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 […]
The Top 8 Mistakes I Made In My First 18 Months As a VC Partner
So I’ve been investing “institutionally” as a VC for about 18 months now (maybe really only 12, counting from the first check that really mattered). A little bit before that as an angel, but not that much. ‘Cause I sort of needed to decompress for a little while after I sold my last company. At first, […]
What is it Like to Negotiate a VC Round?
Over the years I’ve written extensively about the downsides of convertible notes for startups such as here, here and here. The truth is that I’ve been warning about convertible notes since 2010 it was first declared that “convertible notes have won.” Today I want to talk about how a VC thinks about equity pricing on your […]
Don’t Worry About Losing All Your Investors’ Money
In both my start-ups, I was constantly worried about losing all my investors’ money. The first time, my first start-up which we haven’t talked about, NanoGram Devices, I mainly worried about it because I realized we’d almost never have enough capital to achieve our long-term goals. So, FBOW, we sold for $50,000,000 after 12.5 months. […]
Citrix, Cumulogic And PaaS Trends
Last week Citrix (previous CloudAve coverage) announced that Citrix Startup Accelerator, their incubator arm, will invest in the PaaS startup Cumulogic (previous CloudAve coverage). On the first look, this is not a significant news and many in tech media didn’t even bother to cover it like some of the other PaaS news around the industry. […]
The IT Spending Recovery and Implications for Enterprise Software
Computer Economics has just published its 22nd annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study. The latest data, based on our survey from the first half of 2011, shows that the US and Canada have emerged from the IT spending recession of the past two years. At the same time, the recovery is weak and organizations […]
Invest in Lines, not Dots
Everyone seems to be in such a rush to get shacked up these days. In normal times investors will look for “traction” before investing. We want to make sure we’re in love. This sometimes frustrates entrepreneurs who just want to “get back to running the business.” But if you understand it you’ll see that it […]
Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History?
In 2005, Peter Thiel paid $500,000 for a 10% stake in Facebook.Today, with Facebook’s estimated value topping $33 billion, his stake is worth between $2-3 billion. That’s a 6,000x return on his capital in 5 years.I’ll put it this way–if you made a $2…
Outbound VC Dialing Programs – Total Disrespect for Entrepreneurs
I recently got an email from a friend who had been approached by a well known VC. He sent me an email asking whether the approach was real and whether he should take it seriously. Here is the email he received (reprinted without names with his permission). “Hi [entrepreneur], I hope all is well. I’m an […]
High-Tech VC Should Outpace Any Other Asset Class
With all the fear and loathing in the VC industry, sometimes it’s good to get back to basics. Here’s a great reminder: In any economy, Technology Venture should outpace any other sector or asset class for Limited Partners with a ten year horizon, simply because of the following reasons: Technology is a low cost production […]
FriendFeed Bounces Off Lows, Comes Back Stronger than Ever
Earlier about a month ago I wrote about what happens when a company got bought out by Facebook, namely FriendFeed. People invest a lot of time in social networks and when a social network gets bought out that sets up a level of uncertainty that the company will still be around later on. FriendFeed is […]
Doubling Down, Trading Stocks and Running Startups
Fred Wilson (Defrag speaker) has a wonderful blog post up about investing that combines investing theory with gambling- and immediately gets my blood flowing. As an entrepreneur (running Defrag and Glue), I’m a “base hit” kind of guy. That is to say, that I’m very comfortable planning, building and executing on businesses that are “lifestyle […]
Revenue, Burn Rate, Growth and ARPU for SaaS Businesses
There has been much discussion of late around the relative profitability of SaaS versus on-premises software companies. Most of the high-level analysis of SaaS companies is based on (relatively) mature companies – there being very few companies that are both young AND by necessity or choice report their number extensively. SaaS accounting company Xero (disclosure […]
An Answer to the Burn Rate
It’s been exciting times in the last few days in Xero-land. First they announced their 31 March figures which showed a doubling of customers over the past three months. The very next day they announced that Telstra, the largest Australian telco, was including Xero in T Suite, it’s packaged suite of SaaS business products. That […]
