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…
Damon Darlin argues in an article earlier this week in the Times that serendipity has become "lost in the digital deluge". His premise is essentially that through services like Twitter, Facebook and others we’ve essentially crow-sourced content discovery and lost is the beauty of discovering "something we never knew we wanted to find" (he uses…
Clear announced last night that they had shut down. The note on their website says the following: Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available. At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to…
The initial signs of hope in a market are often just the sense that things are swinging in the right direction. This is why measures such as "consumer sentiment" are so important to the outlook of an economy – when people think things are going well, they often do (and because consumers power over 70%…
Reposting from my partner Jason Mendelson’s blog about an upcoming event at CU Boulder featuring Sam Zell. This will be a great event. In the continuing Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, next week Sam Zell will be visiting the university. April 22nd, at noon in the large (Boulder NewTech Meetup) courtroom at the law school. More…
I’ve been enjoying Scott Austin’s Venture Capital Dispatch. It’s a great source of information, easy to read and is a great summary of information for those of us who don’t have time to read the Journal every day. Thought it was worth a pointer.
For me the greatest impact of Barak Obama’s historic victory yesterday is the generational shift that it enables. I’m not talking about his generation, although there’s clearly a passing of the baton from the 60’s generation (people born in the 40’s) to the 80’s generation (people born in the 60’s). I’m talking about his kids…
A recurring theme in venture circles these last few weeks has been "Back To Basics" with VC pundits boldly prognosticating about the current state of the markets, talking about the infamous Sequoia deck and trying not to make people wince as they lay their claim to how they saw all this coming (I’m not immune…
For those that scoffed at my posts (here and here) about the US savings rate falling below zero (written during the summer of 05′) here’s another, somewhat less scientific data point (not that the skeptics need further convincing these days). The National Debt Clock which counts the total national debt (not consumer debt, but that…
Now that I’ve received a link to the Sequoia "Holy Shit" presentation about 30 times along with about a dozen emails asking "what do you think?" it’s probably time for a post. My partner Jason has a great post up on the subject (with a more general discussion of how the current markets effect our…