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By Derek Pilling on January 22, 2014
When an investment passes our first-screen at Meritage Funds, the first deep-dive we typically do is on the unit economics of the business. Unit economics are the fundamental financial building blocks of a business. If you can pin down the unit economics, you can determine contribution margins, break-even points and perform ROI calculations all of which […]
Posted in Business | Tagged average customer lifetime, capital expenditures, churn, contribution margin, Economics, Growth Equity, Investment Selection, marginal operating costs, Raising Capital, unit economics
By Derek Pilling on September 2, 2011
Some businesses are designed – maybe even destined – to be owner operated. Industry parlance often refers to these businesses as lifestyle businesses. Wikipedia has a nice definition. They are typically small, profitable, generate cash and enable their owner-operator to sustain a well-above average lifestyle. In some circumstances, they may even make their owner-operator filthy […]
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Tagged Entrepreneur, Growth Equity, Investment Selection, Investor, lessons learned, lifestyle business, Raising Capital
By Derek Pilling on January 5, 2010
I have always been fairly thematic in my investment approach. For me, the process starts with identifying big markets that are either 1) emerging (and will therefore be created over the next several years) or 2) undergoing some structural shift that will enable new entrants to grab market share from incumbents. I have seen Companies succeed in […]
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Mobile | Tagged 2010, cloud, cloud computing, electronic payments, Investment Selection, mobile, payments, Platforms, saas, Themes, utility computing, venture capital, wireless