Many of the comments on yesterday’s post were about training future VCs, or not. Both Brad Feld and Fred Wilson said they did not have junior VCs because they did not want to burden entrepreneurs with inexperienced VCs. This makes a ton of sense. But, then, where should experienced VCs come from? Andy Weissman comments […]
VC
On fixing VC ourselves
What good is it for me to sing helplessness bluesWhy should I wait for anyone else? – Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues That’s for Fred Wilson. In his post last month “Can the Crowd Be More Patient“, Fred says We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, […]
Venture Capital Family Tree
About six months ago my friend Chris Fralic (@ChrisFRC) invited me to a screening of Something Ventured, a film about the origins of the US venture capital industry. Definitely worth checking out. One of the things it got me to thinking about was how intertwined the early VC firms were. So, in the spirit of […]
Selecting, not filtering: Give me a reason to say yes
Raising money for my last startup was humbling, frustrating, time-consuming. But that part was okay: any highly selective process will be humbling, frustrating, and time-consuming. The part that really bothered me wasn’t that it took so much time, but that so much of that time was a complete and total waste. In almost all of […]
VC/Company Investment Visualizer
A friend asked me last week if I knew a tool to help him visualize which VCs were investing in a sector. I did not. But I realized I could pretty quickly repurpose the VC Bar Chart code and some unpublished code that pulls in data from a Google spreadsheet to show a force-directed graph. […]
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Not at scale, anyway.
A year ago I wrote, re investing in social marketing, “The social loop will share superficial characteristics with the display loop, but it’s really completely different… the area with the most near-term leverage will be tools that help communicators understand the impact of how they are communicating and then help them make better decisions.” This […]
Disruptive innovation, buy vs. build, the most pernicious lie in business, and how to know if you’re fooling yourself
If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, big fat liar No matter what the dictionary […]