I recently participated in a Thomson Reuters webinar entitled "Boosting Returns with Web 2.0 Technology". The seminar was targeted to VC and Private Equity professionals and focused on how investment firms can use social media in managing their investment business. I was reminded of the mew media technology bubble that I live in a few months ago when I spoke on a similar topic at the PEI Investor Relations and Communications Forum. When I asked the crowd of about 150 people how many were on Twitter and a single hand went up I realized that I had my work cut out for me (I might have guessed that that when I walked into the room and was the only person…
Category
Venture Capital
Venture capital is dead! Long live venture capital!
Dan Primack sited a study on PE Hub today that found that over 50% of VC professionals believe that the VC industry is “broken”. My response: WHO CARES? Seriously. It seems like the venture industry these days spends more time lamenting its future than actually working towards a future that’s different. And they couldn’t be more short term in their perspective. VC sentiment has started to become like consumer sentiment – something that moves on a monthly basis. Are we forgetting that our business is about spotting long term trends and funding business cycles that are measured in years, not months?!? It’s possible I’m simply in the wrong demographic (almost 85% of the respondents were east- or west-coast VCs), the…
Are young VCs better VCs?
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…
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!