From the category archives:

Venture Capital

The New Normal of Venture-backed startups

March 11, 2010

Tweet Bill Gross, the legendary bond fund manager at PIMCO, has been writing for a few years now about the new normal of global finance and the implications for investing and investing strategies going forward. I recently came across this awesome guest post by George Zachary of Charles River Ventures on the Venture Hacks blog [...]

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Success bred from failures – the VC model

March 2, 2010

Tweet This 2004 Stanford University eCorner lecture series interview with Randy Komisar, serial entrepreneur and Partner at Kleiner Perkins, is one of the best snippets of what it takes to succeed as a venture capital backed entrepreneur. Randy also highlights the value and key attributes of the US Venture Capital model. The video is 8 [...]

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For love or for money?

August 20, 2009

Tweet In entrepreneurship, it had better be for love. I could not resist posting this video clip of John Doerr speaking about missionary founders/CEOs vs. mercenary founders/CEOs, and why they only invest in the missionary types. Hat tip to Larry Cheng’s blog where I found this video … Larry also identifies one of the top [...]

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Entering the Web 2.0 Innovation Abyss

April 12, 2008

Tweet Fred Wilson put up a great post last week which generated a ton of commentary on the post itself and across the blogosphere on the topic of a ‘new path to liquidity’ for startups. Be sure to scan through the comments. Umair Haque had a supportive follow-on post as well. Fred hit on a [...]

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Charles River & Quickstart

November 1, 2006

Tweet TechCrunch announced today the new Charles River Ventures Quickstart program. It is a program designed to ensure that CRV gets access to deal flow in this latest startup boom of Web 2.0, where the costs to effectively get a company up and off the ground (and potentially to an exit) are substantially less than [...]

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Cash (flow) is king!

September 8, 2006

Tweet VC Confidential has a recent post on the power dynamics between VCs and the entrepreneurs they back. It is a worthwhile read for all entrepreneurs, but certainly for those that are or are considering being venture-backed. The overarching lesson is that until your business is cash-flow positive, you are at the mercy of outsiders [...]

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The return of tech IPOs?

August 31, 2006

Tweet Paul Kedrosky has an interesting post predicting that 2006 is the end of the misery for venture-backed technology companies seeking an IPO exit and that 2007 will see a resurgence. It seems that he is suggesting that the supply of attractive tech equities is shrinking (or has shrunk enough), yet the demand for tech [...]

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Interesting VC analysis

August 31, 2006

Tweet Peter Rip at Early Stage VC has an interesting series of blog posts that he is producing on Venture Capital 2.0. This post caught my attention for some data that was in it regarding ways for limited partners to successfully pick VC funds which will earn the outsized returns. I copied the paragraph below: [...]

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Dissecting and pattern matching the venture business

June 30, 2006

Tweet Paul Kedrosky, blogger behind Infectious Greed,  has a couple of interesting posts again dissecting the venture business  and looking for best practices  to identify what makes a stellar venture capitalist. A lot of time, effort, words and echo in the blogosphere is dedicated to this task in general, though Paul is certainly qualified to [...]

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What enables a great startup hub?

June 23, 2006

Tweet Recently Paul Kedrosky initiated an interesting discussion about the top technology startup hubs in the USA. His article  was an excellent summary of the topic. He even posits how Buffalo could make the list! The discussion that followed included Fred Wilson  arguing that NYC should be #3 on the list, ahead of Seattle and [...]

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Back to basics – filling the early stage funding gap

May 29, 2006

Tweet An interesting trend is underway in the venture capital industry. Most of us are well aware of the trend to very large funds, which started in the Internet bubble with the first $1 Billion and up venture capital funds appearing. Well, the necessary reaction to that action of large fund formation has finally begun [...]

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A better seed investment structure

April 30, 2006

Tweet There has been a fair amount of discussion on seed / angel investment structures recently in the blogosphere. Below are two great postings that cover most of the discussion to-date: Brad Feld – discusses the two main structures currently used, preferred equity and convertible debt with a warrant Josh Kopelman – discusses the positives [...]

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A solid VC blog

January 31, 2006

Tweet I’m back after a long absence in posting – just finished a major crunch in launching the pilot of our new Web Game Show, THINK!. Mike Hirshland from Polaris Ventures just started blogging. I was referred to his blog by another blog, and have begun reading his posts. I am highly interested in following [...]

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