Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

I’ve heard a lot of people question whether there is too much money in venture capital chasing too few great deals. Others believe that new business models are emerging that could replace venture capital all together. Taken together these “mega rounds” represent nearly half of the funding in 2018. We’re in a new tech bubble!”

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Venture Capital Capital Startup Funding 292

socalTECH

OCTOBER 11, 2018

This morning, Moonshots Capital (www.moonshotscapital.com), led by Kelly Perdew and Craig Cummings , announced its first formal fund, a $19M seed stage fund. We had been doing that for several years, and decided we wanted to start syndicating deals in September of 2014, so we formed Moonshots Capital.

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Capital Funding Startup Venture Capital 164

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

At our mid-year offsite our partnership at Upfront Ventures was discussing what the future of venture capital and the startup ecosystem looked like. Should SaaS companies trade at a 24x Enterprise Value (EV) to Next Twelve Month (NTM) Revenue multiple as they did in November 2021? But rest assured valuations get reset.

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Venture Capital Marketing Technical Review Seed Funding 416

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 5, 2023

It’s helpful to think of startups as proceeding through several stages, which I have defined a long time ago from a funding perspective. The first step toward a business with any idea is to write it down, and build a business plan around it. Funding or rollout stage. Growth and exit stage.

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Startup Funding Organization Incubator 122

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

how on Earth could the venture capital market stand still? One of the most common questions I’m asked by people intrigued by but also scared by venture capital and technology markets is some variant of, “Aren’t technology markets way overvalued? With the enormous changes to our economies and financial markets?—?how Of course we can’t.

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Venture Capital Writing Invest Pricing 471

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2017

I am so proud and humbled to be able to formally announce that Upfront Ventures has raised its 6th venture capital fund in the past 21 years. Upfront VI is our latest core fund and is $400 million to invest in early stage entrepreneurs. This brings our combined funds under management to nearly $2 billion.

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Funding Venture Capital Santa Monica Invest 287

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 11, 2022

Something happened in the past 7 years in the startup and venture capital world that I hadn’t experienced since the late 90’s — we all began praying to the God of Valuation. How might our next phase of the journey seem brighter, even with more uncertain days for startups and capital markets? What happened?

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Venture Capital Startup LAMP Marketing 466

TechCrunch LA

JULY 19, 2022

Josh Kaplan and Dee Murthy, both founder and co-CEO of the Los Angeles–based company, started Ghost in 2021 after previously working together at Four Five Group, a men’s apparel business. million in new funding for its predictive inventory recommendation platform, joining other similar companies, including Zippedi and Inventa.

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Product Funding Technical Review Equity 191

socalTECH

MAY 25, 2016

Santa Monica-based March Capital Partners (www.marchcp.com) has just announced a brand new, $240M venture investment fund, led by longtime venture investing veterans Jim Armstrong, Sumant Mandal, Gregory Milken and Jamie Montgomery. What is the investment focus for this fund?

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Southern California Capital Funding Invest 113

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 11, 2020

Yeah, Valence announced > $5 million in funding led by GGV and Upfront. It is a company with a mission to create better access and more funding for Black entrepreneurs and executives. Announced their Series A funding round , which Upfront participated in and which was led by Hans Tung from GGV. Really, truly.

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Funding Venture Capital Entrepreneur Networking 314

TechCrunch LA

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Riot Ventures , the Los Angeles-based, early-stage and deep technology investment firm is going out to market to raise a $75 million second fund to finance the development of startups in LA and beyond, according to fundraising documents viewed by TechCrunch. Marcus has a long background in angel investing and company creation.

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Los Angeles Artificial Inteligence Invest Angel 126

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 6, 2018

Fund raising. But it’s critical for your business, for you as a leader and people who excel at fund raising have an extreme advantage over those who do not. As a VC I also have to fund raise every three years and these posts 100% apply to VCs raising money, too. It definitely has a “d” in it, as in it’s really not fun, raising.

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Funding Venture Capital Startup Entrepreneur 236

TechCrunch LA

JULY 2, 2020

When it comes to venture capital, Los Angeles is a city on the rise. In the past year, it’s seen one of the most profitable venture-backed exits of any tech ecosystem (with the $4 billion sale of Honey to PayPal) and investors are minting billion-dollar companies in the region at a torrid pace. Will Hsu, Mucker Capital.

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Los Angeles Venture Capital Capital Invest 277

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

But what IS the right amount of burn for a company? Burn rate in case you don’t know is the amount of money a company is either spending (gross) or losing (net) per month. (it Conversely if you’re burning $600,000 per month (yes, some companies do) then you only have 5 months of cash left. Gross Burn vs. Net Burn.

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Startup Company Companies .Net 383

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2016

At the Upfront Summit in early February, we had a chance to have many off-the-record conversations with Limited Partners (LPs) who fund Venture Capital (VC) funds about their views of the market. In fact, if you add the capital flows of the past ten years, there have been just shy of $50 billion in net cash outlays.

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Venture Capital Capital Marketing Seed Funding 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

Seed investments are down by any measure (funds, deals, dollars) over the past 3 years in deals < $1 million AND in deals between $1–5 million. Over the past month a colleague ( Chang Xu ) and I sifted through data on the venture capital industry (as we do every year) and made a bunch of calls to VCs and LPs to confirm our hypotheses.

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Venture Capital Invest Seed Funding Startup 328

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2011

Yesterday I wrote Part 1 of the series on the changes to the software industry over the past decade that has led to changes in the venture capital industry itself. It’s one thing to invest in a later-stage (say a C round) to help with growth, it’s another to fund companies who are already valued in the billions.

