Posts under ‘vc’

Steve Blank at Entrepreneur Corner writes with the inflammatory headline, “Can you trust any VCs under 40?“  He doesn’t actually talk about trust, but instead gives us a gloss on the history of the original Internet IPO bubble (1995-2000) and the subsequent mini-boom in M&As (2003-2008).  His thesis is that any VC under 40 has [...]

I spotted a piece by Paul Kedrosky today during a blog-feeds-catchup-session where Paul talks about a sort of “(minimum) two degree of separation” rule that VCs maintain between themselves and the sex industry. (Quotes above for my words, not his.) In other words: benefiting from infrastructure, transport, payment mechanisms — [...]

In a recent blog entry, Leo Parker Dirac poses the question of the fairness of liquidation preferences in VC financings of startups. He’s going to be delivering a lightning talk based on it tonight at Ignite Seattle.
(To those of you who don’t know, liquidation preferences, or prefs, are [...]

This is the first of a series of “snippets” about getting a job in VC. I get asked about this approximately weekly, so I am going to try and do a highlights reel of things I tell people or thoughts I come up with on the topic.
In a nutshell, VC [...]

It is my intention to begin a series of entries dealing with “essential tensions” in investing in general and VC in particular. This is the first of the series.
Venture capital as an industry deals with momentum investing. Paul Kedrosky has argued on his Infectious Greed blog that VC is a [...]

Occasionally I get calls from folks who get the bright idea that, since VCs have a bunch of portfolio companies under influence, they can leverage selling their stuff by talking to me instead of pounding the pavement to the whole portfolio.
If you’re thinking of doing this, remember that we (VCs) are [...]

In Venture Capital, we have lots of rules of thumb for assessing entrepreneurs. Some such rules are:

Invest in guys who are already rich, because they have fewer distortions in their motivations.
Invest in guys who aren’t already rich, because they’re hungry.
Invest in guys who have put their own wealth at risk, because [...]

In a post entitled The Venture Capital Aptitude Test, quasi-famous blogger and sorta-VC Guy Kawasaki rags on junior venture investors in general and on young VC associates in particular. He prescribes “contempt” for “any young person who opt[s] for venture capital” and implies that such people are “full-of-shi[t]” (saying “shiitake” [...]

Today, I called up a news release on finance.yahoo.com for a fairly dodgy publicly traded company. Although I expected to find a transcript of the earnings call, or perhaps a brief table summarizing the expected and actual earnings numbers, I was given a link to the full audio of the call.
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