The following Wharton PE Conference coverage is from Daniela Stefovska, a first-year MBA student at the Wharton School. She sat in on two keynotes, from John Megrue of Apax Partners and Dalip Pathak of Warburg Pincus. Prior to Wharton, Daniela worked in the Global Treasury group of Merrill Lynch, where she helped create the Liquidity Risk […]
I've been worrying lately that we are suffering from a lost generation of entrepreneurs. That was my first reaction when I read what Sequoia's Doug Leone said a few weeks ago about innovation and age at a recent talk with MIT Sloan students visiting Silicon Valley, where Leone claimed that only people under the age of 30 are truly innovative. Over 30 folks can manage innovation, Leone observed, but you need to be under 30 to create it. Examples cited included Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder who was 30 at the time that he started the service. Now you can argue whether this is right or whether it's a hyperbolic statement for effect, but let's put that aside for now. Here's my worry: when I was under 30, I had the opportunity to be a part of a rocket ship start-up (Open Market), that promoted me into an executive team position of a public company in my 20s. The lessons and skills from that experience inspired me to delude myself into thinking I could be the founding president of another start-up, Upromise, when I was 30. At the time,
Joseph Schumpeter, the legendary economist and political scientist, called it “creative destruction” when a severe downturn ravaged a wide range of industries, sectors and nations – ruining growth, devastating jobs and squeezing credit in the process. Well, we’ve certainly seen plenty of “destruction” over the past 18 to 24 months; now it’s time for the “creative” part, and it should start sometime early in 2010, when the economy’s healing process begins to make itself felt. That’s right. I believe the economy is beginning to mend and knit back together. As we all know, the “destruction” has been excruciatingly painful and dislocating, but it has cleared out the uneconomic and unproductive investments and set the stage for steady new growth and sustained capital markets-driven enrichment.
Reports of venture capital’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Not a day goes by without a commentator reading the VC industry its last rites. And many of the gloomiest prognostications come from those inside the industry. A recent survey found that 53% of VC respondents felt the industry was broken. It’s too easy and lazy (and self-serving for some) to claim the VC model as broken. Nineties nostalgia recalls VC as an investment strategy played on Lake Wobegon, where the sun always shined, all portfolio companies were above average, prices always moved higher and everyone came away a winner.
Historically 70% of job growth in the U.S. has come from the small business sector – including the world of start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. While small businesses are known for their agility – out of necessity – they are also much more susceptible to the vagaries and uncertainties emanating from Washington, DC these […]
Today’s announcement of our investment in oneforty is a useful prompt to talk about why I’m a big believer (and now investor) in the real-time Web. The real-time Web (i.e., the overwhelming stream of instant, free flowing information available digitally) is clearly hitting the mainstream. One can declare this confidently when even CNN calls it […]
This past summer we surveyed over 1,000 venture capitalists, and asked them a simple yes or no question: “Is the Venture Capital Business Broken?" Over 53% of the respondents said “yes." This triggered a lot of conversation in the blogosphere and in the VC community. It got me thinking about what exactly is going on and made me want to do a deeper dive. As a result, late in the fourth quarter I reached out to 50 general partners of venture funds across the country in Silicon Valley, Austin, Dallas, Tysons Corner, New York and Boston to gauge their sentiments about the state of the venture business. Not surprisingly, a wide-range of insights and comments resulted from those conversations. I started those dicussions by asking: “How does the venture business look on January 1, 2010, when the industry can no longer drag around the 1999 returns in a trailing 10 year average?” The best response I received was that on that date that the industry would go to a 12-year trailing average!
I confess to being a Shrek fan. My kids made me (well, sort of) buy the music CD to Shrek 2 and my favorite song on that CD is the Jennifer Saunders song – Holding Out For A Hero. When they were little we would play it over and over again in the car. I […]
For decades, the venture capital industry was like a Yale Secret Society - very clubby, discrete and opaque. VCs had all the power in the VC-entrepreneur equation, and entrepreneurs had to work hard to decode the mysterious VC process to obtain funding. My how the world has changed in a few short years. Pundits will tell you that in terms of trends, 2009 was the year of the real-time Web/Twitter, smart phones/iPhone and the mainstream emergence of digital advertising. But 2009 was also the year VCs blogging and tweeting really became mainstream.
Finally saw Avatar over the holidays, and James Cameron has done it again. I can definitely see it winning the Oscar for Best Picture. But now that 2009 has ended, it’s time to make some real Oscar predictions for the all of the best movies of the past year. So, here is my list of the Best Movies of 2009, Venture Capital (VC) style: