This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Picking a VC is hard. So I thought I’d write about out with what I would look for in a VC knowing what I know now and why. Most VCs are book smart. VCs should be more of a coach than proscriptively telling you what to do. You want a VC who will spar with you but then STFU and let you get on with things.
I have had the great pleasure of working with Matt Blumberg and the senior leadership team of USV’s former portfolio company Return Path (which was sold in 2019) for much of the last twenty years. All of this is outlined in the Bolster Founding Manifesto which explains why they started this company.
Investors let him control the board as long as he continued to make them paper rich, and then actually rich--so they couldn’t technically force him out. When it happens at companies run by women, the media, disgruntled employees, and their investor board members, burn them at the stake. VC David Sacks tweeted “??
I remember about fifteen years ago, a well-known VC said to me “you need to sell a company within a few years of the founder leaving. ” I told that VC that my experience has been different on that measure and that I did not agree. Etsy, where I am Chair of the Board and a large shareholder, is a great example of that.
A well-known entrepreneur turned VC, who will go unnamed because I am not sure he would want me to share this conversation publicly, once told me “if you remove a founder, you must sell the company within a couple of years or it will start to decline in value.” It will be an incredible trip. Most are not.
Last year, after more than five years at the helm, Julie decided it was time to pass the baton to a new leader and she and I and a group of board members spent the fall talking to lots of people and we found a fantastic new leader named Jason Clark. We called it Tech:NYC and I first wrote about it here at AVC in March of 2016.
In the VC insider baseball world a discussion has gone on about “VC platforms” over the past 5 or so years. While firms define platforms differently, let’s just say they are the services that a VC offers outside of investment capital and partner time on boards or providing intros.
See How to negotiate a partner role at a VC or private equity firm.) You can work as a consultant, an interim executive, a board member, a deal executive partnering to buy a company, an executive in residence, or as an entrepreneur in residence. . At Versatile VC , we’ve used all these models. Board of Directors.
leadership, mentorship, competitiveness, communications, relationship-building?—?and She worked for 5 years as a VC at Battery Ventures and co-headed M&A at IAC working with Barry Diller. Leadership is about recognizing your next generation of talent and helping lift them up. She had all of the skills and traits we sought?—?leadership,
If you’re an entrepreneur who would like to see this clause in more startups please ask your VC to include it in future term sheets and link to it from their home page. “We We strive to invest in companies that are consciously working to create a diverse leadership team?—?one We immediately realized this was a great idea.
When you set up a board it is often initially a combination of the founders and the early investors. This post sets out how I believe founders (and investors) should think about independent board members having worked with many of them for the past 20 years. The board is where large equity investors get their representation.
I’m often asked about the differences between being at a VC and being an entrepreneur and whether I prefer one or the other. When it’s an older firm (say Fund X or XII) it is often the 3rd generation of leadership, it has historic rules & norms that haven’t been fixed, it has skewed economics and an unclear mission.
Leah Edwards is a passionate fan and connector in technology and impact, a lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford and a partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures , a Silicon Valley-based VC firm. As a partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures , I’m aware that the VC industry boasts about finding teams with outlying and industry-changing ideas.
Now that he’s become a VC he’s promising me he’ll provide way more public information and discourse so please welcome him by following him on Twitter and better yet welcoming him with a Tweet of your own linking to his Twitter handle or this post. So what gives? Mark, why wouldn’t you fund him?
Today I’m handing her the largest A-round check I’ve ever written as a VC as we lead her $10 million A-Round at uBeam. The reality is that as VCs we have limited allocations of where we can spend our time so we want to attach ourselves to projects in which we, too, can be passionate. That was three months ago this week.
Because most startups avoided raising in 2022, there will be a glut of startup companies in the market for capital this year and while there is plenty of venture capital sitting on the sidelines waiting to be deployed, VCs will be much more selective, instead of funding everything that moves as we’ve done over the last few years.
I don’t think that Google would have become the success story we all know without the leadership of Eric Schmidt through the years he led the company. So Nick drove strategy & tech from the UK and remained an active board member and CTO of the company. Case in point is the return of Larry Page to the role as CEO of Google.
But honestly there are times when being a VC can feel like that, too. Successful entrepreneurs achieve much through their personal leadership traits that inspire others to do great things with them – sure. And in it he profiles the work of Coach Campbell who was once on the boards of both Google & Apple.
I often tell people in this scenario to focus on a VC “fixer upper.” You will learn about running board meetings, setting up the ultimate financial plan, leading a team from the top, dealing with the press, raising capital, etc. Incoming into a VC fixer-upper you often have leverage over personal compensation.
A good early-stage CEO needs to be accessible, to be accountable for producing results and should be establishing the cultural norms of the company through direct leadership at all levels. This applies to both founders and to VC’s that work with them. I’m not a big believer in too much hierarchy. A quick example.
In almost thirty five years of working on boards, the hardest decisions I have had to make involve removing the CEO. You must act and replace the failed CEO with whomever is the best option in that moment and work with the new CEO to address the challenges facing the company, many a result of the failed CEO’s poor leadership.
As an early-stage VC I love this phase. Many companies don’t reach the next phase either because their leadership doesn’t adapt as an organization or because they don’t design processes that lead to scaled outcomes. We recently added Richard Mumby to our leadership team.
Every VC firm works differently but when asked about our process I always reply the same way, We’re a “high conviction” shop. If you pound the table on deals over a period of time and you’re consistently wrong it’s clear you won’t make a great long-term VC. He took two words where I take 1,000!
