Dr. King

I was thinking today (as I’m sure many people are) about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One of my favorite quotes is from Dr. King (although I’m afraid to say that I couldn’t find it quoted directly on-line – apologies for not giving a direct link). To paraphrase is goes something like this: Those who have succeeded have yet to find something great enough at which to fail Like the story of throwing your hat over the wall, this quote inspires us to reach for great things. True in business and in life.

January 17, 2005· 1 min read

The Power of Branding

Ross and Dave sent this link over to me today. Parody – a strong sign of flattery. Clearly Apple has marketing down – we could all take a lesson. . . https://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif

January 14, 2005· 1 min read

I need better user statistics

I just set up FeedBurner on my site to start tracking readers. I should have done this a long time ago (where long time = 7 days ago when I started my blog). I’m pretty bummed with the stats that are available on TypePad. By pretty bummed, I mean that the stats are essentially useless. They don’t have any information on click-through nor do they tell me either what aggregators are hitting my site (although I can see a little of this in the referrers section, which is pretty much the only part of their statistics that I find useful) and they definitely don’t tell me how many underlying readers there are for my site because they can’t surface information on how many customers each aggregator is pulling for. I’m going to write a future post on the vanity of blogging, but suffice it to say for the moment that I (and most bloggers that I know) check my stats pretty regularly. Its not that I’m specifically trying to vie for a large audience (although it’s nice to know that the work I put into my site is being seen by others), but I’m still interested in how many people are reading what I’m putting out there. …

January 13, 2005· 3 min read

Go Sox!

One of the things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been sitting down to write is the balance I’d like in my blog. My intention was to write a professional blog, but with a personal twist –not a blog just about the mechanics of being a VC, but my personal observations of the VC world and my growth as a venture capitalist. A few people have written in and reminded me not to forget about writing some posts about me with the idea that my VC observations will be more meaningful if I occasionally write posts that have nothing to do with being a VC, but give some background about how I got here and what else is important to me. …

January 13, 2005· 3 min read

Financial Models – Too Much Information?

At Mobius Venture Capital, as in many venture firms, we don’t have analysts (people whose primary responsibility is to run models, cap tables and the like). As a result, each of us does most of our own financial modeling. I actually like this set-up, because it makes sure that I’m both directly responsible for my work and am up to speed on the financials of each of the companies I work with. Reviewing financial models is not the largest part of my job, but is an important part of what I do – for screening new investments; tracking portfolio company performance as well as analyzing follow-on investments into companies in which we already have a financial interest. In the course of reviewing many many many such models, something rather counter-intuitive has struck me: most financial models are too detailed. That’s right – most models have too much information in them; too many assumptions; too many inputs; and are too hard to follow. Now, don’t get me wrong – there is definitely a place and time for a detailed line item budget (say for a rolling 12 month operating plan). That said, trying to detail out line item projections over a 5 year period I think makes models less rather than more useful. When I was in college I really enjoyed theoretical economics. One of the classes that I liked the most was Econometrics. As a relatively green econ student, I remember that my inclination (and that of my classmates) when building econometric models was to put in as much data as possible – the theory being that more data wouldn’t harm the model and would potentially help it. Our professor, Gary Krueger, pounded into us that this was in fact not the case – weak data hurt your model and taking out mediocre variables actually strengthened the veracity of the output (the garbage in/garbage out theory – although he had more colorful way of describing it at the time). I think a lot of modelers fall into a similar trap as me and my classmates first did – instead of simplifying their business to a reasonable and manageable number of inputs and variables, they attempt to put every complexity of their company into the model. …

January 12, 2005· 4 min read

The Adventure Reference

A number of people have written in and correctly identified the Adventure reference of my blog title. Here’s the full reference and why I chose it as the title for my ramblings. When I was a kid I used to love playing “Adventure” (written by Will Crowther and Don Woods back in the late 70’s). My dad worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, so I was rarely without a computer of some sort (terminals in those days; first with a 300 baud modem and eventually a super speedy 2400 baud model that didn’t even require you to insert your phone receiver into two plastic cup things to make the connection – you could actually plug your phone line directly into the modem!). I also had basically unlimited VAX time since I could log into an account my dad set up for me pretty much any time from home. I liked computers and spent a lot of time trying to write up rudimentary BASIC code and, of course, playing Adventure. I eventually mapped out the entire adventure world (I still have the pencil written map in a box of memorabilia from my childhood). …

January 10, 2005· 4 min read

Cover your wells!

