Sat.May 10, 2014 - Fri.May 16, 2014

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The Economics of a Small VC Fund

This is going to be BIG.

'Two years ago I started a fund. For the fund to be viable, it had to be at least $5 million, but somewhere in the neighborhood of $8-10 million would have been perfect. Thankfully, that''s what I raised--$8.3 million. So how does it work? How does one make money raising a venture fund of this size? Not easily, let me tell you. The benefit comes in the upside, and it''s very back end weighted.

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Why I’m Now Long NPR

Both Sides of the Table

'Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a few brands & media properties that I truly love and for which I have huge loyalty. Virgin America. Uber. USAA. Jon Stewart. Fareed Zakaria. David Brooks. And NPR. NPR has been a part of my life for 25 years. As a news junkie and seeker of information, I’m that guy who always has his car tuned to KPCC everyday to get my daily dose of NPR.

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Don’t Forget Grants If You Need Early Seed Money

Gust

'In the US, many entrepreneurs see grants as “free money,” since they are not loans and don’t have to be repaid. A grant is not an equity investment, so the entrepreneur doesn’t have to give up a stake in the company either. Typically they can be used to fund product development and commercialization that would otherwise require outside investors. A good place to start looking is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which is a lifeline for high-tech startups.

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Both sides must be fair in a term sheet negotiation.

Berkonomics

'By Basil Peters. After being an active angel investor for about fifteen years, I realized that many of the discussions I was involved in were virtually identical to ones I’d had many times before. A good example was during the negotiation of a term sheet. These usually involve a handful of angel investors, and a few entrepreneurs, who all want to build the very best term sheet for their exciting nascent enterprise.

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Digitalization: 5 Tech Updates That Will Help You Survive The Recession & Thrive

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.

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What Something Isn't Worth

This is going to be BIG.

'Dollar Tree. Smucker''s. Uber. If the Bloomberg story is right, all three of these companies are now worth about $10 billion. I don''t know about you, but I''m pretty sure I''d rather own Uber than all of the crappy Dollar Tree stores or a peanut butter company. Plus, I''m more of a almond butter guy anyway. I don''t totally understand why people get obsessed with valuations--especially given that the complete lack of context around a deal.

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How do angel investors typically deal with the legal agreements and similarly how would they help deal with legal issues for a startup they’ve invested in?

Gust

'All investments by angels (and everyone else) in a company are made according to detailed legal documents that specify everything about the relationship among the various parties, the terms of the value exchange and the various rights and responsibilities of everyone involved. The paperwork can range from 5-10 pages for a pretty straightforward convertible note, up to 120 pages or more for a full Series A round.

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To My Wife, On Mother’s Day

Both Sides of the Table

'Mother’s Day. The one day a year where we recognize this all important figure in our lives who shapes our childhood providing unconditional love through our successes and failures with encouragement and support through our struggles. I’ve written about my own mom before and the role she played in shaping my life but of course you never quite appreciate the full contributions of Mom until you’re much older.

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What’s a typical day like for a full-time angel investor?

Gust

'There is no such thing as a full-time angel investor (or if there is, I’ve never met one.). If you mean someone investing mostly other people’s money through a seed fund, they are venture capitalists, and their days are spent like other VCs, meeting with prospective investments, mentoring portfolio companies, raising money from limited partners, negotiating deals, and so forth.

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The Workplace of the Future

Tomasz Tunguz

In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore reviews Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace , a book whose author asks the question, what is the work place of the future? The information worker is a relatively new concept. Peter Drucker coined the term in the 50s. By then companies had already developed new ways of housing information workers. The very first information workers were accountants hunched over “Bob Crachit” desks in the back rooms of factories.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

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.

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New Startups Around the World – Q1 2014

Gust

'Thousands of entrepreneurs continue to create new startup profiles on Gust each month. Take a look below to see which industries, countries, and company stages had the most activity in Q1.

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Startup Best Practices 7 - How to Use Andy Grove's Stagger Chart to Build Predictability into a Startup

Tomasz Tunguz

Predictability is sexy. Startups that have tuned their growth engines well enough to accurately forecast their growth, presuming these growth rates are attractive, will command much higher valuations in the market, simply because there is less risk in the company. As a result, investors prize these companies disproportionately. The challenge with predictability is predictability isn’t an end state.

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Ruthlessness and Grit in Startups

Tomasz Tunguz

Startups are in a state of perpetual change. During a startup’s first few years of establishing product market and winning the first set of customers, this state of change is obvious. But as a startup scales, the company must adapt by learning and reinventing. Whether it’s building the processes to grow the team, creating new sales and marketing initiatives to pursue adjacent customers, developing customer success teams or handling an unforseen crisis, this process of reacting to the

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