How to Deal with Skeletons in your Closet
This is part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital. I recently wrote a post on how to Deal with your Elephants in the Room during your VC meetings. Elephants being big issues that the VC will be thinking whether you bring it to his/her attention or not. My advice with Elephants was [...]
Deal with Your Elephant in the Room
This is part of my series on Raising Venture Capital. There’s an old saying that if I’m talking with you and I start the conversation by saying, “whatever you do, DO NOT think about Elephants” then you can’t help but thinking about elephants while we’re speaking. It’s called “The Elephant in the Room” and there’s [...]
VC Funding Season Ends Next Week
This is part of my series on Raising Venture Capital. I’m sure I’ll spark the ire of some VC’s for saying so, but there is certainly such a thing as black-out days in venture capital. It’s worth you knowing this so you don’t waste your time. It’s also very important to understand so that you [...]
Good Judgment Comes with Experience, But Experience Comes from Bad Judgment
This is part of my Startup Advice series of posts. I heard Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark Capital say these words at a conference in London nearly 10 years ago. I jotted the words down (I normally pay little attention to anything said at conferences. Most of it is BS) and thought about them much over [...]
Choose Your VC Investor Carefully
Beware of VC Seagulls, who shit on you and then fly away (or worse yet leave you with Red Herrings) This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. I write this post as a warning to pick your VC’s carefully. I like to say to first-time entrepreneurs, picking a VC is more permanent than [...]
Who Should you Hire at a Startup?
This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. There are people who tell startups that they should hire the most senior people that they can find. I’m not one of those. I believe that you should always hire people are are looking to “punch above their weight class,” which means to hire people who [...]
Retro: My Favorite Blog Post on Raising VC
On December 2nd, 2006 I wrote the blog post published later in this post when I was CEO of startup Koral about my experiences in pitching VCs. After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. [...]
VC Seed Funding is Dead, Long Live VC Seed Funding!
This is part of my ongoing series about Raising Venture Capital. This posting was inspired by an email from Rajat Suri who wrote me an email in response to Chris Dixon’s blog post (link below) from August, which recently re-ran on Business Insider and has generated much Twitter chatter. A few years ago it became [...]
Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. This is a story of one of the risks of venture capital. When you’re an early-stage startup that hasn’t raised any institutional money you end up doing almost every job function of the company yourself. But some companies have entrepreneurs that seem talented on paper, are [...]
Why I Don’t Like Board Observers
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. I wrote recently about the role of Advisory Boards in startups, which I expected to be a bit controversial. People love their advisers and I don’t blame them. It’s just that many companies waste equity on advisory boards, pick the wrong advisers or set up advisory boards [...]
Should Your Startup Have an Advisory Board?
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. Many startup companies hire advisory boards. It’s very tempting. It’s mostly done by first-time entrepreneurs who want to persuade (bribe?) prominent industry luminaries to be closely associated with the company. It’s done partly in hopes of gaining their wisdom but it’s also done to portray the [...]
3 Sales Tips for Startups – Creating a Burning Platform
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. Many entrepreneurs who start technology companies are product people, technologists or savvy business people who worked previously for a larger company. Most start-up entrepreneurs have little or no sales experience. I know I didn’t. But through nearly a decade of startups I learned that sales comes [...]
2010 VC Funding Outlook for Startups – Prepare for Winter (Part 3/3)
In the first post in this three part series I described why I believe the VC market froze between September 2008 – April 2009. In the second post I argued that as of September 2009 the pace of VC investments has increased rapidly (at least for software / Internet investments – the only sector on [...]
The Big VC Thaw – Why The Market is Moving Again (part 2 of 3)
In my previous post, The VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) I wrote about the reasons why the VC market came to a screeching halt in September 2008 and remained largely shut until at least April 2009. There are now signs the VC market has gathered pace meaning it’s a great time to be [...]
The Great VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) – Part 1 of 3
When venture capitalists scale back investing activities it can be very swift and leave many companies that are in the process of fund raising hung out to dry. Just ask anybody who was trying to close funding the fateful week of September 11, 2001 or even March 2000. I would argue that the shut-down of [...]
