I love Jackson Hole, Wyo. It is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful settings in the world. One cannot help being in a good mood when observing the breathtaking wildlife, open sky and the awe-inspiring Grand Tetons.

Thus, reading the reports from last weekend’s annual economist confab in Jackson Hole could not have been more depressing. If the practitioners of the dismal science sound this pessimistic amidst such an uplifting setting, what will their attitude be when they trade in their cowboy boots for green eye shades and return to their drab offices to stare at spreadsheets? A usually staid Allen Sinai sounded positively hyperbolic, yet apparently spoke for many at the conference, when he told New York Times: “I’m more worried than I have ever been about the future ...

The advent of the Internet and such things as private equity blogs and newsletters have proved advantageous in many ways. Wider and faster dissemination of information allowing investors and entrepreneurs to benchmark and measure their operations, terms and attitudes against those of other players in this realm all seems quite positive, and interesting, to me. What seems less so to me are the endless hashings and re-hashings of subjects, the essence of which are so simple as to make the amount of digital ink applied to them by otherwise intelligent and thoughtful individuals unfathomable to me.

I’ll address just two. There was an article/editorial in one prominent newsletter just this week rehashing the complaints (dare I say whinings) of entrepreneurs as to the length of t...

The venture capital community has been getting slammed recently for moving too slowly.

And these accusations, no matter how well-founded, are beginning to stick. Entrepreneurs loathe the idea of fundraising for protracted periods of time, and therefore they are particularly susceptible to this form of VC bashing. But I don’t think that the accusations are fair. There are many of us in the venture community who are willing to work hard to get entrepreneurs a quick and definitive answer.

For a long time VCs have been lambasted for taking an unreasonable period of time to get to “no.” Yet now the mantra is that VCs take too long to get to a “yes.” Entrepreneurs are being trained to expect an answer during a first meeting and anything shy of that ...

In the beginning, there were angel investors. And it was good. As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” And so the super angels became micro-VCs (or “institutionalized super angels”). Everyone was excited and on the seventh day they did another deal instead of resting.

I’m a huge fan of the super angel movement. Some of my best friends are super angels and I’ve put my own money where my mouth is in funds like Chris Sacca’s, Dave McClure’s, Jeff Clavier’s, Roger Ehrenberg’s, and David Cohen’s. Not only am I an investor in these super angels, I love to have them on board with our investments at Foundry ...

One of the hardest things for an investor tries to gauge is: what are the characteristics that make up a winning team?

A large venture capital firm was recently looking at investing in a follow-on round at one of my portfolio companies and shared an interesting data point with my CEO - the single most highly correlated factor that they found in analyzing hundreds of portfolio companies was actually a very obvious and simple one. If the team had previously been successful and made money as a team, they were significantly more likely to be able to do it again.

Creating companies from scratch is very, very hard. Too often than not, there are soap operas at start-ups and self-inflicted wounds that cause failure. HBS Professor Bill Sahlman, in his seminal work on “What Do...