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The Twenty Year Itch: My Last VC Investment Out of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures

This is going to be BIG.

To put that timeframe in perspective, here’s a picture of analyst me taken at USV’s first office in 2005, dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt versus a picture of me, a GP at my own firm, over 100 deals later, now on my latest Zoom board call from my couch at home with my junior analyst of about a year and a half. No new investments.

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Why being a VC sucks. Advice to anyone who wants to get into venture capital.

This is going to be BIG.

I usually direct people to this post --still hanging atop the search rankings for " How to be a VC analyst" years later. Since there''s no way to both make yourself accessible and not get a fire hose of inbound, most of the pitches you''re going to have are from perfectly nice, smart people who have perfectly horrific, unworkable ideas.

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Here is How to Make Sense of Conflicting Startup Advice

Both Sides of the Table

Everybody has a blog these days and there is much advice to be had. Many startups now go through accelerators and have mentors passing through each day with advice – usually it’s conflicting. So far from not taking advice from other people – I want more advice, more data points, more opinions.

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How to pitch me: 5 investors discuss what they’re looking for in April 2023

TechCrunch

But dealmaking is idiosyncratic: a few investors might be content to make a deal over coffee, but early-stage teams still need a sturdy pitch deck or memo they can leave behind. Similarly, one VC may encourage newly minted CEOs to eat ramen and ride the bus, while another might suggest a salary in the low six-figures, depending on geography.

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8 Tips To Get the Most Out of Your Investors and Board

Both Sides of the Table

He wrote a post this long weekend on how he manages the board of DataSift. In his post he asserts, “You get the VCs you deserve” and the corollary “You get the performance out of your board that you deserve.” Sincerely – he is better at managing his board than any exec I have worked with.

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Why VC Feedback is Often Bad Data

This is going to be BIG.

I've seen this so many times over: A founder pitches a VC, or several of them, and then they come back from that process with all sorts of new strategy goals or worries that they need to be doing something differently. So why is this feedback seemingly all over the board? Any advice they have for you is going to be a bit broken.

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The Problem with Startup Advice

This is going to be BIG.

I'm often the last one to leave an event, held back by the most persistant of entrepreneurs trying to squeeze as much advice as they can out of me. Often times, the advice is terrible or impractical. Try and figure out exactly what a startup had to show at the moment a VC chose to invest in them. Why should that stop me, though?

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