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 they [...]
Posts under ‘vc’
Guy Kawasaki Hates Me
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” when you mean “shit” is [...]
Earnings Calls in a Trippy Vortex
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. When I clicked the [...]
VC Annoyance: Term Sheets Excluded from Closing Book
The Closing Book of a financing is the definitive collection of all documents relied upon in conducting a financing. It will generally have a “snapshot” of critical documents before and just after the financing, such as the original Articles of Incorporation dated one day, and the “amended and restarted” articles dated the next. Other agreements [...]
To the sender of an unsolicited business plan email
2006-06-08 Randall Lucas Hello, I received an unsolicited business plan via email from you. This letter will try, in a constructive and humble manner, to tell you why I won’t read it, and what else you should try. Unsolicited commercial email is spam — even if it’s sent to twenty VC firms instead of a [...]
Unsolicited Emails and VCs
2006-06-01 Randall Lucas About a month after starting to work for Voyager Capital’s investment team, I started noticing a different kind of spam email than I had ever received in the past: business plan spam. This problem — probably fairly unique to VCs (and possibly high-profile angel investors) — exhibits many of the same characteristics [...]
Venture Capital Jargon and Terminology
2006-04-10 Randall Lucas It’s been just over half a year that I’ve been working on the “other side of the table,” as a VC analyst at one of Seattle’s leading venture firms. Something that was helpful to me in my first days on the job was reading blog postings from Brad Feld and Fred Wilson, [...]