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I/O Ventures VC Paul Bragiel Goes On Hiatus To Train For The Winter Olympics
Some VCs are into kite-surfing. Some do triathlons.
Then there’s i/o Ventures managing director Paul Bragiel, who has spent the last two and a half months in the Nordics, either cross-country skiing for two to four hours per day or doing “swamp training,” where he runs through bogs for several hours.
His dream? To compete in the Winter Olympics, which are just eight months away in Sochi, Russia.
“I want to walk into the Olympic Stadium with people from all 192 countries. This is what’s awesome about the world. I’ve wanted to do this since I was 11 and watching the 1988 Seoul Olympics on TV,” he said in an interview from Austria, where he just relocated to train for a month. “I kind of gave up the dream when I was 14 and became a computer nerd. But that’s a whole different story.”
The U.S. team only has about four slots and is one of the most competitive countries in the world, Bragiel said.
So he’s in talks with various South American and Sub-Saharan African countries to get dual citizenship to compete on their behalf. Because he also co-founded the Tanzania and Kenya-focused Savannah Fund and advises other countries on how to grow startup communities, he believes citizenship won’t be that big a hurdle.
“This is an honor. Someone giving you citizenship? I’m going to wear that country’s flag proudly,” he said.
Picking a sport was a long process. One of the first sports he looked at was curling. He even visited a curling center in Minnesota, but then he realized that there wasn’t a team that would let him join on less than a year’s notice.
Then he looked at bobsledding, and traveled to Latvia to look for a team.
“The costs ended up being very prohibitive. It can cost millions of dollars and you have to ship a bobsled internationally,” he said.
He also would have needed to find a driver. “If I did it, I would probably flip over and die,” he said.
Then the luge terrified him, and he didn’t think he could get used to downhill skiing as a longtime snowboarder.
So that left cross-country skiing. He reached out to friends like Trulia co-founder and competitive triathlete Sami Inkinen and others, who helped him find a coach. Then Bragiel bought a one-way ticket to Finland a little over two months ago and began training.
His training regimen consists of skiing for several hours a day and doing sprints. Then he’s also added in swamp training. He’ll be in Austria for the next month before starting to compete in qualifying races in New Zealand and Australia in August.
To qualify for the Olympics, he must be able to finish five qualifying races where he’s not more than 10 minutes behind world’s top cross-country skiier, Norway’s Petter Northug (pictured right).
“My coach gives me a 20 to 30 percent chance,” he said.
He says that during training downtime, he’s still active in helping existing portfolio companies. But he’s not taking on any new companies at the moment.
“I’m long distance with my partners at the moment. I’m on hiatus,” he said. “But I still have a good amount of downtime. I still give my current companies attention and I’m on e-mail all the time doing introductions. The only thing I really can’t do is sit down and have a beer with them.”
The more involved he gets with competing, however, he’s realizing that he may need to get sponsors to help with the process.
“A lot of Olympians get nutritionists or guys to help them wax skis, which can take hours at this competitive level, or physical therapists,” he said.
He says that he would donate money back to the ski associations he’s training with. “I train with 17 and 20-year-olds and I see how they sometimes forgo their college plans to compete in the store,” he said. I want everyone else to do well too.”
Instagram Launches Cinema, Its Fix For The iPhone's Shaky Camera
Instagram today finally unveiled its anticipated video service and served it with a kicker, great for those of us with shaky hands. It launched Cinema: a way to stabilize the video captured with the iPhone.
Right now this is an iPhone-only app. And for good reason. Since the launch of the iPhone 5, Android phone makers have embraced higher quality cameras than Apple with many flagship devices already featuring image stabilization.
Of course a lot of this is hearsay right now. Image stabilization performed by software, like done here, historically gets the job done at the sacrifice of image quality. Either it introduces more digital noise or messes with flow of the image. But most of the time the image does improve in some way.
This feature gives Instagram a solid leg up over Vine and other camera apps. Like when taking pics with Instragram, the photos often look better with a slight adjustment. Other apps, like Camera+, feature similar tools, but Instagram bakes in features that make their pics, and now videos, look as good as possible — and then adds a social layer on top.
Cinema is built into Instagram’s iOS app, which is available in the app store now.
Instagram Launches 15-Second Video Sharing Feature, With 13 Filters And Editing
Instagram, the immensely popular photo-sharing app that was acquired by Facebook in a $1 billion deal last year, is not just for photos anymore.
