What Do LPs Think of the Venture Capital Markets for 2016?
At the Upfront Summit in early February, we had a chance to have many off-the-record conversations with Limited Partners (LPs) who fund Venture Capital (VC) funds about their views of the market. While I’m not an LP, the following post represents my discussions with more than 100 LP firms – specifically ones that do fund […]
Do VC Platforms Make Sense?
In the VC insider baseball world a discussion has gone on about “VC platforms” over the past 5 or so years. While firms define platforms differently, let’s just say they are the services that a VC offers outside of investment capital and partner time on boards or providing intros. Examples of VC platform services include: […]
Gadi Shamia, COO of Talkdesk: “8 Things I Learned After Joining a Hyper-Growth SaaS Startup”
One of the things I want to do between the ’15 SaaStr Annual, the SaaStr blog, and the ’16 Annual is do true, longitudinal, hands-on SaaS case studies. Not just one-and-done podcasts, posts, and the like. But to go further, to check in repeatedly with (x) very successful, (y) soon-to-be very successful, and (z) pre-successful SaaS […]
The Case for Optimism and Risk at Startups
Last week a company we enthusiastically backed, uBeam, led by a very special entrepreneur, 25-year-old Meredith Perry, announced a $10 million round of financing. The press around the raise & company was fantastic and the promise of their technology – wireless charging that works as easily as WiFi – would positively affect many of our lives. […]
Follow Up Post – Continuuity, the PaaS for Big Data (and a $10M Series A)
When Continuuity came out of stealth recently I was a little dismissive of a press release that was full of buzzwords and lacking significant details about what they’re actually doing. To their credit the Continuuity team reached out to me and spent some time talking about what they’re seeing in the marketplace and why they […]
Platfora Closes Series A Funding To Help Make Sense Out Of Your (Big) Data
Platfora, the company with a mission to bring clarity to your data, today announced series A funding worth $5.7 Million to expand their rich analytics tool for Hadoop. After the cloud euphoria, it is the turn of big data to get the mindshare of pundits and public. This space is crowded and competitive. Platfora is […]
The Top 30 Most Respected Venture Capitalists (infographic)
A guide for Entrepreneurs There is a lot of content created by the Venture Capital community that has helped countless entrepreneurs. In fact, one of my favorites is How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs. I recently stumbled upon the article again and it reminded me of an article I’ve been meaning to write for my entrepreneurial […]