This isn’t a post on venture capital or anything else related to business but rather something much closer to home . . . If you have a window well, please make sure it is covered. My wife and I have two dogs, one of whom is a 12 year old yellow lab named Beau. Beau is quite possibly the sweetest dog ever born (I’m of the belief that every person gets to have one truly exceptional dog in their lifetimes – Beau is this dog for us). Beau wandered away the other night. We couldn’t find him for several hours. I finally started checking the window wells in some of the adjacent houses and found him in an uncovered well at a house down the block that is under construction. It was dark and the window well was flush with the ground – I almost fell in myself. Beau was pretty seriously hurt. Friday we thought things were over for him (he couldn’t walk at all), but now things are looking a little better as he’s regained use of his front legs and some use of his back legs. He’s taking steroids and we’re hoping that his back/spinal chord was bruised (in which case he’ll regain much of his abilities) and not broken (which would be very very bad news). While the accident was clearly my fault (he wandered off and should not have been in a position to fall into the well), I have a couple of observations: …

January 9, 2005· 3 min read

Putting together a good venture presentation

From time to time I’m planning on writing posts aimed at giving some insight into the venture industry. Brad (sometimes co-authored by Jason Mendelson, our GC) has done a series of these that I think are very informative. In fact, my very first blog was a guest column for Brad that described splits and the various ways to calculate them in a venture deal (and why this matters to entrepreneurs). I sit through a lot of venture presentations. Literally hundreds of them. Some are very good but a good number of them are really poor. Seriously. This amazes me. I think it’s pretty hard to get an audience with a VC (I think about the number of plans we receive every year that we don’t see the pitch for vs. the number that we invite in for a meeting). I’m amazed how often entrepreneurs fail to put their best foot forward when they do get a meeting by having a sub-par presentation. I think it’s because too many entrepreneurs know their business so well that they forget how to describe it to people who don’t. Here’s a couple of do’s and don’t that I hope will be helpful. Also below is a list of what a good venture presentation should include (I believe this was originally put together by my colleague Chris Wand a few years ago). – DO have a 2 or 3 sentence description of what you do. This should be simple and straightforward. You grandparents should hear you sa this and say ‘oh – I get it’. – DO make sure you start your presentation by telling the people who you are talking to what it is you do (I’m truly amazed by the number of times it takes 6 or 10 powerpoint slides to get to the part of the presentation where I finally understand what it is the company that is presenting actually does) – DON’T assume that the problem that you solve is obvious. Make sure you do a good job outlining what it is that you ‘fix’ – DON’T have a financial plan that shows you becoming the most successful [insert your company type here] company ever in existence. I’m amazed how many enterprise software companies show us with a plan that has them generating $50m in revenue in their 4th year . . . while at the same time insisting that their plan is ‘very conservative’ – DO make sure you do time checks – first at the beginning of the presentation to know how long you have an audience for, and then periodically to make sure you are still on schedule – DO make sure you then organize your presentation around the time you have (which is to say, understand the meat of your presentation and make sure you get to it in the time you have allotted); a corollary to this is to make sure that you skip sections that you are asked to skip. We regularly spend 10 or 15 minutes time going through something (for example the market overview of a market we already know broadly very well) that we’ve asked an entrepreneur to skip over, only to run out of time during the real guts of the presentation (i.e., defining how the company’s technology is unique from that which we’ve seen before). – DO make sure you practice your presentation out of order and interrupted – a lot of good presenters get completely flustered if they get off track or have to take things in a different order than they planned – you should expect that you’ll get interrupted with questions, asked to skip over sections and challenged on certain points – practice your presentation that way. Questions to answer in a venture presentation. (n.b., please don’t see this as an end-all/be-all list, but rather as just a guide): Vision – What is your big vision? – What problem are you trying to solve and for whom? – Where do you want to be in the future Market – – …

January 8, 2005· 6 min read

Hats Off!

Someone once told me a story that I think about often. It went something like this: Two friends were walking together through some fields when they came to a high wall. The wall stretched as far as they could see in both directions. As they were talking about what to do in this impassable situation one of the men takes off his favorite felt hat and throws it over the wall. The other looks at him and says “why did you do that – that was your favorite hat,” to which his friend responds “now we’re going to have to find a way over that wall.” …

January 6, 2005· 2 min read

Eyes closed . . . head first . . .

I spend a reasonable amount of time on-line (or in my RSS reader) and more recently have begun to read an increasing number of web logs. It’s a fascinating phenomenon – a voice for everyone (although not necessarily a listener, but more on that in another post). I work for Mobius Venture Capital and have been interested in the emergence of some prominent VC’s in the blog world (my boss, Brad Feld, has a very popular and I think informative blog; other blogs, including some of the venture blogs I read are listed here on my site). One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the VC bloggers seem to be partners (two notable exceptions are Ryan McIntyre and Robin Bordoli – both colleagues of mine at Mobius). I’m not entirely sure why this is. My initial assumption is that those of us non-partners who work in VC are simply too busy (trying to become partners) to put anything together; or perhaps it’s because in the world of VC people care a lot about what partners think and say and not as much about what the rest of us say. So I decided to test this theory by starting a blog of my own. I’m calling it “VC Adventure (you are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike”) because I’m intending to muse about the twists and turns of the VC world (points to the first person who gets the full reference). I’d like to talk directly about my view of the world – the triumphs and frustrations I go through with my companies and in my firm as I try to figure out what kind of venture capitalist I’d like to be. …

January 5, 2005· 3 min read