A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 11, 2021

Last week I spent three hours with my six partners in a conference room talking through what we are investing in and why. In one hour we learned enough from the founder to be able to make a decision on whether or not to invest in the founder’s company. And investors in NYC can access investments in Singapore with ease.

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culture disruption capital founder 262

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Good entrepreneurs have a penchant for doing vs. over-analyzing. Most of them are completely mundane such as choosing which: bank, office space, 1-year lease vs. 2-year lease, logo, URL, pricing structure or which VC. This is part of my Startup Advice series. obviously don’t read this as zero analysis). Making Things Happen.

entrepreneurs 414

entrepreneurs board advice consulting 414

Hunter Walk

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Watching the boom/bust cycle of DTC brands that were running on just the sugar high of venture dollars has given me even more appreciation for those who, yes, require investment capital along the way, but are playing the long game. It may seem academic, but living it means building a business much differently.

culture 96

culture collaboration startup financing 96

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. Almost all business success relies on creativity. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A So no whinging about what a long post this is!

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Understanding how your company will change as you move through these phases is critical if you hope to scale to a large business one day. Understanding how your company will change as you move through these phases is critical if you hope to scale to a large business one day. As an early-stage VC I love this phase.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

If you’re funding the same stuff as everybody else and if you started your activities when the clues were obvious you’re much less likely to drive enormous returns. This was certainly the case when I invested in a small YouTube video production company called Maker Studios that recently sold to Disney for just shy of $1 billion.

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funders culture incumbents technology 362

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

The idea actually came to him from the Yellow Pages business. He was a life-long entrepreneur and the first business he created out of college (actually, he founded it while he was at Caltech) was a company that manufactured high quality audio speakers. So the Yellow Page business was always “pay for placement.&#.

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incubation entrepreneurs hospitality VC 350

Entrepreneurs' Organization

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

If nothing else, the 2020 pandemic has shown everybody—particularly business owners and entrepreneurs—the value of being prepared and ready to pivot. Remove the “fat” from all aspects of my business. Ensuring that your cash position is not skinny going into a pandemic is the greatest business relief. Juggle fewer balls.

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consulting creativity entrepreneurs collaboration 294

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

I use George Bush vs. Al Gore as allegory and I’ve been using it with entrepreneurs for years to sink in a simple point about how to communicate with the market. Partisan rancor aside, we had just come off a boom decade – especially in tech – and many people at the start of the election thought Al Gore was a shoe in.

entrepreneurs 370

entrepreneurs pitching startup education 370

Hunter Walk

NOVEMBER 11, 2024

Hunter Walk: You started at Instacart in 2013, just a year after it was founded, which obviously turned out to be an epic decision. I was introduced to Apoorva , the founder of Instacart, in the spring of 2013 by my close friend/business school neighbor Rafael Corrales. So what follows are Five Question with Nilam.

board 104

board collaboration energy advice 104

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2015

And to show you just how similar many of these pioneers of the industry went through a similar startup journey to you – Jeff started by investing his own personal money ($250k) for a few years – $25k at a time – until he could persuade a few institutional investors to give him some money.

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VC peer-to-peer frameworks board 348

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 21, 2021

Fundraising takes a long time. I’m a female founder. I don’t have a technical co-founder. I don’t have enough traction. These are all of the things I heard from a founder that I recently backed. She was pitching for a pre-seed round of $400k. I appreciated her desire to get back to work, but I convinced her to agree to a 2-3 week sprint.

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advice pitching venture capital VC 429

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2010

Spark Capital is relatively new to VC (founded in 2005) yet has become one of the hottest new VCs having invested in Twitter, Tumblr, AdMeld, Boxee, KickApps and many more companies. We discussed NY vs. Silicon Valley and NY vs. Boston. Targeting SMB’s (small & medium businesses). Content, of course, is the same!].

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

This has obviously occurred in battles with tech platforms like Yelp vs. Google or Zynga vs. Facebook). As always this battle is settled by the degree to which a consumer has a strong preference for a company’s product vs the substitute products it may choose instead.

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sustainability communities media disruption 296

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

But alas I must scale with businesses and make money. You transition from “startup” to real business and it turns out that having an entire team be efficient is more important than that boundless energy but destructive nature of constantly changing direction from the CEO. And so must you.

board 338

board energy financing finance 338

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 14, 2015

Some smart people whom I like & respect started to weigh in publicly. As a business – no. I built it on a platform given to me for free by a company that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars of which I receive value. The energy was election so I’m going to do it again this coming week.

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energy networking VC innovation 325

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

awards dinner on Thursday night I started reflected on what it would take to “change the trajectory&# for Seattle or for any regional market, really. And I think about the “Seattle issue&# as a metaphor for startups and business in general. I will start recruiting soon. Are you going to do all of this?

communities 317

communities VC innovation entrepreneurs 317

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 18, 2013

I have started thinking about what the future might look like and I’ve started imagining what I call, “MMOV” or massive multiplayer online video. Global audiences of prosumer video producers will create content that is viewed by global audiences in numbers far in excess of traditional TV. Why would it? billion views.

peer-to-peer 380

peer-to-peer media creativity disruption 380

This is going to be BIG.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

A lot of people ask me what I think of posting to Twitter these days… (I’ll start calling it X as soon as I learn to stop saying Battery Tunnel and Triborough Bridge). That’s a complex question that should start with answering the following questions: What formats will you enjoy creating for the most? Audio/video vs writing?

peer-to-peer 344

peer-to-peer board communities leadership 344

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

It is the second largest city in the country with (18 million inhabitants) (vs. When you’re one fund and have $600 million to invest it’s easier to take that kind of risk. Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. Los Angeles.