Mar Hershenson , co-founder and managing partner at Pear VC. Mar Hershenson co-founded and serves as managing partner at Pear VC, a seed-stage investment firm in Palo Alto backing companies like Guardant Health, DoorDash, Gusto, Aurora Solar and Branch. He also serves on the board of Friends of Hudson River Park.
Historically VC has been an apprenticeship business. VC ASSOCIATIONS. No-cost accelerators: Afore Capital Angel to Fund Manager (AFM), Founder Institute VC Lab , Recast Capital Enablement Program – Accelerators with tuition: Oper8r , OnConduit ‘s Emerging Fund Managers Initiative. Reboot VC Bootcamp.
2021 saw phenomenal returns for our industry and it topped off more than a decade of unprecedented VC growth. When we get involved in Seed investments we usually represent 60–80% in one of the first institutional rounds of capital, we almost always take board seats and then we serve these founders over the course of a decade or longer.
The best advice she ever gave me, though, was to join the EO to build my leadership skills and my support network. About a year and a half after starting my business, I joined EO and was quickly invited onto the board of directors where I sat with a woman who is so unapologetically herself.
But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Within 2 years I was getting 400,000 views / month and had been voted the 2nd most respected VC in the country by an independent survey of entrepreneurs, The Funded and sentiment analysis. thought leadership. accessibility.
. “Yes&# was given to me by one of my favorite angel investor / seed VC’s to work with – John Greathouse of Rincon Venture Partners and author of the blog InfoChachkie that you should check out because it is filled with great info from a guy who has been a very successful operator.
One of the most common questions we hear from founders is “How do I manage my board?” It’s something that provokes anxiety, because this is the first time the founder/CEO is subject to external supervision, and the board has powers that include the firing of the CEO and the senior management. But first, what’s the purpose of a board?
(co-written with Katherine Boe Heuck , a MBA candidate at MIT Sloan (class of 2022); past intern at Versatile VC ; and a current intern at Metaprop NYC.). We reviewed CB Insights’ global list of “40 of the Best VC Bets of all Time.” For funds with an overall return of 3-5x, which is what VC funds aim for, the overall return was 4.6x
So we brought in experience hand Mark Woodward who had taken 2 companies public and had a storied sales leadership turned CEO career where he learned in academy-rich Oracle. Many VC firms expressed interest, nearly every one took a meeting and several called Mark and the team back for meetings. September started easily enough.
And while Kevin went on the guide our role on the board at Seriously and deserves 100% of any Upfront credit, Andrew went on to become a dear friends. I’m sure he could have done without his VC asking him on the sidelines our latest revenue forecasts :) but we really just kept it personal. I am also thrilled for my partner Kevin.
I know because I marked the occasion with a blog post on how to have a great VC meeting. The decisions were endless, the choices not obvious and the VC involved a pain in the ass. The board was unanimous in our opinion of this including outside director Ian Rogers who has served as Jonathan’s mentor and friend.
The where does it live question is also an equally complex one, but the way we’ve got our Plinko board setup above, e-mail and LinkedIn clearly play an important role—and I’m a big believer that you’re missing out if you’re not using both. Perhaps SMS, but most people don’t want your thought leadership in their previous text inbox.
This division of labor and responsibilities has proved invaluable and they are both on the board so we have good and robust debates. I’ve heard all of the VC arguments about using other people’s facilities, not wanting to invest in physical infrastructure (warehouses, trucks) and even silly ideas like wanting peer-to-peer storage.
I apply visual thinking for nearly everything I do: preparing for important phone calls (I imagine my opening lines, I imagine the responses), writing keynote presentations, deciding whether or not to invest in a company, preparing for board meetings – you name it. These are all creative processes. That’s a shame.
In 2016, we set out to develop a rigorous methodology for tracking progress on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in venture capital, and to measure and benchmark those data through our biennial VC Human Capital Survey. Once talent has come on board, inclusive culture and retention become key metrics of DEI progress.
Boards often discuss CEO performance without really knowing how things work inside the company. And CEOs often have very little visibility to how they are doing and what the board thinks about their performance. I’ve written about this topic before. It is an important topic and I want to raise it again. Enter the CEO 360.
With so many entrepreneurs and startup ventures seeking investment opportunities, it’s crucial that venture capitalists (VCs) create a list of criteria they want their potential investments to meet. As such, VCs have to consider a number of factors when choosing which companies or entrepreneurs in whom to invest.
I think our view of successful leadership style needs to change just as much as these founders need to be more aware of the fact that we as investors are in this to take the risks, and that no VC is going to go homeless if a deal doesn’t work out.
These range from companies pitching me to portfolio companies presenting at board meetings. So part of seeing you with a team is to get a read on team dynamics and believe me all VCs discuss the team dynamics after you leave as in. Here are some guidelines for you – particularly for VC pitch meetings.
It’s certainly not salary, as when a company has nothing beyond a great idea and maybe a lead to a VC on Sand Hill Road, there’s no fat paycheck or benefits package to offer. Our board — which is packed with studs from the Bay Area — is expecting that to soar within two years! This is the culture and thus foundation of your company.
(co-written with Katherine Boe Heuck , a MBA candidate at MIT Sloan (class of 2022); past intern at Versatile VC ; and a current intern at Metaprop NYC.). We reviewed CB Insights’ global list of “40 of the Best VC Bets of all Time.” Why are all of the VC home runs from white men, or Asian men in Asia, plus a few Asian men in the U.S.?
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 24,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content