venture capital

 Yesterday evening, I got a SNOM M3 phone that I had ordered from Amazon. I unpacked it and charged the phone. While it was charging, I pointed my web browser to onsip.com and set up a 30 day free trial account. It took me about five minutes to set up an account, one user, and get a phone number. I then took down the sip...[read more]

Venture capital term sheets are not legally binding (except certain subclauses like confidentiality and no-shop provisions). That said, there is a well-established norm that VC’s don’t back out of signed term sheets unless they discover something really, really bad – fraud, criminal backgrounds of founders etc. The best VC in the world...[read more]

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Nivi, the co-author of the great Venture Hacks blog. He recently added me to AngelList, a directory of angel and seed investors that Nivi curates. Our discussion covered a variety of things, including trying to define the parameters that qualifies someone to call themselves an angel investor....[read more]

An occasional series in which a review of recent posts on MyVenturePad reveals the following nuggets: The gulf widens The mobile Internet will explode with Google Phone and Android adding to iPhone’s success. For many, work and play will happen wherever they happen to be. Others will reject the always-connected world, while some are...[read more]

Short answer: enough to get your startup to an accretive milestone plus some fudge factor. “Accretive milestone” is a fancy way of saying getting your company to a point at which you can raise money at a higher valuation. As a rule of thumb, I would say a successful Series A is one where good VCs invest at a pre-money that is at least...[read more]

We’ve run TechStars in Boulder for three years. So far each year at least one of the teams ends up with a runaway success on a bootstrapped business. In year one it was J-Squared with their Facebook (and now MySpace) apps.  The bootstrapper of year two is Occipital with their awesome RedLaser iPhone app. RedLaser has been at the...[read more]

Mark Suster (one of the best VC blogs) has a post up on Tenacity. He says: Tenacity is probably the most important attribute in an entrepreneur. It’s the person who never gives up – who never accepts “no” for an answer. The world is filled with doubters who say that things can’t be done and then pronounce after the fact that they “knew...[read more]

There’s a great CNN opinion piece out today by Amy M. Wilkinson that argues strongly (and correctly) that the government needs to do more to support entrepreneurship and small businesses. I wholeheartedly agree. Quoting from the piece: “According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 has been generated...[read more]

Are you smarter than a 5th grader? While this phrase has become a wildly popular game and game show, it is also an interesting segue into a recent post in The Business Insider. Daniel Schultz, DFJ Gotham’s co-founder and managing director, set out to try and explain venture capital to his son’s 5th grade class. To accomplish his goal,...[read more]

I did a "Room For Debate" on the New York Times yesterday with Ken Auletta and John Markoff. Here's the first part and here's the second part. The topic was Google; are they too powerful, and if so, what the government should do about it. I said this about anti-trust efforts in technology: I am not big fan of governmental intervention in...[read more]

Sequoia Capital is the venture capital firm that backed Google, Yahoo, YouTube, eHarmony, LinkedIn, and PayPal, among many other winners. Here’s some of their advice about business plans. As you’ll see, the format and content they recommend is very similar to what I’ve suggested in previous posts. For example, forget the 30+ page word...[read more]

Online technology magazine Xconomy wrote an article yesterday that focused on the controversy surrounding Boston based Revolutionary Angels – the angel group that is sponsoring a business plan competition in which companies are charged a $4,995 “entry fee” and vie for a $250k investment from the group. I wrote extensively last week about...[read more]

As readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of the startup and venture capital world but also a sometime critic of how the venture capital industry works. For a long time I’ve wanted to do more than talk about this and actually start a new kind of venture firm, designed the right way from the ground up. Last year two friends of mine...[read more]

An occasional series in which a review of recent posts on MyVenturePad reveals the following nuggets:Been there, done it, want to do it againBut there is another kind of entrepreneur I love backing even more. It's the serial entrepreneur who has had a number of successes under his belt and now wants to swing for the fences. We have a...[read more]

One of the more contentious things in the negotiation between an entrepreneur and a VC over a financing, particularly an early stage financing, is the inclusion of an option pool in the pre-money valuation. As my friend Mark Pincus likes to say, "it's just another way to lower the price". I'll accept that critique. And take it one step...[read more]

Every day I get emails from entrepreneurs that make me think. In this case, it’s from a friend who is on the fund raising trail. He started off the email with “I felt compelled to share this with you as someone who would appreciate it.” I thought it was dynamite and asked him if I could share it since – in its unedited form – it captured...[read more]

As the venture business has grown and matured, many firms have developed specific areas of focus. Our firm, Union Square Ventures, for example only invests in web services. I believe this is a good thing for both the investors in venture funds, called LPs, and the entrepreneurs. But there are a number of ways that firms can execute their...[read more]

There is a certain well respected venture capital firm (VC) that has a program for fledgling entrepreneurs. The teams that are selected get a desk, a small stipend, and advice for a few months from experienced VCs. I could imagine back when I was starting my first company thinking this was a great opportunity – especially the advice...[read more]

There has been a lot of talk about young entrepreneurs creating all the great companies; Gates, Jobs, Yang/Filo, Bezos, Dell, Brin/Page, Zuckerberg, etc, etc. I agree that visionary young people are worth backing and we do a lot of that at Union Square Ventures. But there is another kind of entrepreneur I love backing even more. It's the...[read more]

Technorati released its annual State Of The Blogosphere report this past week. In it was a short interview they did with me about VCs and entrepreneurs who blog. I like the way it came out so I figured I'd reblog it here. ---------- Fred Wilson, managing partner of two venture capital firms and well known "VC blogger" at AVC.com,...[read more]