How to Avoid Being Disrupted as a VC
My partner Greg Bettinelli (worth following on Twitter) was recently named by The LA Business Journal as the “Top deal maker in Los Angeles in Venture Capital.” Numero uno. I was nowhere to be found. And that’s a true reflection of just how successful and prolific Greg has been in LA. In a world that is […]
Snapchat 101 for VCs and Old Folks
As the human ear ages it loses its ability to hear high-pitched sound frequencies (above 15-16 kHz) through a condition known as presbycusis that starts at 18 years old. There’s an old parlor trick where a sound is played at a higher frequency than adults can hear while kids are left smiling and laughing at […]
The Full Dataset on What VCs are Thinking About Funding in 2016
Every year at Upfront we try to analyze the venture markets. We try to look at the sources of capital, the valuations, exits and trends. We use this try to draw some context that informs our funding decisions. Of course we fund companies in good markets and bad. In venture our goal is to fund […]
Dealing With Generational Change at VC Firms
Dan Primack and Fred Wilson sat down for an interview last week at the Upfront Summit and the results were amazing. It’s 25 minutes and it’s both a pleasure to watch and is super insightful. You can watch the interview embedded above of click on this link: Dan Primack interviews Fred Wilson at the Upfront […]
What Do Industry Insiders Think Will Happen in VC in 2016?
“This is the year the tortoise may gain on the hare.” There are a lot of data points that one can observer to get a sense of the venture capital markets – both LP fundings into venture and VC financings of startups. They point to some widely known facts: financings & valuations are up massively […]
Embracing Your Community as a Strategy
5 years ago I sat at our annual meeting bored beyond belief. It wasn’t just that I have ADD making boring meetings excruciatingly painful – it was that the format was tired, unimaginative, uninspiring and not very useful. We did what many VC funds did – we presented our annual results, we stood up and […]
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: […]
Does a VCs Culture Really Matter? The Upfront Story
I’m often asked about the differences between being at a VC and being an entrepreneur and whether I prefer one or the other. The biggest difference I cite is that Venture Capital often feels like an “individual sport” while startups are a “team sport.” The reason is that at a VC you have a group […]
Venture Outlook 2016
There is a lot of uncertainty about the state of the private, high-growth technology markets and the venture capital markets that underpin them. On the one hand innovation is clearly at an all time high unleashed by smart phones, fast telecom networks, social networks that spread commerce and the fact that we are all one […]
What I’ve Learned About Venture Funding
VC funding. Our perspectives on the topic wax and wane with market cycles. We love capital efficiency until we love land grabs until we abhor “over funding” until we get huge distribution & ring the bell for more funding until we attract every non-VC on the planet to invest in startups until it crashes and we […]
Why You Don’t Want to Give Financial Information to All of Your Investors
We all know that funding markets have changed for startups. The trends are well understood: more angels, more seed funds, more crowdsourcing and so forth. We all can intuit the benefits to founders of these trends so there’s little reason to elaborate. What is less understood are the consequences of these changes. I have blogged about […]
The Authoritative Guide to Prorata Rights
Prorata rights are one of the most important rights of a private market technology investors and yet are seldom fully understood. They often create the biggest tensions between investors who are investing at different stages in the business. These tensions seep out in some angels or seed funds publicly or semi-privately deriding later-stage VCs for […]
When VCs Play Defense
Somehow the world seems to be spinning faster these days than just a few years ago. The frantic pace of technology cycles, the amount of tech news, the blogs, the conferences, the demo days, the announcements, the fundings, the IPOs. It’s exhausting. Perhaps unsustainable. It got me thinking about the advice that I often give […]
The Changing Structure of the VC Industry
There has been much discussion in the past few years of the changing structure of the venture capital industry. On the surface the narratives have been The rise of “micro VCs” or seed-stage funds The rise of alternative sources of capital (crowd funding and the like) The poor performance of the asset class (this analysis has […]
Putting Tom Perkins Comments into Context
Tom Perkins is one of the founding members of the venerable venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins. He just had his Mitt Romney moment and his name will forever be etched in the collective consciousness of the tech community for this terribly insensitive and tone deaf letter to the Wall Street Journal. The headline of Mr. […]
