About Social Media Today
venture capital
Raising Money: What Not to Say and What Not to Believe
Here are two sets of top ten lies: one of entrepreneurs and one of investors so that you know what not to say and what not to believe. Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs “Our projections are conservative.” “Jupiter says our market will be $50 billion in ten years.” “Several Fortune 500 companies are set to do business with us.” “No one else... [read more]
Moneyball for Startups
Dan Frommer wrote an interesting post on SplatF yesterday talking about the possibility of a quantitative assessment of founders/founding teams, like they use in baseball. [read more]
Social Media Received $2.52 Billion in Private Equity Funding in Q1
Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know that private equity and venture capital firms have been pouring cash into social networks like it was their job (and apparently, it is). Until recently, however, it was hard to get a handle on just how much money was being invested in social media startups. That's no longer the... [read more]
First-Time vs Serial Entrepreneurs
I've been thinking a lot about the differences between first-time and serial entrepreneurs. We invest in both and do not have a preference betweeen the two. But there are significant differences. The best first-time entrepreneurs have been stewing on their idea for quite a while. It is a personal passion of theirs and they bring to it a... [read more]
Adhesive – A Sticky New Foundry Group Theme
Today Seth posted a new blog on the Foundry Group site titled Foundry Group’s AdTech Investing: Adhesive. While we’ve seen a billion AdTech related investments, we’ve only made a few of them over the past three years. We are huge believers in the macro of digital advertising, but we think the morass of much of the online ad world is just... [read more]
Finding Startup Funds Made Easier
Websites hoping to play matchmaker between investors and startup entrepreneurs have come and gone with great regularity. FindVenture.com looks like a player. The site has partnered with a long list of venture capital funds to create a kind of exchange that connects VC and other investors with biz owners and entrepreneurs... [read more]
The segmentation of the venture industry
Ford Motors dominated the auto market in the early 20th century with a single car model, the Model T. At the time, customers were seeking low-cost, functional cars, and were satisfied by an extremely standardized product (Ford famously quipped that “customers can choose it in any color, as long as it’s black”). But as technology... [read more]
VCs Who Code
I'm going to stop by Google I/O in SF this afternoon to see this panel (yes, a panel) of VCs that Google has assembled. The common trait among all of them is they write code or at least they used to write code for a living. Here's the list: my partner Albert Wenger Brad Feld Dave McClure Paul Graham Chris Dixon I... [read more]
2010 ACA Summit: Angels and VCs – Friend or Foe?
Thanks goes to Wall Street Journal’s Russell Garland for taking us to the recent 2010 Angel Capital Association Summit in San Francisco and recounting how angels and VCs rivaled for the top spot. We all like a good scrum! According to Garland, attendees listened intently to speeches about the need for angel and VC harmony, and about... [read more]
The Market Plunge
Yesterday the stock market dropped almost 1,000 points intraday before rebounding late in the day. Does this matter to the world of entrepreneurship and startups? Yes and No. I'm no expert in the stock market but I read a bunch of experts blogs. I liked this from Steve Place: High Frequency Trading broke, then saved the market... [read more]
Mastering the VC Game
Over the years, I’ve occasionally thought about writing a book about how venture capital actually works. I no longer have to contemplate doing this as Jeff Bussgang has nailed it with his book Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on YOUR Terms. If you are an entrepreneur... [read more]
Old VC firms: get ready to be disrupted
If the U.S. economy were a company, the VC industry would be the R&D department. The financing for the VC industry comes from so-called LPs (Limited Partners) – mostly university endowments, pension funds, family funds, and funds-of-funds. These LPs wield tremendous power, yet very few of them understand how startups or venture... [read more]
An Evolved View Of The Participating Preferred
One of the issues with a trail of 5,000 blog posts going back over seven years is that sometimes you change your mind on something you wrote a long time ago but the words are still out there. That's the case with the issue of the participating preferred. Yesterday, I came upon this tweet by Vijaya Sagar Vinnakota: So I... [read more]
HBS Study: Angel Backed Companies Less Likely to Kick the Bucket
William R. Kerr Startup businesses need more than just cash in their kitty to achieve success and business longevity, according to a Harvard Business School paper into entrepreneurial funding. While it is important that seed businesses receive the necessary funding to get their operations up and running, sometimes the psychological... [read more]
SIP Phones and Voice In The Cloud
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]
Backing out of a term sheet
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]
What Is The Definition of An Angel Investor?
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]
#31: Here's a thought...
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]
What’s the right amount of seed money to raise?
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]
The Amazing RedLaser
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]
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Jim Estill is a partner on Canrock Ventures and sits on the board of RIM (Blackberry). More »
Steve King is a partner at Emergent Research and a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. More »
David Thomson is founder and Chairman of The Blueprint Growth Institute, a specialized management-consulting firm focused on helping.. More »
Phil Wainewright is a thought leader in cloud computing as a blogger, analyst, and consultant. More »
Barbara Weltman has written more than 25 books on entrepreneurship. More »
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“To your final comments, right on. Those who cheat will do so regardless of how simple or complex the tax laws, or the rules of the road, or whether they have an admission ticket.”
“To your final comments, right on. Those who cheat will do so regardless of how simple or complex the tax laws, or the rules of the road, or whether they have an admission ticket.”