I spoke at the AppNexus Summit a couple of weeks ago. Brian O’Kelley read my post on adtech investing trends and asked if I could expand during the session. The video is online (my part at 1:48), but I thought I’d write it up also. I figured in the AppNexus audience of 600 that there […]
VC, entrepreneurism, startup economy
Pace of VC investing by subsector
I couldn’t sleep last night so I figured I’d see if I could confirm a nagging suspicion about the early-stage VCs I know. About six months ago it seemed like they were slowing down their pace of investing while the corporates and newer super-angels were doing a lot more deals. If this were true it […]
Valuation for investors
Twice in the past week I have had pre-product entrepreneurs tell me that they were raising seed rounds at an approximately $10mm pre-money. In both cases I had to pass, despite the merit of the management teams. Both companies told me that they have other early-stage investors ready to fill their rounds, and I’m glad. […]
Neu VC
Put up a website. Took down the robots.txt today. Thought I’d tell you all first. Now before you inform me–as Josh Reich did when I asked him to take an early look–that I should get a new designer, I’ll let you know that I designed it myself. With help from my five year old. Between […]
Innovators can come from anywhere. VCs, not so much.
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions. […]
Don’t let the dumb money lead
When I don’t invest in a company it’s because (a) I didn’t like the company, (b) I didn’t know enough about the company’s business to actually add any value, or (c) I didn’t like the terms of the deal. But I recently said no to a company where I liked all three of those things. […]
The bubble this time
What is a bubble anyway? A positive feedback loop where the governor is on a time-delay. It’s not necessarily a money thing. It’s just that financial bubbles are easy to spot because price is easy to measure and a graph of the exponential positive feedback followed by the screeching halt (and ensuing positive feedback on the decline) […]
Old Style vs. New Style VC
Wrote a comment over on David Lerner’s blog on his “Are Super-Angels Extinct” post. He said What I am saying is that some of these superangel funds may structurally resemble traditional VC funds, but they are something altogether different- and more akin to an angel group. My comment was that structure matters. If you set […]
Co-evolution and other housekeeping
A couple of weeks ago I wrote something for AdExchanger’s ‘Predictions for 2011‘ series. It needed to be brief, and I wanted to talk about what entrepreneurs will be beta testing two years from now. I made a couple of observations that are pretty obviously true and then ventured this prediction: Towards the end of […]
More VC Coinvestment Visualizations
I’ve always believed that unless you try your hand at something, you can’t really appreciate the people who do it well. That was my motivation in creating the VC Coinvestment Network Map I posted two weeks ago. And believe me, after munging that together I did appreciate the complexity of the process and the expertise […]