This is going to be BIG.
JULY 16, 2014
'There''s been some writing about how VCs and founders interact with each other and it inspired me to take a step back and reflect on what my role is supposed to be with regards to the investments I make and the founders I deal with. Here''s what I came up with. First, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my investors who entrusted me with money in the first place.
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 23, 2014
'There has been much discussion in the past few years of the changing structure of the venture capital industry. On the surface the narratives have been. The rise of “micro VCs” or seed-stage funds. The rise of alternative sources of capital (crowd funding and the like). The poor performance of the asset class (this analysis has largely been wrong as I pointed out here –> most analyses were clumsy rear-view mirror looks at the data).
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Gust
JULY 6, 2014
'Photo via Flickr by Eric Chan. I talk to many people who have spent years struggling up the corporate ladder who dream of jumping ship and becoming an entrepreneur. I hasten to tell them that every job move is fraught with risk, but the move from employee to entrepreneur is on the high end of the risk curve. It’s a big jump, especially in today’s economy, so do your homework first on this one.
Berkonomics
JULY 17, 2014
'When meeting with investors, during the period devoted to feedback after your presentation, you will hear comments and recommendations that don’t resonate with you. Some will be from a misunderstanding of your explanation. Some listeners will challenge your assumptions. Some will seem to ask just plain show-off questions, in which the questioner wants you and others in the room to know that s/he knows more than you do.
Advertisement
Lack of digitalization decreases business competitiveness. To thrive, embracing modern solutions becomes essential. The approach to digitalization often aligns with a company's business model. This shift not only boosts productivity but also automates processes and improves security. The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.
abovethecrowd.com
JULY 23, 2014
'Today Benchmark announced that Eric Vishria has joined us as a General Partner. Eric is one of the up-and-coming stars in the technology industry, and we are very excited he is becoming our partner. In Benchmark’s team dynamic, character and attitude really matter. Eric’s keen intellect, his experience as an entrepreneur and CEO, his depth in infrastructure and enterprise software, and his infectious optimism about technology make him an ideal Benchmark partner.
Startup Catalyst Brief brings together the best content for the entrepreneurial ecosystem from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
This is going to be BIG.
JULY 17, 2014
'I''m excited to share that goTenna, a Brooklyn Bridge Ventures portfolio company, has launched the presale of its point to point communications device. Have you ever texted anyone in the same room and thought about the infrastructure behind it--about where that message travels to, the great distances it gets bounced around, all to travel ten feet, in just milliseconds.
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 21, 2014
'Since 2009 we’ve been in an unequivocal bull market. Venture capitalists have raised increasing amounts of money from their investors (LPs) every year. An impressive number of new VCs have been created – most of them with new seed funds. We’ve had an explosion of alternate sources of financing from crowd-sourcing, angels, accelerators, incubators, corporates, corporate incubators.
Gust
JULY 19, 2014
'With Gust , the power of the system is that your completed investor relations profile can now serve as your official application to virtually any organized angel group in the world…all you need to do is share it with them*. I’d suggest that you browse through the Gust investor search engine for investment groups (and accelerators, incubators, business plan competitions, et al) that are relevant to your startup (by location, industry, type of organization, etc.), and read their
Berkonomics
JULY 31, 2014
'Marketing is a science devised to help drive customers to your door. There are lots of ways to define how to market well, including the four P’s of marketing (1): product, price, promotion and place. This is considered to be the producer-oriented model. These are still the driving focus behind most marketing courses, and deserve to be so. Then there is the four C’s, the consumer-oriented marketing model (2).
Advertisement
Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.
abovethecrowd.com
JULY 10, 2014
'On June 18, Aswath Damodaran , a finance professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article on FiveThirtyEight titled “ Uber Isn’t Worth $17 Billion. ” This post was a shortened version of a more detailed post he had written for his own blog titled “ A Disruptive Cab Ride to Riches: The Uber Payoff.” Using a combination of market data, math, and financial analysis, Professor Damodaran concluded that his best estimate of the value of Uber is $5.9 billion, far short of the value re
Tomasz Tunguz
JULY 7, 2014
It would seem hardware startups are booming. First, the amazing success of the GoPro business and IPO , which set a 23-year high-water mark for a consumer hardware company. Second, there seems to be a growing number of hardware startups bubbling in incubators like Lemnos Labs and Highway1. Third, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites have enabled hardware startups to mitigate one of the biggest risks in starting out: obtaining a reliable proxy for consumer demand.
This is going to be BIG.
JULY 28, 2014
'I wrote this note to a young company that had recently raised some money and moved into a shiny new office after busting at the seams in a makeshift setup. The company was full of super young, vibrant, and incredibly talented people with a huge opportunity ahead of them--and a lot of difficult challenges. Congrats on moving into your new office. While I''m there are still a few bugs, bells, whistles, and bandwidth to work out, let me be the first to officially point out.
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 27, 2014
'I recently attended and presented at Dave McClure’s PreMoney conference in San Francisco. I go every year because I love events hosted & moderated by insiders involving discussions by insiders because it maximizes the amount of real discussions people have. What you’ll see if you watch the video is an unscripted and unfiltered look into how Scott Kupor & I see some of the changes and challenges of the venture industry. tl;dr version.
