The following is excerpted from an email from David Weild to a senior SEC official, part of an ongoing discussion. Thank you for the quick response and the thoughts of your colleagues. Let’s diverge for a moment from the question of accounting costs. The reason why we care about the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley and the […]
My husband is a Bill Maher fan and, each Friday night, we look forward to hearing his version of “New Rules.” So, in that spirit, here are my New Rules for Recruiting: New Rule: If you say it’s not about the money, then you can’t negotiate for the last dollar on an offer. Opportunity […]
The following post is the majority of a letter I sent to a senior contact at the SEC today: Last week I was up and down Silicon Valley talking to venture capitalists and CFOs. The week before I was in Boston, Waltham and along Route 128. People are simply fed up with being held hostage […]
My partner, Chip Hazard, has been an enterprise IT VC since he joined Greylock in 1994. He and I have watched with some amusement as everyone and their brother in the VC community has been writing off enterprise IT as a boring industry and reinventing themselves as consumer VCs. With some coaxing, he agreed to […]
I had lunch at Google yesterday. I mention this only because everybody else does. But it was really the news that PE professionals make more from fees than from carried interest that got me to share my schedule. I’ll explain shortly. For now, the item I’d like to share is that I had lunch at […]
This was originally posted on Fred Wilson’s blog I was meeting with a web entrepreneur yesterday. It’s something I do at least five to ten times a week. This entrepeneur said ‘but I worry that the coming downturn might have a negative impact on my business plan.’ Not ‘a possible coming downturn’, it was ‘the […]
Compensation … it’s what many of you seem focused on as the third quarter winds down – especially with all the uncertainty in the market these days. Earlier this week, I took a call from a candidate who wanted to know whether his firm was paying him “market” compensation. My first question was whether he […]
The “carried interest” earned by venture capitalists is no different from the equity earned by entrepreneurs or hired CEOs who run our companies. They have all their eggs in one basket — whereas we have our upside spread over many companies — but the analogy is strong. A CEO who joins a venture-backed company gets stock options […]
Consistent with Dan’s boomlet theory, recent market volatility probably won’t create a wave of new healthcare activity, but it should change the dynamics a bit. Healthcare has generated a steady stream of activity for several years, and the drivers in the healthcare business continue. And, with the amount of equity placed in the sector by […]
Last week, some talk show host commented that this year would be “bye-bye bonus” for financial service professionals. It got me thinking about how so many investment professionals take their bonus as an expected piece of their compensation, whether or not the firm has given them a specific “guarantee.” This time of year is always an interesting one in the […]