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. […]
Do the words “sustainable” and “sustainability” make you feel as uncomfortable as they first made me? Getting comfortable with Conscious Capitalism also requires getting comfortable with the concept of sustainability in the business context. Understanding sustainability is relevant to the venture capital industry because the path to a sustainable society may provide the biggest opportunity […]
Alignment. You hear this word thrown out frequently in business conversations. It is a wonderful thing to aspire to, but very hard to achieve. Perhaps even harder to achieve in entrepreneurial settings between the venture capitalist and the entrepreneur, where the stakes are so high and the ever-present risk of dysfunctional behavior leading to a Start-Up Soap Opera. Ever since I began the research for my book, I have been spending time thinking about why VC-entrepreneur alignment is so elusive. And so when the Kauffman Foundation asked me to give a presentation to their recent class of young VCs, I decided to take the opportunity to develop a few thoughts that teed up the key issues.
We recently surveyed over 1000 venture capitalists to get their opinion on the state of the industry. Ninety-eight percent of the respondents were either Partners or Managing General Partners at VC firms throughout the country. The mood was considerably better than what we observed in the same time frame last year. This is not a […]
As one of the original seed investors in Carbonite, I often worry about data backup. As we move toward a nearly 100% digital life it becomes extremely important that we backup our digital data, because the digital data has become our lives. As we move toward cloud computing, backup becomes more nebulous. Certainly the online […]
An important theme that we’ve heard in talking to investors recently has been the challenge of making commitments over the next two years. On the one hand, some investors feel that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be years with good opportunities to invest – prices are down from their pre-crash highs, and many good managers […]
It’s 2nd down and about 10 yards to go, and Harry Reid decided he might as well punt. With today’s news that any upcoming energy bill won’t include climate legislation or even a renewable portfolio standard, cleantech entrepreneurs and investors are left scratching their heads. Yet more uncertainty. I continue to see pitches from companies […]
General partners in private equity funds claim that a variety of global regulations -- Basel III, Solvency II, the "Volcker rule" and the European Alternative Investments Fund Manager Directive -- will severely restrict available fund capital, thus decreasing the amount of financing available to non-listed businesses. Not a good thing for economic growth, particularly when small businesses already are having trouble securing bank loans. However, the situation is not as obvious as general partners describe it. First, funds are the emerged part of the iceberg in terms of private equity: Family offices, corporations (listed or not), sovereign wealth funds, individuals... a significant group of economic actors are indeed doing non-listed investments. This does not necessarily get into the figures reported by the professional associations (such as the NVCA, EVCA and others). In fact, they only gather statistics from their members, who are general partners in private equity funds.
I and a couple other ad agency people attended the AOL Ventures and Betaworks-sponsored VC Demo Day last night, where prominent VCs had four minutes to communicate/market their respective companies. It was intriguing to benchmark another industry and experience VC community interaction. None of the agency people could imagine an advertiser coalition coming together to pitch advertising agencies to potentially work with one another. But that's exactly what the spirit of this event intended and succeeded in doing. What struck us is that no matter what the industry, there tend to be core fundamentals that yield more engaging, positive presentations that go a long way in winning over a target audience: