InfoChachkie

NOVEMBER 23, 2015

VC's love to talk about their successes. Yet most VC's bury their failures under six feet of denial. This latest round valued the company in excess of a billion dollars, entering them into the overly-hyped Unicorn Club. In retrospect, our decision was both perfectly rational and completely lame. What’s The Worst Mistake?

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Technical Review Software Review Southern California 100

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

70–80% of the costs of most startups are employee costs so what you’re really talking about when a company is unprofitable is that they are growing their staff ahead of their revenue. Are you looking to potentially sell the company in the next year or two? Do you plan to run this as a smaller business but maintain healthy profits?

Startup 227

Startup Venture Capital Sales Course 227

Berkonomics

DECEMBER 17, 2020

There is an exemption from the requirements that these investors be accredited with net worth or income minimums to qualify legally to invest in your company. If you have a virtual company with your employees working from home locations, as many startups do, it should be the location of the founder. Accelerators.

Equity 156

Equity Technical Review Class Organization 156

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2018

When you raise money from investors you produce information that you are told they want and care about: A fund-raising deck that articulates your company strategy, plans, team, market, competitors and so forth. So what does a VC do when he or she isn’t ready to say “no” or perhaps might like to talk with you in a year but not now?

Funding 336

Funding Venture Capital Startup Email 336

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!” Exec Summary: Most companies (98+%) in the world (even tech startups) should be very profit focused. One of them is profitability.

Startup 418

Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

And she didn’t start her company in Northern California. Tracy built her company, Recycled Media , out of necessity. She hasn’t raised any venture capital. She drove her company to profitability before paying herself a modest salary. She put all of her savings into her company.

Startup 363

Startup Entrepreneur SEO Venture Capital 363

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2011

This is a blog post I really didn’t want to write. I didn’t want to write it because I have mixed feelings about AngelList. I didn’t want to write it because the bloggosphere doesn’t always do nuance well. So why I am writing it then? That’s less interesting for me as a VC.

Venture Capital 267

Venture Capital Writing Blogging Startup 267

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

Having street smarts with no inspirational ability to build teams can yield a great small business but will be difficult to scale into a large VC-backed business. So we as VCs search for entrepreneurs/founders who have the whole package or as much of it as possible. In the book they profile how VC worked in the early days (60s / 70s).

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur Startup Venture Capital CTO Hire 293

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 17, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC “ There’s a great meme developing this morning on the need to simplify funding terms and documents. 2006 was the last time I went out to raise venture capital. This was pre Venture Hacks so not a lot of help on terms on the Net.

Funding 252

Funding Venture Capital Startup Blogging 252

socalTECH

MARCH 16, 2017

Earlier this week, Derek Norton , a long time advisor to the media, Internet, and technology industry in Los Angeles, announced a brand new venture capital fund called Watertower Ventures (www.watertowerventures.com). I hate to put us into the pre-seed and seed area, so I am saying literally, first institutional capital.

Invest 145

Invest Funding Capital Startup 145

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 22, 2012

Usually it’s on behalf of a portfolio company. After all, if your VCs won’t help you get access to potential buyers or business development partners – what will they do? But the reality is that unfiltered intros just create work for the VC. Companies are always looking for highly qualified talent.

Email 359

Email Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 359

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. 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.

Startup 311

Startup Sales Venture Capital Entrepreneur 311

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 10, 2015

As I write these words I already imagine my next deposition in which I’m asked to read this out loud. The simple point is that if you control 51% of your company and/or the voting rights you can avoid a lot of headache and you can still be very generous with early people who join your mission. *. Lawsuits. He sued anyways.

Startup 150

Startup IP Writing Ideas 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

I didn’t mean to be so insulting and I didn’t mean for the net to be cast so wide that many people wondered whether I was talking about them when I was speaking of “job hoppers.&# I learned a lot from reading the comments. No rule is ever absolute no matter how it sounds when one writes a blog.

Startup 285

Startup Venture Capital Sales Software Review 285

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 19, 2011

And yes, VC’s, too. That said, there are times where you need to cast a wider net. I want to judge whether they’re really committed to my company or not. By everybody I mean your lawyers, theirs and the VCs or whoever the client is (maybe a company acquiring you). Recruiters. Real Estate professionals.

