It used to be that anyone in the entrepreneurial world had to be keenly cognizant of what was going on in New York City. If you were funded by VCs in Silicon Valley, Boston or Bombay, it still paid to have your CEO and sales team keep eyes and ears in NYC. My how things have changed. New York City feels increasingly irrelevant to most startups as both a source of customers and large amounts of capital. Instead, Washington DC has in many ways become the New, New York.
Everything I know about management I learned from The Godfather. At its core, business is quite simple. The goal of any organization is to upset the status quo and then re-establish it on a more favorable basis. Of course, all your competitors are trying to do the same thing. The world of business is inhabited […]
Plain common stock has become largely worthless in funded companies. Preferred shareholders have increased their rights and protections, while liquidity events have become rare. Meanwhile, common stock has remained largely unchanged, having value diminished by the changing world. There is an argument that creating value in common stock may help to improve returns from private […]
Finding ways to transfer assets to your family without making significant taxable gifts is critical to the goal of passing the wealth you have accumulated to the next generation. A “GRAT” can leverage the confluence of today’s depressed asset values and low interest rates to help you achieve this goal. However, this is a window of opportunity that exists today and may close in the very near future. Once you have accumulated enough wealth to satisfy your own needs, transferring assets to the next generation - instead of to the IRS - becomes an important goal. The federal estate tax will take 45% of all assets valued in excess of $3,500,000 that you transfer at death to anyone other than your spouse. Many states, Massachusetts among them, also impose a state estate tax.
I started to see a trend about 90 days ago – executives that were “done” two years ago are quietly coming back and letting me know they are “available.” It turns out they can only play so much golf or ski so many runs before starting to go “stir crazy.” I have also heard that […]
Stop looking away and hoping Somebody does Something. Stand up. Be Somebody and do Something. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.
The news came out yesterday that VC funding in the US was down in Q1. Really down. VC funding into start-ups averaged roughly $20 billion a year for many years since the bubble crashed and recently (2007 and 2008) had creeped up to $30 billion a year. The Q1’09 figure was $3.0 billion, suggesting we […]
Last night I was invited to attend (thank you Brenda Chia, president AAAIM) the panel discussion “Market Changeup: Fund Management as a Business”, with Priya Mathur (Board director of CalPERS, California Public Employees’ Retirement System; one of the biggest investor in LPs and VC funds), David Fann (President & Chief Executive Officer, PCG Asset Management), […]
Dan Doman, an associate at G-51 Capital, won our March Madness Extravaganza this year, which prompted the following thoughts. Thanks for the opportunity peHUB readers. Hopefully you’ll enjoy my tortured sports metaphors, and laugh instead of grimace at my attempts at comedy. So here are my three rules for winning your office pool and making solid seed-stage investments… or how business and sports sometimes merge in the same lane of the brain. 1. Advance good teams In college basketball, good teams typically have a great floor leader playing the point (CEO), a dependable big man (techie) and a third player that if he gets hot can really carry a team deep (biz dev, sales stud or maybe even a marketer). As an investor, you want the ball in the CEO’s hands; you trust him to lead the attack and minimize costly turnovers, and you depend on him to get the best out of his teammates. This player needs to be coachable or have experience under the spotlight in good times and bad.
Storm clouds and static keep threatening the already uneasy relationship between Wall Street and Washington DC, and many disgruntled investors and bankers believe the financial services industry is being unfairly singled out for blame by Congress and the Obama Administration. As a veteran investment banker with more than 20 years’ worth of deal-making under my […]