8 dispatches
Republicans have declared a “war on Harvard” in recent months and one front of that is a request to the SEC to look at how Harvard’s massive endowment values illiquid assets like venture capital and private equity. What’s fascinating is that in targeting Harvard in this way the Republicans may have declared war on Private Equity and Venture Capital in general.
So, you watched Silicon Valley and read some articles on Techcrunch and you envision yourself as a startup CEO 🤑. What does it take to succeed? Great engineering skills? Salesmanship? Financial acumen? As someone who has been on both sides of the table (as a venture investor and on multiple startup executive leadership teams), there are three — and only three — things a...
Source: Eric Hamilton Having been lucky enough to invest in both tech (cloud, mobile, software) and “deeptech” (materials, cleantech, energy, life science) startups (and having also ran product at a mobile app startup), it has been striking to see how fundamentally different the paradigms that drive success in each are.
Source: Someecards I thought I’d re-post a response I wrote a while ago to a question on Quora as someone recently asked me the question: “What advice do you wish you could give but usually don’t to a startup pitching you?” Person X on your team reflects poorly on your company — This is tough advice to give as its virtually impossible during the course of a pitch to build...
I’m oftentimes asked what determines the prices that companies get bought for: after all, why does one app company get bought for $19 billion and a similar app get bought at a discount to the amount of investor capital that was raised? While specific transaction values depend a lot on the specific acquirer (i.e.
In recent years, it’s been the opposite of controversial to say that the tech industry is in a bubble. The terrible recent stock market performance of once high-flying startups across virtually every industry (see table below) and the turmoil in the stock market stemming from low oil prices and concerns about the economies of countries like China and Brazil have raised fears...
Source: Next Generation Growth I’ve blogged before about how the economics of the venture industry affect how venture capitalists evaluate potential investments, the main conclusion of which is that VCs are really only interested in companies that could potentially IPO or sell for at least several hundred million dollars.
Let’s say you pitch a VC and you’ve got a coherent business plan and some thoughtful perspectives on how your business scales. Does that mean you get the venture capital investment that you so desire? Source: Toothpaste for Dinner Not necessarily. There could be many reasons for a rejection, but one that crops up a great deal is not anything intrinsically wrong with a...