AIPP Data Modeling (Angel Investing, Sidebar 2)

More from the Angel Investor Performance Project data. Much of the financial activity at early stage companies happens around investment rounds. Acquisitions, failures, and fire-sales tend to happen when it’s time for the company to raise more money. So it doesn’t make sense to look at rates of failure or exits divorced from the fund-raising […]

AIPP Data Summary (Angel Investing, Sidebar 1)

The Kauffman Foundation has some data on angel investor investment and returns at their Angel Investor Performance Project. The data has some serious limitations, mainly that it is relatively concentrated in time (44% of the investments with data are ’99 or ’00), that there’s not enough investments to draw fine-grained conclusions, and that valuations at […]

Transcending Hobbyism (Angel Investing 4)

A company I really liked was out raising money. They went to a very well known early stage VC and had a great first meeting. A couple of days later the partner got back to them with a no. He said “We really like you and your company, but we have a portfolio construction problem.” […]

How to be Different When What you Sell is a Commodity (Angel Investing 3)

When I started a company my co-founders and I thought and discussed and argued about how we were different from our competitors, how there was a hole in the market, how we were going to win by going where no one had gone before. We got potential customers, suppliers, employees excited by talking about how […]

The Work-Work Balance (Angel Investing, 2)

The first question every prospective angel (and all my relatives) ask me is “What do you do all day?” It’s sort of a funny question. For any job more varied than working on an assembly line, the answer is either going to be pretty long or pretty vague. Usually I go with vague. Today I’m […]

On being an asshole

Here’s something you didn’t know about me: I’m vaguely claustrophobic. It doesn’t mean much in practice, but when I was at the last TechStars demo day at Webster Hall, I watched the presenters from the same place I watched the Beastie Boys in 1985, the Mountain Goats in 2008 and every concert in between–the back […]

To my friends who died ten years ago, I hope you had a fortunate rebirth. To my friends who had family members die, may your loved ones find happiness. To my son, born 42 weeks and one day later: there is only loss if there is love, the way forward is always through love.

It might have turned out badly if I’d been on anything but a Harley

One Wednesday 1am in the years when I couldn’t sleep I wandered into a ramshackle biker bar out route 46 and found a guitarist playing the blues. The guy was like 50 and looked like an accounting professor, but man could he play. I listened until he closed the place down and left on the […]

But, then, why have a website at all?

I’ve been sitting in front of my computer all day, doing general industry research: who does what, who the competitors in specific micro-segments are (i.e. who the ten billion companies competing to be the leading real-time mobile app video advertising social behaviorial targeting data exchange are. OK, that was a bit of hyperbole, but not […]