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VC venture capital media culture 313

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

To grow faster businesses need resources in today’s financial period to fund growth that may not come for 6 months to a year. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months.

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startup VC investment investing 418

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

He started his career as a lawyer (he even clerked for a supreme court justice!) This probably wasn’t a fun period of time for a new VC but nonetheless probably made Mike stronger than having started in 1997. But you can see & hear the entire interview well and I think it will be well worth your while.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2015

We are experiencing a frenetic time. I rarely talk to any startup entrepreneur or VC who doesn’t feel it and somehow long for simpler times despite the benefits we all enjoy from increased enthusiasm for our sector. For entrepreneurs there’s too much money sloshing around. The world seems to be spinning just a bit too fast these days.

advice 398

advice VC entrepreneurs transportation 398

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

So when Google started pushing AdSense (ads for affiliate or 3rd party sites) they had a HUGE cost advantage. So when Google started pushing AdSense (ads for affiliate or 3rd party sites) they had a HUGE cost advantage. They were able to “buy&# the affiliate business because they had the Google.com cash cow.

venture capital 271

venture capital capital ventures VC 271

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Commitment & urgency are key drivers of success in startup businesses. 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. Is it 4/1,000?

startup 346

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

Revolution is a “stage agnostic&# fund (means they invest early or late) funded entirely by Steve Case , the founder of AOL and co-founded by two other individuals, Tige Savage (yes, pronounced like the golfer, minus the “r&# ) and Donn Davis. We are a venture capital growth equity fund in Washington DC with about $500m invested.

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founder venture capital media strategy 277

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 8, 2016

Much has changed in the past four months of the technology startup world and how outsiders value the business. And when prices are dropping on a VCs existing companies in market, there is a substantial reduction in FOMO (fear of missing out) for new deals, which means that investors take their time in making investment decisions.

startup 269

startup VC financing finance 269

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2011

NDAs would make it impossible to do business. In the video I describe how to best play this meeting and why, without a champion going into the meeting, you’re unlikely to get an investment. A summary of what we discussed is below: Not 100% in order of the video, but close. Will a VC sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement)?

VC 340

VC venture capital leadership pitching 340

Entrepreneurs' Organization

APRIL 30, 2021

After his recent blog post addressing why it’s in your best interest to ignore SEO , we asked Ben about the importance of return on investment when it comes to marketing. Here’s what he shared: I was recently chatting to a good friend who runs a successful plumbing business. What started as a 400% ROI is actually 80% ROI.

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investment investing finance financing 235

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 30, 2018

If you’re talking with a typical Seed/A/B round firm they often have ownership targets in the company in which they invest. Since they have limited capital and limited time availability they often try to make concentrated investments across companies in which they have the highest conviction. So why does a VC ask you?

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Entrepreneurs' Organization

APRIL 2, 2021

Contributed By Susan Michel, EO New Jersey member and founder and CEO of Glen Eagle Advisors , which provides investment management and financial planning advice. You want to be a responsible parent and raise financially literate children, but where do you start? Raising kids in an entrepreneurial family comes with challenges.

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education board financing finance 196

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 14, 2019

And it turns out that the Whaling industry in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries looked remarkably similar to today’s venture capital business. So I got it on my Kindle and the first chapter is all about the Whaling industry and its similarities to the VC business. They might be rare, but they are not fictional.

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venture capital VC ventures capital 210

Dream It

APRIL 12, 2020

Martino founded Bullpen in 2010 with a focus on post-seed, pre-Series A startups, and he led the fund’s investments in companies like FanDuel, Namely, Ipsy, SpotHero, Classy, and Airmap. This geographic distinction is now less about actual geography and more about mentality and style of investing of these types of firms.

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ventures startup capital board 334

Entrepreneurs' Organization

FEBRUARY 11, 2024

It’s critical to business. “Without happy people, we don’t have happy clients, and without happy clients there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company,” says Lee Deas, Founder of Obviouslee , a marketing and design agency. We build trust by transparency and bringing people along with us vs. dictating from above.”

creativity 217

creativity culture leadership collaboration 217

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2013

Teams usually start with terminology that is very insular and less relevant to customers. I call this George Bush vs. Al Gore. In my first enterprise software company we developed a methodology for sales that we called PUCCKA , which I wrote about previously. The first post covered the topic of “P” or pain. by your customers.

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advice opportunity development investing 336

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

No, seriously—that’s the perk of running your own business. Investors are going to want their investment dollars to be going towards growth than going directly into your pocket—but what does that mean for how much you can actually pay yourself. The answer is easier than you thought: Anything you want. You select your salary.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

I’m very pleased today to announce that I invested, on behalf of GRP Partners, in Burstly alongside Rincon Venture Partners , an early stage VC in Southern California whith whom we love to work (and were our co-investors on RingRevenue ). Naturally I’m excited about this investment or I wouldn’t have done it.

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