Venture Capital 319

Venture Capital Pricing Startup Outsource 319

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 10, 2011

some fun, big tech issues like privacy, net neutrality, location-based services and real-time data. A very big thanks to Alexandra Harris, the founder of FanCause , a company that aims to connect entertainment brands with their fans to raise money. lessons learned from his days as an entrepreneur. Sounds like a noble cause.

Angel 302

Angel Startup Ideas .Net 302

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward. These are all creative processes.

Writing 356

Writing Startup Ideas Summary 356

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

In more than a decade of writing about the Internet and tech-enabled businesses I’ve learned that mobs don’t do nuance well. When you achieve economies-of-scale advantages it doesn’t benefit you to help newer companies draft off of your infrastructure to rise and compete against you. It’s Hobbesian economics 101. Enter blockchain.

Course 280

Course Startup Framework Marketing 280

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

I’ve been meaning to write this post since September of last year when Brad Feld first wrote about the The Founders Visa Movement. I commented briefly on his blog and made a mental note to write a blog post. At the time he granted me permission to write about his story. So he decided to start his company in Canada.

Technical Review 282

Technical Review Startup High Tech Software Review 282

InfoChachkie

AUGUST 11, 2011

Messenger : Naval Ravikant, Co-Founder AngelList and Co-Maintainer Venture Hacks. Investor in Twitter, Foursquare, DISQUS, and (by Naval’s own admission) “a lot of other companies you have never heard of”. 6) Naval, why does the startup world need AngelList and Venture Hacks? . “As Former Founder Epinions.

Startup 273

Startup Software Review Summary Technical Review 273

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 2, 2016

I am not writing about this out of the blue – this seems to be the topic of the day in my social stream based on blogs written, retweets rendered and attaboys handed out. Founders start companies. These days founders often raise money with minimal time spent creating a company and often have salaries from the early days.

Startup 150

Startup Course Writing Capital 150

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 8, 2014

” in 2014 the data seems pretty conclusive because LA has now become the fastest growing tech startup region by numbers of companies being started and those of us here have noticed this pace accelerating. Given how efficient markets are when a large market like LA starts to blossom it attracts capital pretty quickly.

Entrepreneur 376

Entrepreneur Snapchat Startup Google 376

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 10, 2010

It was recommended to me by my friend, Net Jacobsson , who was trying to do some basic Life Hacking. But Net had told me that he picked up some valuable lessons from the book, so I thought, “WTF? Want to take a year pursuing your dream to write a screenplay, travel through Asia, run a triathlon or start your own fashion line?

Startup 295

Startup Email Technical Review Course 295

socalTECH

JULY 13, 2009

The company was founded by the head of the North America investments for Carrefour, the second largest retailer in the world, the head of the retail banking practice at DLJ, the investment bank. The new fund is focused entirely on technology companies. Those companies are doing phenomenally well, and in a normal market was IPO.

GRP Partners 157

GRP Partners Southern California Santa Barbara Rustic Canyon 157

InfoChachkie

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

I taught a somewhat crazy course about writing and deploying a scalable website in Ruby on Rails and deploying it in EC2. That led us to venture capital as opposed to trying to bootstrap ourselves. But throughout the transition I had my safety net. The term ‘cloud computing’ only caught on much later.

Cloud Computing 188

Cloud Computing Santa Barbara EC2 Startup 188

Tech Zulu Event

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

Entrepreneurs are everywhere and capital isn’t. We get a lot more emails from women entrepreneurs who say they are a high net worth in their community and we should come and help boost the number of angel investors in their companies. We are creating even more capital than the initial group commitment.

Mentor 84

Mentor Invest Entrepreneur Startup 84

SoCal CTO

MARCH 22, 2007

I am in the middle of writing up some of my thoughts on this and will post about it and let you know. I have to say that it has netted far more than I would have thought. . * Im constantly frustrated by conversations that take place in discussion groups that cant cross the border into the blog world. And, I dont like to copy and paste.

Blogging 150

Blogging CTO Coach CTO Hire Southern California 150