I typically post in Spanish (I prefer to be one of the top blogs in Venture Capital in Spanish than being the blog number 8735 in English), but I kind of feel that this post is interesting enough for the english speaking community as well, so here it is,
We just launched Greentizen, and was thinking about it in terms of Painkillers vs Vitamins, and got depressed, since it clearly doesnt attack any real pain, but I then asked myself which pain do twitter, apple, Zynga deal with? I then realized, is not about Painkillers vs Vitamins only, its also about antidepressants:
One of the favorite phrases in the VC industry is: «we only invest in Painkillers, not in Vitamins», meaning that VCs like to invest in startups with products which attack some painful problem, and not products who improve anything.
This is still a kind of axiom in the industry, but looking at the companies that have been growing the most in the last years facebook, Zynga, Apple, Twitter, which pain do they kill? What problem do they solve?
What is the pain that causes people buy an Iphone or an Ipad?
I´ve never heard anybody tell me: «I really need a phone with touchscreen « or «I desperately need a tablet» before Steve Jobs showed them. I neither heard anybody saying: «I need a virtual farm to grow virtual groceries», or «I need to tell everybody about my life in 140 characters», and for sure not «I´m really eager to throw angry little birds to bad pigs»
But, are these products Vitamins? Do they improve anything? maybe they do, but if I have to choose a parallelism with the pharma industry I would say that they are more like Antidepressants. These are all tools that help humans to deal better with problems like boredom, low self esteem , shyness, etc.
So, from now on the phrase should be: «we do not invest in Painkillers nor Vitamins, we invest only in Antidepressants…… or Viagra (the sex industry is always profitable 🙂 «
Pablo Brenner & Sergio Fogel Blog 
By the way, depression still implies pain 😉
And you treat depression with painkillers, do you?
Huh? Phones before the iPhone (and later Android) just plain sucked. The iPhone was the epitome of painkillers. Have you tried scrolling through 600 contacts on a pre-iPhone handset?
Zynga es «crack cocaine». No es «painkillers». 🙂
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford.
First of all; i think that your ranking is very optimist….. 8735??? hahahaah that’s very optimist!!
Anyway, you are correct on you appreciation of that statement, but i think that the meaning goes a little dipper than that, i think that they rather to invest on Painkillers cause is addictive! once you try it you cant stop! that’s what happen with FB, TW and so on, then you have Vitamins…… you know that they help and do good, and you tried them, but you hardly get back to them, you avoid them and you always have a excuse on why you are not using them that often.
The logic will be Painkillers are addictive and that’s good because you come back to it, and to me as a VC I will profit from loyal customers. Vitamins are good, but they don’t drag customers back that often, and that to me, as a VC means that i will have to be always on top of it to have a decent flow of business and of course spend money to make that happen .
Painkillers with a word of mouth marketing works very good (and very cheap)
Vitamins you have to spend a lot of money on campaigns just to show benefits, like you have to beg to people to use it.
But like i said, from the point of view that you presented it, your assumptions are correct, i just commenting it from another angle.
Anyway, very good article, keep them coming!
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