Is venture capital broken? Worse, is it dead? Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact the overall venture returns for the past decade are uninspiring. But when have overall venture returns not been dismal? The median vintage year return over the past 29 years averages a mere 8%, which is hardly worth the effort. In […]
I’ve asked many general partners this question over the course of my 20-year career. It seems to be a reasonable question, especially for venture funds that are nearing their five-year anniversary. What I’m looking for is the fund manager’s view of which companies look like winners and which companies aren’t quite cutting it, so that they […]
I love Jackson Hole, Wyo. It is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful settings in the world. One cannot help being in a good mood when observing the breathtaking wildlife, open sky and the awe-inspiring Grand Tetons. Thus, reading the reports from last weekend’s annual economist confab in Jackson Hole could not have been more […]
The advent of the Internet and such things as private equity blogs and newsletters have proved advantageous in many ways. Wider and faster dissemination of information allowing investors and entrepreneurs to benchmark and measure their operations, terms and attitudes against those of other players in this realm all seems quite positive, and interesting, to me. […]
The venture capital community has been getting slammed recently for moving too slowly. And these accusations, no matter how well-founded, are beginning to stick. Entrepreneurs loathe the idea of fundraising for protracted periods of time, and therefore they are particularly susceptible to this form of VC bashing. But I don’t think that the accusations are […]
In the beginning, there were angel investors. And it was good. As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” And so the super angels became micro-VCs […]
One of the hardest things for an investor tries to gauge is: what are the characteristics that make up a winning team? A large venture capital firm was recently looking at investing in a follow-on round at one of my portfolio companies and shared an interesting data point with my CEO – the single most […]
Typically, M&A deals have been done by two law firms – one for the buyer and one for the selling company. Recently, however, we’ve seen a trend toward having a separate firm that represents the interests of a stockholder or group of stockholders. The stockholders will do this for a couple reasons. The first is […]
Conscious Capitalism has already arrived in the private equity world. The pioneer fund, Dallas based Satori Capital, boldly incorporates the tenets of Conscious Capitalism into its investment philosophy. The firm’s co-founder, Sunny Vanderbeck, is a successful entrepreneur who brings execution capital to the table. Sunny co-founded, ran and took public Data Return, a provider of […]
It all started when it occurred to me that we were missing a nice visual map of Silicon Alley’s early-stage ecosystem available for everyone to use. Entrepreneurs were always asking me about various angels and VC’s and I just thought that such a map would be a good resource to which I could refer people. […]