Venture Capital

Do You Have What Investors Want?

May 21, 2012

What do investors want? I’ve read more than 100 business plans in the last two months. Entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly predictable on this point. Investors want disruptive. Investors want game changing.  But not just saying it. Being able to believe it. Two of every three plans says it. Only a very few make it actually believable.  [...]

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Is Venture Capital Gone Forever

May 14, 2012

I completely agree with Steve King of Small Business Labs, in Is the Venture Capital Industry Broken? He says: The news here isn’t that the VC industry is broken. This has been actively discussed for years. The news is who’s saying it’s broken. Which is, in the flap this month, the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Foundation has long [...]

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Disrupt Education … Please!

May 7, 2012

I wonder if we as a society are ever going to figure out how technology can disrupt our antiquated systems for educating our children. Think about what’s happened to information, social interaction, research, and business over the web — not to mention mobile technology — and then think about education. Preschool, K-12, and higher education. [...]

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What Kickstarter Means to You — Maybe

May 3, 2012

I’ve had several visits to Kickstarter.com in the last week. First because some friends of mine are looking to launch a project there. Second, because I’m getting so interested in crowdfunding. Third, because of the Three Years of Kickstarter Projects infographic on NYTimes.com. At kickstarter, I saw the Pebble project that’s raised more than $8 [...]

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Is There a Tech Bubble? We’ll Know If It Pops

May 2, 2012

Earlier today I posted disruption vs. revenue and the tech bubble on the gust.com blog. I’m suggesting in that post that some special-case web-based startups have to choose between disruption or revenue, because they can’t have both. That may or may not be true, but I’ve been guilty of suggesting it is to a couple [...]

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Blaming Angels and VCs for Choosing is Like Blaming Up for Down

February 2, 2012

I was happily reading Sramana Mitra’s The Other 99% of Entrepreneurs on Read/Write Web, agreeing with every detail, when I ran into a snag. It’s in italics in this quote from Sramana’s post. Over 99% of entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected. Yet, the entire world is focused on the 1% that is “fundable.” The media, [...]

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Is Your Startup Positioned in The Funding Gap?

December 7, 2011

Nice post by Bill Payne called The Funding Gap on the Gust.com Blog. Here’s the summary: It is clear from this table that Friends and Family, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists provide 95% of the capital for new ventures. Friends and Family typically invest a few thousand to perhaps $10,000, and only a small number of [...]

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You Can Take Your IRR and Shove It

November 30, 2011

In pitches and presentations everywhere, bright young entrepreneur tells cynical skeptical investors, usually with great pride and flourish, about their fabulous IRR for their great new startup. I get a gag reflex. IRR stands for internal rate of return. You can check wikipedia or investopedia for what that’s supposed to mean and how it’s calculated. [...]

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Long-Term Successes Don't Leave Out Investors

August 25, 2011

For an investor in a startup, return on investment is as simple as writing a check now and depositing some related money later.  And since startups are risky, you’d expect to hit big when you win because you’re so much more likely to lose. Does that make sense? So when the angel investor writes a [...]

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Mark Suster: Be a Line, Not a Dot

August 9, 2011

This morning I added Mark Suster’s Both Sides of the Table to my blogroll here because his post Invest in Lines, not Dots reminded me that I’ve been meaning to include his blog for a long time. His idea here is something everybody should understand. His single line chart here,combined with his title, makes the [...]

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