Raising $$ on AngelList? Working w/ McClure? Ask Jody Sherman
I was hanging out the other day with my buddy Jody Sherman, founder & CEO of EcoMom. I was an angel investor in his company, made a bunch of calls on his behalf and then I personally sent it out on AngelList. Through this process he raised $2 million. When I described to people [...]
Silicon Valley > Boston (The Data)
I love Boston. I lived there for five of the best years of my life, when I was working at D. E. Shaw & Co., and then when I attended Harvard Business School. If anyone asks, I always tell them, “if Boston had the same weather and career opportunities for me as Silicon Valley, I’d [...]
Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, [...]
Silicon Valley Posers And The Inevitable Bust
This morning, my friend Erica Douglass wrote about why Silicon Valley is broken, and why she moved away:This conversation was a microcosm of the reason I left the Valley. No doubt, this guy had a good-looking website, and two co-founders who had sign…
Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
This past October I was honored to be invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company” but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy” since my goal was to slay many of the [...]
Skate Where the Puck is Going
Anyone who works in the venture business or frankly just lives in Silicon Valley will be used to hearing a buzz word rise up out of nowhere to capture the technology zeitgeist and find its way into every entrepreneur’s product development plan or every aspiring entrepreneur’s pitch deck. I call this “the puck at your [...]
Launch Silicon Valley: 30 Startups Debut Tomorrow
Somewhat late notice, but there’s an exciting startup debut event in Mountain View tomorrow: Launch: Silicon Valley, co-presented by SVASE, Garage Technology Ventures and Microsoft, provides the next generation of emerging technology companies with the opportunity to pitch their products to, and network with, an audience of Silicon Valley’s top VCs, Angels, corporate business development [...]
My Thoughts on the Social CRM (SCRM) Panel at Social Media Club
I recently had the pleasure of attending the Social Media Club (San Francisco and Silicon Valley chapter) panel session around Social CRM which was moderated by Jeremiah Owyang and included Salesforce, Get Satisfaction, Mint, and Lithium Technologies. The room was packed with around 100+ people that were all interested in Social CRM, which was great. [...]
Woman in High Tech & The New York Times Out of the Loop
Out of the loop is the original title of a New York Times article discussing how difficult it is for women entrepreneurs to get funded, or generally to get into the management ranks in business. A title that backfires … but you’ll have to wait to see why. The first case discussed @ the NYT [...]
Silicon Valley Is An Innovation Dagger
It was a routine trip back home from work one of these days. As soon as I boarded the bus the driver asked me: “So, what do you think about Google’s announcement regarding China? Will Yahoo follow the suit?”. The same bus driver had asked me about my views on NexusOne on the day it [...]
Where Does the Wall Street Journal Get its News From?
Find out from the Richter Scales, performing at the Crunchies:
Distributing Innovation
In case it’s not obvious by now, you get a lot of differing perspectives at Defrag. You’re just as likely to run into a guy that runs a hedge fund, as a gal that’s responsible for a multi-million dollar budget around “social software,” as a pair of co-founders who are barely legally able to order [...]
TiEcon 2009 – The Bold Entrepreneur
I don’t particularly like large conferences, and I’ve made no secret of it… yet here I find myself discussing yet another one: TiEcon 2009, starting in these very minutes in Santa Clara, CA. One of the differentiators TiEcon has is just how affordable it is: it’s rare to find a two–day conference so action packed [...]
Launch: Silicon Valley 2009 – Call for Startups
Startup Entrepreneurs who did not make it to the recent Under the Radar event, here’s your second chance: join us at Launch: Silicon Valley 2009, co-presented by SVASE, Garage Technology Ventures and Microsoft. In fact it will be more than a second chance: while the UtR event focused specifically on Cloud Computing, Launch 2009 is [...]
The (Perhaps Not Quite) Ultimate Outsider
I’ve had a couple of conflicting experiences in the past couple of days here at the Web 2.0 Conference. Two days ago I had dinner with one of the founders from cool Danish company called Zendesk (whose mascot, appropriately enough as we’ll see, is a smiling buddha) – I wrote a review of their product [...]
