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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Typically, M&A deals have been done by two law firms – one for the buyer and one for the selling company. Recently, however, we’ve seen a trend toward having a separate firm that represents the interests of a stockholder or group of stockholders. The stockholders will do this for a couple reasons. The first is […]
Conscious Capitalism has already arrived in the private equity world. The pioneer fund, Dallas based Satori Capital, boldly incorporates the tenets of Conscious Capitalism into its investment philosophy. The firm’s co-founder, Sunny Vanderbeck, is a successful entrepreneur who brings execution capital to the table. Sunny co-founded, ran and took public Data Return, a provider of […]
It all started when it occurred to me that we were missing a nice visual map of Silicon Alley’s early-stage ecosystem available for everyone to use. Entrepreneurs were always asking me about various angels and VC’s and I just thought that such a map would be a good resource to which I could refer people. […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]