One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to start meditating daily. I had dabbled in it before but never made an effort to make it a daily habit. With all the research that has been coming out around meditation’s positive effects, I figured it was worth putting some real effort into it.

Now having been meditating for 83 days, I can definitively say that it has had a meaningful positive impact on my life. I feel noticeably happier and much more aware of myself. I think almost everyone can benefit from it, but especially extremely busy people like the entrepreneurs we at Eniac have the pleasure of working with every day. …

As Techcrunch announced, last week we led the seed round for Statsbot joined by our friends at Betaworks and Innovation Endeavors. This turned out to be one of the most oversubscribed seed rounds we’ve seen since we started investing in 2010 so we are extremely excited to be involved.

Statsbot allows employees to discover and interact with their company’s data via a conversational user interface. Currently, Statsbot supports Slack as its user interface and can access data from a variety of sources including mixpanel, google analytics and salesforce. …

It has been a crazy year in politics both here in the US and around the world. I can’t remember a time when the news was so dominated by political discourse, yet almost none of it has been about what I believe is the biggest opportunity as well as the biggest threat to our society.

It is a tidal wave that is growing into something more impactful than anything else in our history. That wave is the evolution of intelligent machines. …

Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Anchor, which launched today. Anchor is a social audio platform that lets users effortlessly create “waves”, short bits of audio content. Users can also listen to waves by creator, hashtag or category and reply to create an interactive conversation.

Given what Anchor is all about, instead of our usual blog post about why we invested in Anchor, I’ve created a wave about it. Just click below to listen to it.

Update: looks like we weren’t along in loving the concept of Anchor. Apple is featuring it as the #1 Best New App and anchor spent a whole day as the #1 product on Product Hunt! You can’t ask for a better launch!!!

Last month it was announced that we led a seed round in Sochat followed by a number of other great investors — Greylock, NEA, Slow, Betaworks, Foundation and Allen Zhang. Of course investment decisions are complex, often with many factors, but I’ve tried to boil things down to the main factors that drove us to lead the round.

Unique founder market fit

The number one factor in any investment decision we make is quality of the team. Our investment in Sochat was no different. Prior to founding Sochat, Luke spent two years leading WeChat’s growth team in China. For those that don’t know, WeChat is the world’s largest and arguably most advanced chat platform, boasting an astonishing 650M users. It completely dominates the Chinese marketing in a way no platform dominates the US (more on that later). As the leader of the growth team, Luke has experience that almost no one else in the world has — at most it’s experience shared by a handful of people at Facebook, Snapchat, Kik, Line and Kakao. …

For the last few years my partners and I have had a thesis that mobile search as we know it is completely broken. The desktop experience of typing search terms into a text box and getting back lists of links does not translate to the mobile use case.

Two years ago a few of us sat in our old Eniac NYC office brainstorming what mobile search should be like. Some of the ideas we came up with were:

• Results should be apps not landing pages.
• Needs to deep link into relevant content within each app.
• Must be contextually aware. Surfacing recommendations based on things like location, time of day, who the user is with, the user’s schedule and…

We’re hiring a director of operation to work out of our San Francisco or NYC office. If you’re interested please email me at hadley@eniac.vc with a resume and why you think you’d be a good fit to join the team. Below is more info about the position.

Eniac Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm focused on mobile technology investments. We have a fast growing portfolio of 80+ companies and $70mm of AUM. We are seeking an experienced finance and operations professional to serve as Director of Operations and manage our internal operations as we scale our portfolio.

The Director of Operations will be responsible for transitioning our entire backend infrastructure in-house and managing operations as we scale. This role is multi-disciplinary and requires expertise in finance, accounting, reporting, legal, deal execution, follow on financings and HR. The Director of Operations will need to interact directly with our portfolio companies and will also play a role in portfolio management and development as well as interact with limited partners to help manage investor relations. …

By Hadley Harris, Founding General Partner

I’ve spent the last 5 days in London exploring the local startup ecosystem. Over the last few years, I’ve been hearing great things about the burgeoning tech community over here so I was excited to check it out for myself. Overall, London feels a lot like NYC 5 years ago, which seems to match up with with the numbers as London startups raised $1B last year, similar to NYC in 2009. Per the below, London VC investments have seen rapid growth over the last 5 years.

Beyond the numbers, there are a few factors that feel the same between the London and NYC startups scenes. …