Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel. The VC industry is segmenting – I have spoken about this many times before. The VC industry has different segments in it that have different fund sizes, different investment amounts and different risk / return expectations. It’s just not a VC investment.

disruption 308

disruption VC entrepreneurs financing 308

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 13, 2021

It is a little known part of my career, but for a brief period from 1997 to 2001, I was part of a small group of investors who helped to create a startup ecosystem in Latin America. ” So began a five year investment partnership between Flatiron Partners (our VC firm) and Susan’s Latin American private equity business.

entrepreneurship 192

entrepreneurship startup ecosystem VC pitching 192

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 2, 2014

Henry told me that I should start a fund--me, a 27 year old former VC analyst turned product manager with no MBA at a startup that wasn''t really headed in any particular direction. I got my first job in venture--at GM--in February 2001. It''s probably the first time I''d really ever had the thought of starting my own fund.

venture capital 278

venture capital VC ventures technology 278

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

When I first started in venture capital, back in 2001, I used to fund funds. There were a million reasons not to do Uber, for example--regulatory hurdles, first time VC backed founder (Remember, Ryan Graves raised the seed round as CEO, not Travis), the fact that it required individual launches in each city, premium product, etc, etc.

sustainability 295

sustainability angel investing venture capital VC 295

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2015

In part because as a VC I reached the longevity where you see some things fail and have to ask yourself, “would I readily work with that person again? I saw this in 2001-2003 and in 2008-2010. But I’ve been thinking a lot about failure in the past year or so. Why or why not?”

creativity 378

creativity culture entrepreneurs energy 378

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

Two weeks after Brad’s post I was at the 140 Conference in LA and I held open office hours for any entrepreneur who wanted to spend 15 minutes talking with a VC about their business. He came to the United States in 2001 to study Software Engineering at Auburn University. I hope that didn’t have a stature of limitation!

education 282

education creativity innovation entrepreneurs 282

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Within a year, by late 2000 / early 2001 consulting firms were firing people en masse. On July 27th, 2001 Accenture IPO’s and many of the partners grew fabulously wealthy. Andersen had lost its long-time CEO, George Shaheen, was hemorrhaging staff and wasn’t exactly known as being an Internet pioneer.

consulting 302

consulting leadership entrepreneurs advice 302

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Our first big institutional round of VC was $16.5 We went “nuclear&# and slimmed down to 33 people (yes, I know, still large by today’s standards but this was 2001), raised $10 million and we built a real company. I learned everything I know about startups in these lean years: 2001-2004.

culture 333

culture construction startup advice 333

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2010

People assume that I’m biased because I’m a VC and think you should always get the highest valuation possible. The A round was done in February 2000 (end of the bull market) and my B round was done in April 2001 (bear market). But if you do this early (pre VC) then the price points are pretty low. This is wrong.

venture capital 282

venture capital capital ventures angel investing 282

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 31, 2022

The carnage has been massive and reminds me of what happened to the web sector in 2000/2001. Many large centralized entities; lenders, exchanges, crypto funds, etc, blew up when the value of web3 assets declined 70-90% over the course of 2022. Some of this has been markets doing their thing, but not all of it was.

disruption 244

disruption accelerator capital startup 244

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 24, 2015

I’ve seen friends (and family members) lose much of their savings that way over the years because “Black Swans” happen and in 1987, 2001, 2003 & 2008 (just to name a few from my memory) huge market gyrations caused much financial distress to people seeking short-term gains. p.s. my normal health warning.

finance 344

finance financing ventures real estate 344

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 29, 2021

It reminds me of the early days of web2 in 2001/2002/2003, when we started USV. The good news is there are literally tens of thousands of teams building new things on a web3 stack now. Some of the best entrepreneurs and developers have moved over. The tooling is getting better. That was also a time of great cynicism.

financing 274

financing finance development communities 274

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 18, 2009

You’ve got to be able to come out of unsuccessful VC meetings, pull your socks up, and go into the next pitch. As a VC if I can tell that you’ve survived tough times and you don’t appear beaten down that’s a huge plus. This was soon after the bursting of the dot com bubble – in early 2001.

