angeles-based HashtagOne (www.hashtagone.com). What's the theme of your investments? That's why we have investments in Heal, Saucey, and FragMob.

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Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?

Both Sides of the Table

He also nails the reason why venture capital is still necessary to grow large businesses quickly in a world where the costs of running startups have fallen dramatically. “Why do founders want to take the VCs’ money? .” After all, growth equals high valuations and loads of venture capital!

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The Power of Getting the Band Back Together

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The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. You join teams that got good write-ups on TechCrunch, have great VCs, have star CEO’s, whatever. Writing a book will be fun. After 6 months – you know.

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Announcing a Deal I’ve Wanted to Talk About for a Year

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I’m super excited to announce that GRP Partners led the investment in Ethan Anderson’s new company MyTime (link has LA-based merchants but will give you a good feel for the product). And I certainly didn’t want him having to trapse up-and-down Sand Hill Road informing every VC of his next idea.

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What Would Happen if you Built the Reverse of Amazon? It Might Look Something Like This …

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He hired his co-founder and CTO Adam LeVasseur who set out to build systems to allow you to see all of your storage items in a beautiful app but also to build tech for logistics, driver management, customer service, billing and so forth. I wrote about that experience here without giving away the details of the business.

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On Leadership, Teams, Success & Happiness

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I’m in the team centric sphere so every investment decision I make first & foremost centers on this plane. It’s my belief that through exceptional leadership you attract great teams that do more than the sum of the parts. I made an investment in a company with deep domain knowledge. Is it book smarts?

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Understanding the Power of Your Human Networks

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After my first Tweet with the Notorious mothafucka quote , I thought about my role as a VC and I Tweeted the following. I spent an hour on the phone working with Sam Rosen, the CEO of MakeSpace on a senior exec he is considering hiring. My basic philosophy is that almost anybody can build a network by investing time in it.