Advertisement
CAPTARGET presents a masterclass in M&A deal sourcing. Learn to cast a wide net, embracing seller self-identification. Consistency is the linchpin: keep the origination process steady for a reliable flow of opportunities. Diversify your tactics, employing various tools and vendors. Tech matters! Understand DNS settings, domain authority, and brand presence for optimal outreach.
Gust
JULY 26, 2014
'If founding a startup was easy, there would be a lot more of them, and the percentage that are successful would be much higher. Unfortunately, it isn’t. The essence of entrepreneurship is creating a new venture where one does not already exist in the market as you find it. As such, the founding process is one in which the entrepreneur is competing with market forces.
Berkonomics
JULY 24, 2014
'Most entrepreneurs, when starting to model their business operations using a spreadsheet, start with expected revenue by month. Then they calculate cost of sales, and then project their expenses, to find the bottom line profit or loss each projected month. There is a rarely-used twist that makes lots of sense. Add a new row at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
For Entrepreneurs
JULY 13, 2014
'“Se você não pode medir algo, você não pode melhorá-lo.” – Lord Kelvin Este artigo é um guia abrangente e detalhado das principais métricas necessárias para entender e otimizar uma empresa de Software como serviço (SaaS). Ele conta com a ajuda de dois experts no assunto: Ron Gill, (CFO, NetSuite), e Brad Coffey (VP de […].
Tomasz Tunguz
JULY 31, 2014
I’ve listened to thousands of fundraising pitches in my six years so far at Redpoint. Some with demos, some without. Some with hockey-stick charts, and others just an idea. I’ll never forget one meeting when the founders presented an entirely hand-drawn deck on 12 pieces of paper. The extent of founders’ creativity is hard to over-state.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr
This is going to be BIG.
JULY 7, 2014
'Just to be clear, Reservationhop--the line jumping fake name reservation making most hated startup idea on the internet right now--is not a particularly good idea. - It''s too small of a market with too little monetization per transaction. - It''s rather easily foiled by ID checking. - It doesn''t provide restaurants with any value. It is not, however, any more morally bankrupt than what a lot of other startup people fawn over.
Derek Sivers
JULY 3, 2014
Your business is secure. Even if it’s not, you have to feel that it is. Money is coming your way. You are doing well. You are one of the lucky ones. Most are not so fortunate. You can afford to be generous. All great service comes from this feeling of generosity and abundance. Think of all the examples of great service you’ve encountered: free refills of coffee, letting you use the toilets even if you’re not a customer, extra milk and sugar if you need it, and an employee that spends a whole hou
Gust
JULY 16, 2014
'A useful way to look at it is the difference between current value and potential value. When an investor puts money into a company in exchange for an ownership stake, mathematics means that the amount of ownership the investor receives for the amount of the investment determines the “value” being assigned to the existing company before the investment.
Berkonomics
JULY 10, 2014
'I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked away from deals where the entrepreneur insists on a start-up premoney valuation that is so high, no angel could expect to make a return upon the investment, even with a reasonable sales price for the company down the road. There is always another attractive deal at the ready, and most have reasonable expectations of valuation.
Speaker: Wayne Spivak - President and Chief Financial Officer of SBA * Consulting LTD, Industry Writer, and Public Speaker
The old adages that "cash is king" and "you can’t spend profits" still hold true today. But however well-known these sayings might be, it requires a change in mindset to properly implement a cash flow management system that predicts your business's runaway as accurately as possible. Key to this new mindset is understanding the difference between the Statement of Cash Flows, a historical look at the source and uses of cash, and the Cash Flow Statement, which uses transaction history and forward-l
Gust
JULY 20, 2014
'Image via Flickr by Zaneology. As an entrepreneur, your personal integrity is critical for getting and keeping the support of investors and team members, and your company’s integrity is critical for getting and keeping customers and vendors. But in a practical sense, what does that really mean? Most definitions of integrity include something like “the quality of being honest and morally upright.
Gust
JULY 23, 2014
'The most useful meetings with an investor are ones where going in everyone understands that there may actually be a rational reason for the investor to be interested. So even if my own mother asked me to meet with you, and you were pitching me a biotech opportunity for a $10 million investment at a $90 million valuation, I might take the meeting, but it wouldn’t be particularly useful for either of us.
Gust
JULY 13, 2014
'Image via Flickr. Where did this sense of entitlement in our business culture come from? I’ve written about this before, but I was reminded again a while back at a conference for startups when an entrepreneur started berating investors for not funding early-stage startups. It sounded to investors like me that they felt a funding entitlement for their startup idea.
Gust
JULY 30, 2014
'No, because it is almost certainly against the law or regulations wherever you’re located (in the US it would be called General Solicitation). Check with your attorney to understand what you can and cannot say, and to which audiences. *original post can be found on Quora @ [link] *.
Speaker: P. Andrew Sjogren, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Very Good Security, Matt Doka, Co-Founder and CTO of Fivestars, and Steve Andrews, President & CEO of the Western Bankers Association
PCI compliance can feel challenging and sometimes the result feels like you are optimizing more for security and compliance than you are for business outcomes. The key is to take the right strategy to PCI compliance that gets you both. In this webinar, we have a great set of panelists who will take you through how Zero Data strategies can be used as part of a well-rounded compliance and security approach, and get you to market much sooner by also allowing for payment optimization.
Expert insights. Personalized for you.
368 
Let's personalize your content