entrepreneurs 298

entrepreneurs advice VC SaaS 298

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

I spoke about how Amazon Web Services deserves far more credit for the last 5 years of innovation than it gets credit for and how I believe they spawned the micro-VC category. I said that I felt that Micro-VCs were the most important change in our industry. It is great for entrepreneurs and great for VCs. I believe that.

real estate 309

real estate entrepreneurs financing finance 309

Dream It

APRIL 12, 2020

During our recent Dreamit Kickoff week, Bullpen Capital Founder and General Partner Paul Martino ( @ahpah ) spoke with our Spring 2020 cohort about the state of the VC ecosystem in the current economic crisis. Paul Martino, General Partner at Bullpen Capital. It went from 1 million employed people to 750k employed people within 18 months.

ventures 334

ventures startup capital board 334

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 22, 2010

And good VC’s feel the same way. When my company hit the fan in 2001 I could have easily walked and gotten a better paying job. But sometimes it weakens their own resolve. Especially when this job hopper has them out for drinks to talk about his cool new gig where the grass is currently greener.

advice 392

advice peer-to-peer consulting startup founder 392

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Please don’t also confuse this with whether a VC should invest in a CEO who’s done it before – that’s a given. This was a reasonable achievement when you consider that it was 2001-02, one of the worst years to be selling enterprise software and we were selling it SaaS style, which was still evangelical back then.

startup 327

startup advice SaaS consulting 327

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

I had finally appeared on the front cover of a magazine (TornadoInsider – then the top European VC magazine) but I felt so fat in the picture I never sent it to anybody. Then I got engaged to be married in late 2001 and had the motivation to get really serious. I had probably gained 15-20 pounds in the previous year.

entrepreneurs 308

entrepreneurs advice real estate venture capital 308

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

I asked him if he’d be willing to allow me to interview him for This Week in VC and we filmed it in the offices of Stack Overflow – his new company. Lesson: Joel had been building a community of readers since 2001. So it was a thrill for me last month to be able to have dinner with Joel and shoot the breeze.

peer-to-peer 285

peer-to-peer communities development innovation 285

TechCrunch

DECEMBER 27, 2022

Latin America became the fastest-growing VC region globally, and the market expanded to $16 billion in 2021. Great companies like Nubank, Inter, Gympass, Quinto Andar and several others were in their early innings at the time, but the market dislocation did not last long. Here are a few takeaways: Milk every dollar, save every penny.

venture capital 95

venture capital capital VC opportunity 95

TechCrunch

MAY 17, 2022

The judges for this pitch-off will be Yoon Choi (Muirwoods Ventures), Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) and Gabriel Scheer (Elemental Excelerator) on day one; and Sven Strohband (Khosla Ventures), Victoria Beasley (Prelude Ventures) and John Du (GM Ventures) on day two. ” Mar Hershenson — Pear VC. John received his Ph.D.

pitching 76

pitching energy startup consulting 76

TechCrunch

APRIL 11, 2022

Whether we will see as dramatic a correction in the next few years as we did in 2001 to 2003, however, is anyone’s guess.”. “If We look for founders where other VC firms said they aren’t the best founders, but really, they outperform and are high-performing founders and are resourceful when VCs didn’t give them money,” she added.

venture capital 97

venture capital investing investment ventures 97

Gust

OCTOBER 20, 2011

We also have data points for VC investments in seed/startup companies (but not necessarily pre-revenue companies). The following chart from Dow Jones VentureSource shows very little variation in pre-money valuation of VC seed stage deals over the past decade. The range of the data is from a low pre-money valuation of $0.8

angel investing 146

angel investing investing investment opportunity 146

Angel Capital Association

JUNE 27, 2024

During this past upcycle, many micro VCs raised significant funds and pursued earlier stage deals in earnest. Their DNA was wrapped up in a VC mindset that starting valuations were less important given the lofty later stage valuations and frothiness at that end of the market (hence over 1000 “unicorns” today vs only 8 in 2008 and 1 in 2001).