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Venture Capital Capital Software Startup 296

socalTECH

MARCH 28, 2019

The summit is now associated with March Capital Partners (www.marchcp.com). What's your role at March Capital? Meredith Finn: I joined March Capital at the beginning of the year. How did you end up joining March Capital? That carried through to March, where the big theme is Artificial Intelligence in the enterprise.

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Capital Entrepreneur Invest Artificial Inteligence 162

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2011

If you read this blog often you'll know that I'm a huge fan of First Round Capital. One example is that they introduced a program where their founders can pool together shares from their company and exchange them for a small portfolio of other First Round Capital companies. In 2008 they raised a much larger fund $132.5

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Capital Venture Capital Technical Review Startup 284

TechCrunch LA

JUNE 9, 2021

Even as NFT sales dip below their most speculative highs, startups aiming to tap into their potential are still scoring big funding rounds from investors who believe there’s much more to crypto collectibles than the past few months of hype. The startup has raised a whopping $120 million to date.

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Platform Framework Los Angeles Design 308

socalTECH

OCTOBER 19, 2009

He recently landed a round of funding, and shares his experience here: Before you start bitching about investors not writing checks in this economy let me just say this  bullshit. I just finished our capital raise for our new company, Affordit.com and can tell you first hand that I've never seen more people eager to write checks.

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Writing Santa Monica Venture Capital Entrepreneur 100

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 18, 2017

Union Square Ventures (USV) has been one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past 10–15 years and continues to be a leader in our industry. Lindel is no stranger to thorny venture capital issues — he was arguably amongst the most successful LPs of his generation.

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Venture Capital Funding Capital Startup 161

TechCrunch LA

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

The Facebook parent-company saw its stock price get bludgeoned after a bad earnings report showcased that Apple’s ad-blocking changes are shaving billions off its books and the company’s crown jewel — the Facebook platform — has stopped growing and actually shrank this quarter.

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Marketing Newsletter Technical Review News 246

socalTECH

JANUARY 8, 2020

in a funding round, according to the company. The funding was led by Switch Ventures, and also included Bessemer Venture Partners, Toba Capital, plus Gerald Risk, Peter Kelly, Jonathan Erlich, and Blaine Vess. The company is led by CEO Malte Kramer. READ MORE>>.

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Services Marketing SEO Writing 100

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 21, 2010

In writing anything positive about any of the companies I’m not suggesting that it means that I prefer them to any of their competitors. I just cover the companies that were funded that week. Also, some of the deals I write about I have actually seen as part of their fund raising process. Really!).

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Venture Capital Capital Email Blogging 265

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 20, 2015

VC funding. We love capital efficiency until we love land grabs until we abhor over funding until we get huge payouts and ring the bell for more funding until we attract every non-VC on the planet to invest in startups until it crashes and we start the cycle all over again none the wiser. We’ll see in time.

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Funding Venture Capital Startup Marketing 150

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. The rise of “micro VCs” or seed-stage funds. The rise of alternative sources of capital (crowd funding and the like). ” Stated simply – if you seed funded Uber at $4.5m

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Venture Capital Technical Review Startup Seed Funding 398

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. I always tell founders … “An investors job is to deploy capital and make a return. an investment in your company. This is where most founders err.

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Venture Capital Funding Startup Sales 332

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2010

We received so much positive feedback from our This Week in Venture Capital show walking through valuation calculations & term sheets that we decided to do a Q&A show this week to address topics that entrepreneurs want to learn about. I explain in the video what happened in my first company (e.g. This is minutes 8-11.

Venture Capital 282

Venture Capital Capital Startup Pricing 282

socalTECH

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Scripted.com , which operates an online marketplace for professionally written content--which was originally backed by LA investors--has raised $9M more in a funding. The new funding came from Crosslink Capital and Redpoint Ventures, and also included angels Gil Penchina, Auren Hoffman (LiveRamp) and Justin Moore (Axcient).

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UCLA Claremont Redpoint USC 124

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2011

Back to regular writing this week so check back in. if you get some value out of the notes consider checking out his company or Twitter feed). Yes an online video startup in ‘99 that helped large media companies encode and distribute their videos through portals. He was introduced through mutual friends to Highland Capital.

Capital 265

Capital Venture Capital Veoh Startup 265

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

There is much discussion online and also in small, private groups, about why the price of technology companies – public and private – are falling. Valuing any company can be difficult because it requires a degree of forecasting future growth & competition and ultimately the profits of the organization.

Startup 150

Startup Company Companies Venture Capital 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 18, 2016

We try to look at the sources of capital, the valuations, exits and trends. We use this try to draw some context that informs our funding decisions. Of course we fund companies in good markets and bad. If people think we’re full of s**t we certainly hear so right away if we say something stupid!

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Funding Venture Capital Marketing Writing 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2010

This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital. I’m writing this series because if you better understand how VC firms work you can better target which firms make sense for you to speak with. VC’s often talk about this term as in the total amount of funds EVER raised by that VC. What is a VC fund?

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Venture Capital Funding Invest GRP Partners 269

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 24, 2014

As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. That company was Invoca, which just announced a $20 million fund raise led by Accel. Lemons ripen early, great companies take time.” 5 years ago. ” Still. Sourcing high-quality leads : 9/10.

Venture Capital 387

Venture Capital Downey Writing Press 387

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 28, 2018

It’s helpful to think of startups as proceeding through several stages, which I have defined some time ago from a funding perspective. The first step toward a business with any idea is to write it down, and build a business plan around it. Funding or rollout stage. Growth and exit stage.

Funding 94

Funding Startup Organization Incubator 94

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Just as I was getting the swing of things the world shifted beneath my feet and the stock market went into a free fall and venture capital all but shut down for nearly a year. We not only have our Series A funds that can write $500k?—?$15 15 million first checks but we also have three growth funds. $15

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Venture Capital IP Startup Google 223