Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 19, 2011
I recently sat down with Matt Coffin , the founder of LowerMyBills, which sold for $400 million but was very nearly a bankruptcy only a few years early, and talked “startups.&#. Matt is one of the most transparent, focused & honest startup guys you’ll meet. You can watch him on YouTube , download in iTunes (for gym or commute) 3/31/11 edition.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 15, 2011
Let's be clear, New York City is a big, tough place. It's crowded and there are a lot of distractions. People are busy here and it takes a lot for them to stop and notice something. Hell, some poor shlub jumped in front of a subway train the other day and people on Twitter blew up about how it made them late for work. When the ground explodes and 500 pound manhole covers get tossed into the air, we barely break stride to snap a photo and be on our way.
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For Entrepreneurs
APRIL 25, 2011
If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post outlines a framework that is designed to fire up your best creative thinking modes, triggering [.].
Berkonomics
APRIL 3, 2011
Here we must do a little math calculation together to make a point. Assume that your gross margin from sales is 50% for ease in calculation. Assume 30 days to collect receivables from completed work, and 30 days to complete the work. Finally, assume a fixed overhead equal to all of the remaining 50% of revenues, just for the sake of making this point.
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Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 23, 2011
I’ve just finished a week away from the office for Spring Break, which was much needed. I’m now back & ready for action. I took the opportunity this past week to publish summary notes of some of the VCs and entrepreneurs I had interviewed on This Week in VC. Back to regular writing this week so check back in. One of my goals in doing the show was not only to educate entrepreneurs but also to put a human face on many of the VCs in our industry as VCs can be hard to get to know.
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.
APRIL 11, 2011
Back in 2005, when I was with Union Square Ventures, we changed our brochureware homepage into a blog. A few other VCs had been blogging before, but no one had gone as far as to make the whole front facing effort of their firm into something so interactive. It changed the way we worked with entrepreneurs. Last year, First Round Capital , my current firm, updated our page to make it even more interactive, pulling in shared links, Foursquare updates, and linking to our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Hones
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 11, 2011
I recently had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed , a company who focuses on helping media companies make their content go viral. His words, “we find things on Sunday morning that will be on the Today show on Tuesday morning.&# That’s why people turn up to Buzzfeed. We talked about a lot of great stuff in the video including how to do sales calls and a how a new “culture of writing&# is emerging as a critical skill set in business today.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 30, 2011
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR) ! I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down. Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 4, 2011
You Manage What you Measure. One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”. It’s a very important concept for me because in a startup you are constantly under pressure and have way too many distractions. Having a set of metrics that you watch & that you feel are the key drivers of your success helps keep clarity.
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Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 16, 2011
It’s easy to think that the wife of a well-known & successful VC ( Fred Wilson ) would have had an easy and storied life of wealth and privilege. I had previously had the opportunity to spend time with Joanne Wilson , Fred’s wife, and knew otherwise. That’s why I was so interested in having “ The Gotham Gal &# come on This Week in VC ( video link on YouTube , download iTunes, episode 15) ) and dispel those myths.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 13, 2011
Brad Feld is a fountain of knowledge & wisdom. I had the chance to sit down with him for an hour and ask him loads of questions that I thought you’d enjoy hearing. If you have time check out the video (or download on iTunes – Episode 27 - and listen at the gym or on your commute!). Or, as always, summary notes available below. Huge thank you to Steve De Long for the write up.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 29, 2011
I had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur last week about how he decided which VCs he was going to pitch. Mostly, it was a function of who he could get introductions to. No matter how much I or any of the team here at First Round made themselves accessable through Office Hours, LinkedIn, Twitter, speaking, blogging, etc., he was always going to go where he already had the warm intro versus going in cold.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 19, 2011
Yesterday, an entrepreneur asked me whether or not First Round does convertible notes. I wasn’t trying to be evasive, but after saying that we have done them on occasion, I pushed the entrepreneur to think deeper about his fundraising goals. To me, asking about a whether a VC does a specific security seems like the wrong question. It’s like asking an assassin whether or not he uses rifles or grenades—it really depends on the situation and what you’re trying to optimize fo
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Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 25, 2011
This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. There’s a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry (and subsequently Wall Street) who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses. It’s nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 1, 2011
I take a ton of meetings with people asking me about opportunities in our portfolio. For a lot of people, I feel like I’m the one being asked to do the work of finding them something. For a select few people, they understand that startups need a lot of help, and fall in love with the people who are motivated and show that they can offer help right off the bat.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 23, 2011
In the startup world, getting the right kind of attention is critical to success. No matter how good your product is, you're always going to have to depend on someone else to tell your story--especially early on. That makes journalists a critical group to build a relationship with as an entrepreneur or even a VC.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 8, 2011
When I was a junior at Regis High School, I had Mr. Murphy, who had a certain way of emphasizing different phrases at a deeper pitch that made for high scores on the Unintentional Comedy Scale. The best all-time exchange in his class that I got to witness was with my friend Gian, who was caught, like a deer in headlights on one particular question. Undaunted, as any true Regian would be in a situation where he had to speak on a topic he knew nothing about, words started to flow out of his mouth.
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For Entrepreneurs
APRIL 7, 2011
Introduction This post aims to help startup CEOs optimize their funding strategy by examining how investors value startups, and explaining how to avoid the common cash management pitfalls. (Note: The concepts in this post will likely be obvious to experienced CEOs and entrepreneurs. Despite that, our experience indicates that entrepreneurs frequently make costly, avoidable mistakes [.].
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 21, 2011
There isn’t a single person in the NYC that is more excited than I am about how far we’ve come. As a Brooklyn native who has never lived outside the five boroughs—and someone who left Big Finance—I feel a special kind of pride over what’s gone on here in the last six+ years. But I am also someone who is very colored by my past experience of seeing the venture implosion after the first bubble and walking through the fundraising tumbleweed of late 2008.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 6, 2011
There are a lot of arguments to be made about where innovation comes from, how to encourage it and what mechanisms with the economic ecosystem are best able to support it. A lot of people think about this as they try and figure out where they want to make their professional mark. A startup may not be the right environment for everyone, but I think the single biggest differentiating aspect of the startup innovation community is the preponderance of "yes" people.
Berkonomics
APRIL 11, 2011
In the past insight, we created an example to demonstrate that it truly takes money to make money; that growth calls for increases in working capital. The example we crafted proved that companies can easily find themselves strapped for cash during periods of rapid growth as well as in downturns. There are many techniques and time horizons for forecasting cash.
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
Berkonomics
APRIL 25, 2011
A. Accumulate or acquire (product line, breadth of services). M. Marketing or merchandising (expert and diligent use of resources). D. Distribution (adding channels and reinforcing relationships). Let me credit CEO Erik Hovanec ( www.leisurelink.com ) for this one, whether he originated it or recast it from his past. As his chairman, I have watched him masterfully focus his employees all toward a common theme aligned with the company’s goals.
Berkonomics
APRIL 17, 2011
Growing companies give rise to many events that great managers will take advantage of to create and shape the culture of the company itself. Each new plateau in revenue growth, each time a month’s orders hit a record, each large order from the sales department, all of these and more give rise to opportunities to celebrate publicly. Everyone in a stressful corporate environment loves to pause and relish the latest victory.
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