Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 24, 2014

I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. I divided success into the phases of venture capital and 18 months into writing my first check here was my view (details on each in the link above).

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2010

Our guest this week on #TWiVC was Dana Settle , partner at Greycroft Partners , a venture capital firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Current rount: $8.14mm in Series A from Redpoint (lead), Foundry Group, with previous investors, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital (Chris Sacca), Ravi Narasimham. Founded in 2007.

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VC peer-to-peer advice ventures 240

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 2, 2014

What might be a more relevant date is May 22nd, 2007. Venture Capital & Technology' Three years ago today, I grabbed the domain name BrooklynBridgeVentures.com. It''s kind of a funny answer to "When did you start Brooklyn Bridge Ventures?". After my two year stint was up, I bought a domain name. Yeah, so, somewhere in there.

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venture capital VC ventures technology 293

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 3, 2009

When Twitter first became popular with niche crowds in 2007 it seemed to take hold initially with bloggers. Bill Gurley , a well known VC from Benchmark Capital, seemed to have a 2-year hiatus from blogging and has now picked up the pace. And I’m enjoying being part of the two-way conversation again as I was from 2005-2007.

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VC creativity networking media 219

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 11, 2014

I didn''t actually get to meet him in person until SXSW in 2007. Venture Capital & Technology' He was an interesting guy and I watched him throughout a bunch of interesting projects, like a complete open source business where all the employees got to make the decisions. That was the year Twitter took off.

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board venture capital creativity entrepreneurship 274

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2015

At the time almost nobody had heard of the following funds: FirstRound Capital, TrueVentures, Floodgate and SoftTech. By fund II (2007) he was able to raise $15 million (if you watch the video you’ll hear an interesting story of how he did this) and he had a proper fund. I think they were all brand new or just forming.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2015

I know that I had things easier as a new VC because I came into the business in 2007 when the market was frenzied like today but an order-of-magnitude less so and the world wasn’t living in public. It’s true that my job requires more travel than I’d like.

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advice VC entrepreneurs transportation 398

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2013

Early in his days when he was raising capital for DocStoc he came to see me a lot. When I joined GRP Partners in 2007 I was offered a role as a General Partner. I wrote about there here. When you want press, it will come. Some practical examples. Jason Nazar is a master networker. As good as they come. And then I think about me.

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advice VC networking entrepreneurs 407

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

I recently sat down with Troy Carter to talk about what he does and why he believes it is applicable to venture capital. The history of tech will always tell you there was a defining moment for companies (like Twitter at SXSW in 2007) but the reality is often more nuanced. Same with Gaga. “It was a series of inflection points.

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venture capital communities VC entrepreneurs 228

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

2007, 2011) and for the hottest of companies and in bad markets for fund raising (2003, 2008) prices test the bottom end of the range. I saw this kind of pricing when I first entered the VC market in 2007. So rounds tend to be “range bound&# where the top end of the valuation spectrum often being done in boom markets (i.e.

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startup advice pitching investment 336

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

I know that most people who are close to them tend to deny their existence, as we saw in the great housing bubble of 2002-2007 and the dot com bubble of 1997-2000. I guess that makes USV, Spark Capital, Foundry Group, Accel, Benchmark, Revolution (along with several others) pretty happy right now. source: Capital IQ.

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real estate entrepreneurs finance financing 309

Gust

DECEMBER 13, 2011

Here are the trends in venture capital financings from 2006 through 2010 – the number of seed stage deals funded and total investment by region in millions of dollars. . For VCs, I chose to look at all seed stage VC deals (from MoneyTree©) as well as those in five of the most active regions in the country. All Seed-VC. Silicon Valley.

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entrepreneurs angel investing VC venture capital 162

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

And Mike believes that entrepreneurs often need less capital to get started these days. Founded 2007 in Boulder, CO. Current round: $8.5mm Series-C led by Jafco Ventures with DCM , Emergence Capital, and August Capital participating. Tags: This Week in Venture Capital. Competitors: Google. Total raised: $18.3mm.

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VC ventures venture capital capital 230

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 12, 2011

More importantly, I know them both for a while--Hilary since August of 2007 through twitter and, of course, getting to work with her at Path 101, and Kara since I used to e-mail her about her Boomtown columns in the WSJ over ten years ago. Venture capital isn't a game or club any more than any other industry is.

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data analysis venture capital communities entrepreneurs 298

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

What a pleasure that I got to spend an hour talking with both Om Malik (whom I’ve always respected his views) and Paul Jozefak , a venture capital partner at Neuhaus Partners in Germany (and formerly the head of Europe for SAP Ventures). Tags: This Week in Venture Capital. To see the video of This Week in VC click on this link.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

There are real changes in the venture capital industry and it would have been fun to talk about them. Dave McClure argued passionately that since the overwhelming majority of exits are sub $100 million we need to readjust how much capital goes in. Answer: Not much. And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel.

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disruption VC entrepreneurs finance 308

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2014

I was having dinner with a friend last night and we were chatting about venture capital and a bit about what I’ve learned. I started in 2007 with a thesis that my primary investment decision would be about the team (70%) and only afterward about the market opportunity (30%). Hedge funds, other public investors, corporates, etc.

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VC investing investment entrepreneurs 374

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2010

This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital. If you imagine that they did most of their initial investments between 2002-2007 then it’s been 3 years of mostly doing follow-on investments in those old deals. Tags: Pitching VCs Raising Venture Capital VC Industry.

