I love the start-up world. I love working with founders and young companies. I love the excitement of working on business ideas that are new and different. I love seeing the success that often comes from this hard work. I’ve never before in my professional life seen a time of such innovation and creativity. At Foundry we see more business plans now than we ever have. And what’s more, more of those business plans are really interesting (and fundable). It goes without saying that I love the business of venture capital. I love helping entrepreneurs work on their ideas. And I love helping companies figure out how to become as successful as possible. I love the challenge of trying to…
Tag
Venture Capital
Entrepreneurs First!
A few years ago I was talking to a fellow venture capitalist about an entrepreneur he had previously backed. “That guy should love me!” he exclaimed, “I made him 50 million bucks!” And then moved on to some other topic which I can’t remember because I was numb with disbelief at his previous statement. He backed an entrepreneur who built a business that after a number of years had a very nice exit and he made the entrepreneur money? Obviously his logic is completely backwards. And while I don’t know that many VCs would express such an extreme view of that sentiment I do think that most believe that not only is a healthy VC ecosystem important for entrepreneurship to…
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…