Do the words “sustainable” and “sustainability” make you feel as uncomfortable as they first made me? Getting comfortable with Conscious Capitalism also requires getting comfortable with the concept of sustainability in the business context. Understanding sustainability is relevant to the venture capital industry because the path to a sustainable society may provide the biggest opportunity in the history of capitalism.

Professor Nada Nasr of Bentley University suggests that at a basic level sustainability is the capacity to endure. It’s obvious that a business must be profitable over the long-term in order to endure. Reviewing the balance sheet and income statement is the standard approach to measuring a business’ capacity to endure. Unfortunately, the current method ...

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Alignment.

You hear this word thrown out frequently in business conversations. It is a wonderful thing to aspire to, but very hard to achieve. Perhaps even harder to achieve in entrepreneurial settings between the venture capitalist and the entrepreneur, where the stakes are so high and the ever-present risk of dysfunctional behavior leading to a Start-Up Soap Opera.

Ever since I began the research for my book, I have been spending time thinking about why VC-entrepreneur alignment is so elusive. And so when the Kauffman Foundation asked me to give a presentation to their recent class of young VCs, I decided to take the opportunity to develop a few thoughts that teed up the key issues.

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We recently surveyed over 1000 venture capitalists to get their opinion on the state of the industry. Ninety-eight percent of the respondents were either Partners or Managing General Partners at VC firms throughout the country. The mood was considerably better than what we observed in the same time frame last year. This is not a surprise as we had hit rock bottom on the confidence scale in March 2009.

That being said there is plenty of conflicting data and lots of opinions on what is going on. Brian Hughes with KPMG LLP recently published a summary report on their survey associated with Venture Summit East 2010 titled Optimism in the Northeast. The Wall Street Journal on the other hand posted an article on July 19, 2010 titled Venture Capital Could Shrivel Away.

The truth ...

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As one of the original seed investors in Carbonite, I often worry about data backup. As we move toward a nearly 100% digital life it becomes extremely important that we backup our digital data, because the digital data has become our lives.

As we move toward cloud computing, backup becomes more nebulous. Certainly the online providers are backing up our data in mass to protect themselves from major data center disasters, but in a multitenant environment, what happens to the individual when they lose their cloud data?

As a huge Gmail fan, I used ...

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An important theme that we’ve heard in talking to investors recently has been the challenge of making commitments over the next two years. On the one hand, some investors feel that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be years with good opportunities to invest – prices are down from their pre-crash highs, and many good managers are bringing funds to market. On the other hand, some investors fear prices have already rebounded and that there is plenty of dry powder sitting idle on the sidelines, eagerly looking for transactions to invest in before commitment periods expire.

Either way, private equity investors are more allocation-constrained and cautious than in any time in recent memory. Many investors already have large uncalled commitments to private equity, and some have limited li...

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