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VC venture capital investment investing 269

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

They have marked-up paper gains propped up by an over excited venture capital market that has validated their investments. Bad times often require more capital but ironically this is when capital is dried up. The dinner parties now are filled with self-righteous angel investors bragging about how many deals they are in on.

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angel investing investing investment real estate 299

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

Facebook had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users and was everything that MySpace wasn’t. Close shop to try and control monetization and you can only rely on your own internal innovation machine & capital. In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly.

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networking innovation development opportunity 297

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2018

Today the company officially announced its most recent round of capital ?—?having Capital of course drives scale advantages and when you have “winner take most” markets it also has a way of scaring away some investors from investing in the 3–5th “me too” competitors. having raised $300 million?—?less There is nothing viral!

transportation 256

transportation innovation leadership capital 256

TechCrunch

JULY 13, 2022

Kontent, a platform designed to help companies manage business-related content in the cloud, today announced that it raised $40 million from Expedition Growth Capital as part of a growth capital infusion. Kontent competes against Contentful , Contentstack , Strapi and Storyblok in a headless CMS software market that could be worth $1.6

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capital incumbents frameworks development 79

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 7, 2022

Travel booking startup Hopper today announced that it closed a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to $740 million. Travel app Hopper raises $96M from Capital One to double down on social commerce by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch.

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capital leadership disruption ventures 107

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 30, 2010

This has been especially true for angels or seed investors as there is a new thesis that less capital is needed to start Internet companies so more money is being spent at this phase of the funding lifecycle. Consumer debt relative to incomes has risen to an all time high reaching 138% of 2007 (obviously that’s not sustainable!)

entrepreneurs 298

entrepreneurs real estate VC advice 298

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

It had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users, which actually was slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was. Close shop to try and control monetization and you can only rely on your own internal innovation machine & capital. In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly.

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networking mix-use innovation development 318

Gust

OCTOBER 8, 2014

There weren’t a lot of seed funds in 2007 so this was often done by angels, funding consortia or sometimes early-stage funds that existed then (First Round Capital, True Ventures, SoftTech VC, etc.). 5 million was always the classic definition of an A-round between the late nineties (crazy financings aside) and say 2007.

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VC advice finance financing 136

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 21, 2009

On the third Wednesday of every month I co-chair a meeting called the SoCal VCA (venture capital alliance), which represents participants from all of the top venture capital firms in Southern California as well as prominent members of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA). What are your predictions for the road ahead.

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VC venture capital ventures capital 241

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

I became a VC 12 years ago in 2007 when the pace of deals was much slower. Just as I was getting the swing of things the world shifted beneath my feet and the stock market went into a free fall and venture capital all but shut down for nearly a year. Accel led the B, Morgan Stanley the C and now HIG the D. Over the past 2.5

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 9, 2011

When I first got into the industry it was 2007. 2010 was the year of the “super angel&# and 2011 has to date been the year of unbelievably highly priced B,C & D rounds of venture capital. Venture capital is an industry best served up from 7-year aged casks. Yesterday was a Monday. And not a pleasant one. We did not.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

We raised a seed round of capital in 1999 and our first venture capital round was the first week of March 2000 (e.g. We were now set to close at $46 million in new capital. We found a way to get a round of venture capital closed after all of this. We were based in London. I swam every morning and ran every afternoon.

entrepreneurs 308

entrepreneurs advice real estate venture capital 308

Onevest

APRIL 30, 2015

In a report on startup investing and “How the Rich Invest” Forbes notes that the Angel Capital Association counted more than 330 active angel groups in North America as of 2013. Just 2% of startup financing actually comes from venture capital firms. But angel financing has been evolving thanks to ‘Super Angels’ and crowdfunding.

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investing investment coworking spaces startup 116

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

Most prefer not to say this publicly for two reasons: 1) they have an entire portfolio of startups, many of whom are raising capital and 2) they prefer not to be attacked publicly or seem “anti entrepreneur.” Many experienced partners are funds have 7-10 boards and most of these will need more capital. This is how VCs feel.

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startup VC entrepreneurs investment 285

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2011

Mike Yavonditte is the founder of the “super hot&# Hashable , a startup out of NYC that has been described as a “ Mint.com for Social Capital ” Mike sold his previous company, Quigo , to Aol for $340 Million. They sold in December 2007, but he started selling Quigo in 2004. Judged his instincts, and felt it was Quigo’s time.

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disruption technology finance financing 302

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

.” Under CEO Phil Libin, who joined the company in 2007, Evernote shifted its focus to the web, smartphones and Mac, starting with Evernote 3.0 Between 2010 and 2015, Evernote raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from investors including Sequoia, Meritech Capital and Japanese media company Nikkei.

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Founders Coop

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

This post is an attempt to unpack the changes we observed both during and after our time with Techstars, to draw out potentially useful lessons about how things might have gone differently. ——— In the Beginning: Champions of the Local Startup Ecosystem Techstars launched its first program in Boulder in 2007.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

But if 2011 & 2012 look more like 2008-2009 than 2010 or 2005-2007 then one of the most important skills of angel investors will be whether they can get their companies financed (or ramen profitable, but this is harder to sustain over a long period of time). and now they’re all buying their way into innovation and talent.

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angel investing investing investment VC 152

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 20, 2021

Matthew Mendelsohn’s accession to become Yale’s new chief investment officer marks a milestone for the rise of university endowments investing in venture capital. By working as partners on these educational programs, endowments and VCs can also start changing the makeup of venture capital to include investors from a variety of backgrounds.

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