There’s a great post up on the NYT Bits Blog that asks “Do Young Venture Capitalists Have an Advantage?” While established (i.e., older) venture capitalists have more name recognition and therefore theoretically access to better deal flow, younger VCs are closer to the technology and have more in common with today’s set of technology entrepreneurs – according to the article – which makes them have an advantage in today’s venture market. This is a great question and one that I think about a lot as I consider ways to be a better venture capitalist myself. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was to shed light on the progress of an individual VC as I rose in…
Category
Venture Capital
Start your business now! (revisited)
I wrote a post a few weeks ago listing out the reasons that right now is a great time to start a business. A few days ago TechCrunch came out with their TechCrunch 2008 Year in Review (their first paid report). The post that summarized the report had a preview of some of the data they write about and included the following graph that does a great job of showing why the current market can work in your favor. Have at it!
WSJ Venture Capital Blog
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.
Techstars Beantown!
I’ve been a *huge* fan of Techstars since first meeting David Cohen just over two years ago and have not been bashful about my love of the concept in previous blog posts. For those of you not familiar with the program, Techstars brings together teams of entrepreneurs from across the country to participate in an intensive 3 month summer program to jumpstart their businesses. It’s heavily mentor and experiential driven – the teams work extremely closely with the program’s mentors to advance their businesses and the summer program is filled with guest speakers that cover an array of topics of specific interest to building young businesses. Since launching in 2007 we’ve had 20 companies through the program (of which 12…
meeting overload
The last couple of months have been tuff ones for me. I’ve felt constantly behind (thus the lack of blogging consistency) and most days consisted of running from one meeting to the next (typically 10 minutes behind). This has contributed to my feeling both burned out and feeling that I was letting too many things fall through the cracks. This was evidenced by 1) my inbox growing most days, not shrinking; 2) waking up at 5am to try to work on #1; 3) an over-reliance on multitasking (walking to a meeting, on the phone while responding to email); 4) my wife never being able to reach me during the day; and 5) generally feeling stressed and off-balance. My week off…
Deals
I’m trying to purge the word "deal" from my lexicon – at least as it relates to investments (i.e., companies are not a "deal", it’s an "investment opportunity"; the actual transaction itself is still fair game). I’m amazed how often the term comes up in the venture industry. To me it seems somehow demeaning and way too generic. Entrepreneurs who put their heart and sole into a company don’t need to hear us talk about their companies like they’re a commodity. If you’re a VC reading this, try it for a day and see how often the word comes up . . . and how difficult it is to stop using it…
Saying "no" can be hard to do
At the risk of opening myself up to a landslide of snide comments expressing sympathy for the "difficult" job a VC has saying no to so many potential investments, but in the interest of being open about the experience of venture capital from the inside I offer up the following thoughts: Sometimes it’s very easy to decide to decline a company’s request for financing (and we see literally thousands of plans a year, so we’re pretty well practiced at it). Many times the company simply isn’t a fit for our investment focus (we get a few "invest in our [pick one] manufacturing/car wash/custom painting/etc business" requests ever year). Or the business plan is clearly off base (my personal favorite from…
The glamorous life of our accounting group
I caught this shot as Melissa from our accounting department was preparing some kind of mailing to go out later this afternoon. This is actually only about 1/2 of the envelopes she was working on. It’s all glamour here in venture capital!
Positive trending
I was thinking earlier today about one of the more subtle litmus tests that I use when considering an investment opportunity – my excitement trend line. My partner Ryan really helped me think through this a few months ago (I had been doing it but hadn’t been explicit about it). For every investment opportunity we dig into there are always multiple meetings, due diligence calls, research reviews, partner debates and other chances to interact about a company or idea. It’s obvious when I write it out here – although I think more subtle when you’re actually in the middle of evaluating an opportunity – but the trend line around a potential deal should be pretty clearly rising as you spend…
How do you make money on the Internet?
My partner Brad Feld was interviewed yesterday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation on the topic of how companies make money online. You can listen to the broadcast here. The key take-away ultimately is that is you aggregate enough traffic you have a handful of options for turning those eyeballs into cash (probably worth of a full post about the pros and cons of these various models, but no time today to get that down on paper). Brad did a great job and I’m psyched that I now know someone who’s been on TOTN!