The NY Times is reporting today on the question of entrepreneurs paying to pitch their companies to prospective investors – “Should Start-Ups Pay to Pitch?”. Highlighted in the piece is a Boston-based group – Revolutionary Angels – that charges companies $4,995 to enter their “business plan competition” (the winner of the competition receives an investment from the group). To be clear on my view of this: THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH ENTREPRENEURS SHOULD PAY TO PITCH THEIR BUSINESS TO PROSPECTIVE INVESTORS. PERIOD. END OF STORY. This kind of activity makes me absolutely sick. And the fact that Revolutionary Angels calls their scheme a “business plan competition” is reprehensible. In the Revolutionary Angels setup they are asking 100 companies to…
Archives / November, 2009
News Corp is spoiling Google’s fun (not to mention ours)
So it’s really come down to this? News Corp is thinking about inking a deal with Microsoft/Bing whereby not only will Bing get access to News Corp data (WSJ, Fox, etc.) but they’ll also prevent Google from indexing their sites. This sounds like a lose/lose/lose/lose proposition. News Corp loses – fewer page views, less revenue for their online content, and to the 90% of Internet users who use Google for search their properties will effectively stop existing. Google loses (sort of) to the extent people miss the data (not sure what will happen when you force a search on Google to a News Corp domain – will they simply return no results?). The rest of us lose because universal search…
The VC Model is “broken” (again? yawn!)
In the latest lob into the morass that has become somewhat of a sport amongst journalists and those that follow the venture capital industry, Carl Schramm and Harold Bradley write in BusinessWeek about “How Venture Capital Lost Its Way”. The evidence? Venture capital funding is down – from an “astonishing” 1.1% of US GDP in 2000; and in the 3rd quarter of 2009 down 33% from the same period a year earlier. To add to Schramm and Bradley’s collective horror, “two areas crucial to American progress cry out for capital-intensive investment: clean energy technology and biotech. And the VC industry isn’t delivering it. (Info tech, which by now requires few capital investments, still accounts for the lion’s share of those…
Putting entrepreneurs first
Shout-out to Sequoia for featuring Omar Hamoui on their home page today (he’s the CEO of AdMob which was acquired by Google today for $750M). Well done!
The “real” America
I’ve generally avoided political issues on this blog, but this isn’t something I can keep my mouth shut on. Yesterday Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the New York City Marathon in 27 years. Born in Eritrea on the east coast of Africa, Keflezighi moved to the US when he as 12 (more than 20 years ago), is an American citizen and has raced for the US Olympic team. Still, there are some who are calling his achievement diminished because he’s not “technically” an American by virtue of having been born outside of the United States – chief among them Darren Rovell of CNBC. Rovell writes: It’s a stunning headline: American Wins Men’s NYC Marathon For First Time…