funders 52

funders peer-to-peer mix-use angel capital 52

TechCrunch

DECEMBER 12, 2020

While several marketplace unicorns prepare IPOs, a VC digs into the data (EC). It goes a little something like this: After moving to California in 1996 at the age of 20, Gorny eventually founded a web hosting company in 2001 after working for tech companies during the dot-com boom. Airbnb said to price IPO between $67 and $68.

venture capital 122

venture capital capital startup SaaS 122

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2010

It also takes options off the table if you eventually find out that this isn’t a VC backable business. I’ve spoken about this in a post entitled, “ Do you even need VC ?&# It places undue pressure early in the company’s history to “do big things&# when sometimes what is warranted is more prudence.

startup 319

startup advice venture capital VC 319

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 22, 2014

Through the first six months of 2014, VCs have raised about as much as all of 2013. If this pace of fund raising continues, 2014 would mark the biggest year for VCs since 2001, when the industry raised about $38B. Each quarter, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters gather data on the VC industry.

venture capital 40

venture capital capital ventures startup 40

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

Most of what I learned about operating startups I learned from the really tough years at my first company from 2001-2003. My company had raised venture capital in April 2001 but we were told that there may never be any more coming. Hell – we fought against the VC’s together! He’s family and he knows it.

advice 285

advice venture capital VC construction 285

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

We then had a piece in Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Europe, we ran front cover of Tornado Insider (the top VC magazine in Europe at the time). 2001-2004 were very humbling but we built a real company. If you need VC, no better time than the present. I sat next to Irwin Jacobs (founder of Qualcomm) on a bus ride.

media 310

media advice VC capital 310

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I had previously raised VC in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005. In case VC’s haven’t figured this out yet, shit rolls downhill. My blog linked to Brad Feld’s blog because I was so grateful for his series on term sheets and he was one of the biggest reasons that as a VC I felt compelled to blog.

VC 274

VC venture capital pitching capital 274

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

I’m over-paying for every check I write into the VC ecosystem and valuations are being pushed up to absurd levels and many of these valuations and companies won’t hold in the long term. However, to be a great VC you have to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. Where are Things Headed for VC in 2031?

ventures 471

ventures VC venture capital funders 471

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 5, 2023

Last August, I passed the point at which I had spent literally half my entire life working in this asset class, having started at the General Motors pension fund doing institutional investments in venture funds and late-stage directs back in February of 2001.

ventures 545

ventures investing investment VC 545

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

It’s hard for many VCs to get excited about funding a company who is going to compete with somebody who just raised $10 million from an A-list VC (although this can go the other way, also). As anyone raising money in April 2000, September 2001 or September 2008 can tell you that. Fund raising can be black-and-white.

advice 303

advice frameworks capital mentorship 303

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 22, 2019

Back in 2001, the FCC recognized that interoperability was key to competition and required then-dominant AOL to make its instant messaging service compatible with its competitors. Senator Mark Warner put out a long tweetstorm yesterday laying out the ideas behind this bill and I would like to highlight a few of them here.

leadership 176

leadership media 176

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

You’re tied at the hip to your VC. Get to know VCs over a long period of time so that when you’re ready to get engaged you feel you know their character. How do you then reference check your VC to be sure that you’ve chosen a good firm and partner? Ask the CEO’s about the VC when the chips were down.

VC 288

VC advice entrepreneurs venture capital 288

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series “ Start Up Advice &# but I’d really like to call this post, “VC Advice.&#. We exchanged ideas when I was an entrepreneur along side him in NorCal in 05-07 and my point-of-view on founder / VC relationships hasn’t shifted even 1% since I went to the dark side. You lose the dream.

founder 329

founder VC advice pitching 329

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 11, 2022

2001–2007: THE BUILDING YEARS The dot com bubble had burst. Between 2006–2008 I sold both companies that I had started and became a VC. SEEING THINGS FROM THE VC SIDE OF THE TABLE While I was a VC in 2007 & 2008 those were dead years because the market again evaporated due the the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

VC 466

VC culture sustainability capital 466