At a press event at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, Instagram’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom debuted a new feature called video capabilities called, simply, “Video On Instagram.” This lets people create 15-second videos to share on the service. The feature includes simple editing capabilities as well as 13 new filters, which were specially created for video.
“What we did to photos, we just did to video,” Systrom said.
This feature, which is rolling out to all Instagram users on iOS and Android today, will impact a huge number of people, due to Instagram’s current reach. Systrom said today that Instagram has 130 million monthly users, who have shared 16 billion photos to date. Engagement on the app is high: Over one billion “likes” are added to the service every day.
This confirms our scoop from earlier this week, and also puts an end to the years-long search for an “Instagram for video” that has spawned a number of new startups aiming to fill the gap — Instagram is now the Instagram for video, quite literally. None of the existing apps in the mobile video market have yet become the definite winner from an adoption perspective, so it will be interesting to see how this takes on with the mainstream.
Indeed, this is a clear move that pits Facebook more firmly against Twitter, which acquired its own short-form video sharing app called Vine last year. This morning Vine went on the offense, announcing a slate of new features.
In response to a question about why Instagram chose the 15 second time frame, as opposed to the six-second videos offered by Vine, Systrom said that 15 seconds was “an artistic choice” and stressed that he doesn’t necessarily say that one is better than the other. “It’s that Goldilocks moment. It feels just right.”
This is a the biggest change in what Instagram fundamentally is since the service first launched nearly three years ago. Systrom has said in the past that video could be in Instagram’s future, but has stressed that video adds challenges that are not presented by photos. In an interview with the Verge last fall, Systrom was asked why video-sharing apps haven’t taken off in the same way that photo-sharing apps have. He said: “I think it’s a combination of data speed limitations and the time it takes to watch a video. Videos are a very difficult medium to be good at, and also a difficult medium to consume quickly.”
Presumably, being a part of a company with Facebook’s resources has enabled Instagram to finally build a feature that rises to video’s challenges. During a Q&A session following the Video On Instagram launch, Systrom said that adding video was a “significant feat” from a server and infrastructure engineering perspective.
Here is a video of Video On Instagram at work:
Instagram Crosses 130 Million Users, With 16 Billion Photos And Over 1 Billion Likes Per Day
On stage at Facebook’s big mystery event, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom has just shared some new growth statistics for the photo-sharing platform.
Instagram now boasts over 130 million active monthly users. And that’s not all — there are over 16 billion photos on the service altogether, with over 1 billion likes given to users each day.
In February of this year, Instagram had just surpassed 100 million users. But much of that growth came with the introduction of an Android version of the application.
Originally, Instagram launched on iOS only, and had around 30 million users in the seventeen months of iOS exclusivity. A year later, over half of Instagram’s 100 million users are coming from Android.
In terms of volume as a photo-sharing network, Flickr surpassed 8 billion photos in May of this year. That should give you a pretty clear idea of the scale of Instagram usage thus far.
Instagram: 16B Photos, 130M People, 1B Likes…And 15 Seconds Of ‘Beautiful' Video
Instagram’s Kevin Systrom told us today told us how people “come together to share the world in real time” as the company planned to unveil Instagram’s video service — which we first reported earlier this week. And he also revealed new stats: Instagram now hosts 16 billion photos for 130 million users, who have interacted on the network with 1 billion likes.
That’s 30 billion more users than Facebook reported for Instagram just a month ago, and more than double what Instagram had when Facebook first made its offer to acquire the app, in April of last year, when Instagram had around 50 million monthly active users.
That underscores what a runaway success the app has been so far. Earlier today I noted how Instagram is currently the most popular photo sharing app on the iPhone in the U.S., with over 35% of iPhone users accessing it every month, giving it a lead of nearly 20 percentage points over Snapchat.
It will be interesting to see how the introduction of the new video features impacts that: yes, it will enhance the service, but the question is whether current users will feel that it interferes with what Instagram already offers, and subsequently migrate elsewhere; or whether they will naturally move to using it alongside the photo features. That’s putting to one side whether Instagram might pick up completely new users who are interested in the video service alone. At the moment, Vine is the most popular among the mobile video apps, but with only around a 10% market share, there are many more users for both to target.
In fact, with Vine allowing for 6.5 seconds of video and Instagram going for 15 seconds of video, you could almost wonder whether some might just use both.
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