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AUGUST 26, 2019

Some Seriously Great News. No, Seriously … Exactly six years ago today I received an email from my friend Ynon Kreiz introducing me to Andrew Stalbow and Petri Järvilehto. Ynon had been the CEO of Maker Studios and I trust his opinion a great deal so of course I took the meeting. Andrew and Petri had left game developer Rovio (of Angry Birds fame) and were creating a new games company called Seriously that would combine compelling intellectual property (characters), great narratives, and fun gam

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MARCH 11, 2019

Photo by Juliette F on Unsplash Networking is a critical part of relationship building and there is no event more valuable to building relationships than the proverbial “breaking of bread” with people. I personally run many group lunches & dinners and I attend even more so I’ve developed a set of tips I often pass along in how to make these the most effective they can be.

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Networking Startup Tips Course 262

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FEBRUARY 28, 2019

Photo by Filipe Delgado from Pexels We’ve all been in meetings that get off track?—?sinking ever down the proverbial “rat hole,” from which rescue feels impossible. How does it happen? And how can you avoid it? This is part of a series on Managing Boards. In my last post I wrote about board preparation before the meeting and frankly this can be applied to any type of meeting.

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FEBRUARY 22, 2019

Should You Allow Board Observers on Your Startup Board? Photo by Antenna on Unsplash A board observer is somebody who attends your board meeting but doesn’t have a voting right. There are also certain points in a board meeting where you can ask the board observers to step out of the room unless they’ve negotiated specific rights that preclude this.

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FEBRUARY 20, 2019

One of the things that founders have the most angst about is whom they should have on their board and at what stage of the business. This is smart because amazing board members can be transformative with important advice and access and can also help attract other great board members (and team members). Bad board members can make business very unpleasant.

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MAY 24, 2018

If you’ve read any of my ongoing series on fund raising from venture capitalist (episode 1?— ?controlling your psychology ) you no doubt have heard me say that raising capital is a sales & marketing process. You company is the product and you’re selling an equity ownership in your company but much more broadly you’re selling trust & confidence that you’re going to build something enormously valuable and that you’re going to be enjoyable to work hand-in-hand with over the coming decade of

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MAY 21, 2018

I was recently with an entrepreneur and talking with him about his fund raising process. He was in a later-stage financing round and was talking with many investors. Some started asking him for very specific analyses to be completed on his data and wanted his company to crunch the numbers. I told him he shouldn’t bother and that it was likely a junior person at the firm whose job is was to find holes in the data / narrative.

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Funding Newsletter Venture Capital Email 217

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MAY 10, 2018

Whether you’re fund raising from angels, seed investors and VCs?—?as an industry we succumb to “herd mentality.” There are a few exceptions and originally thinkers but it’s maddening how much group think and need for social proof there are. Nobody commits, nobody wants to set a price, nobody wants to stick their neck out then BOOM! Reid Hoffman is in?

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Press Funding Venture Capital Technical Review 232

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MAY 7, 2018

There is an old management saying, “measure twice, cut once” which refers to the benefit of doing some planning. It’s the antithesis of “ready, fire, aim” which seems to be so prevalent in today’s society. The benefits you will receive from doing even some basic planning before you hit the fund raising trail are enormous. This post has some basic advice on how to plan your raise before you hit the road.

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Funding Startup Venture Capital News 215

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MAY 6, 2018

Fund raising. It definitely has a “d” in it, as in it’s really not fun, 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. The best entrepreneurs in our industry focus on it year-round as opposed to just once every 18 months. As a VC with scores of startups in our portfolio we have ringside seats to many, many fund raising processes plus I had to raise money across about 5 different rounds of cap

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APRIL 12, 2018

Many people will write the history on why Ring became an enormously successful company and why it became a real-world unicorn in a world when many startups are anointed that merely on paper. Since I had a ringside seat to the company before it really existed all the way through the end I thought I’d offer my version and what I think it means for our future.

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FEBRUARY 22, 2018

At the recent Upfront Summit my partner Stuart Lander had the opportunity to show some California Love and interview three of the wealthiest Bitcoin owners, each of whom were some of the earliest owners in the asset class and who haven’t sold any of their holdings. It’s an extraordinary story ranging from Jaime who studies cryptography in college to Bryan who was early in selling products on Silk Road to Steven owns 179,000 Bitcoin worth more than $2 billion.

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Class Study Product 303

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FEBRUARY 11, 2018

If a picture is worth a thousand words then you already know that Chamillionaire is having a great time with his new startup Convoz. He’s here on stage with Snoop Dogg and they had just dialed in Shaq to record a live video for his platform. It was just announced today on TechCrunch. We’ve known each other for nearly a decade and he’s been a friend, a co-investor in startups and a mentor to many startups with whom I’ve worked.

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DECEMBER 6, 2017

Time Magazine published its “person of the year” edition today and honored “the silence breakers” for speaking up and forcing our society to confront its position towards men in power exploiting their power for sexual gain. Real change is clearly needed. These brave women who have taken on personal risks and faced doubters to change the culture globally to stop sexual misconduct, harassment & gender bias deserve the recognition x1000 along with the many other women who have spoken up.

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Venture Capital Capital Course Report 254

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SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

Why the Former President of Nickelodeon Joined mitú as CEO. (Hint: 60 million US Latinos driving US growth engine) I am beyond excited to announce the Herb Scannell has agreed to move from NYC to Los Angeles to take on the role of CEO at mitú, the fast growing Latino digital media company, serving more than 100 million monthly unique viewers. Herb is a Puerto-Rican American media executive who was previously the President of Nickelodeon.

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Media Content Course Technical Review 269

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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. If you read the headlines or talk with zealous friends you may well think cryptocurrencies are either our savior from bureaucratic, ossified governments or are purely speculative Ponzi schemes. The reality is that cryptocurrencies can be both and can be liberating and corrupting at the same time.

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Course Startup Framework Marketing 280

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JULY 17, 2017

Starting back in 2015 and throughout much of 2016 people started commenting that my blog had become a lot more political. I guess I didn’t see it quite that way. My blog has always been a mixture of what was on my mind and a blend of venture, startup life, tech views and current society events that related to my interests: Venture, startup & tech.

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JUNE 25, 2017

Fresno State students receive supplies for school with help from Renaissance Scholars staff John Hunt, Jr. (left) and Kizzy Lopez (right). We’re all bombarded with social media campaigns asking for us to Tweet, share, like, change our badge, use a hashtag or generally show outrage at a topic du jour. We jump in when we feel compelled or want to support the person who enlisted us.

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APRIL 23, 2017

When you run a startup you’re always on borrowed time. You have cash in the bank, a monthly burn rate and a “cash out” date that few in the company truly comprehend. I’ve never met a founder who wasn’t acutely aware of his or her ticking time bomb and the sense that failure and humiliation is a real possibility. It’s why so few can really start a business from scratch.

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Funding Venture Capital Startup Course 238

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MARCH 12, 2017

Recently Upfront Ventures published its outlook for the technology startup world and venture capital overall titled it “ WTF Happened to Winter ?” The conclusion of our report was that winter did come, but it was mild and short. This was driven by the influx of corporate VCs, foreign VC money, sovereign wealth funds and the new war chests of VCs who raised new funds in the past 18 months.

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FEBRUARY 20, 2017

It’s easy to find yourself caught in the trap of just GSD (getting s**t done) and not stepping back to be thoughtful about whether you’d benefit from doing fewer things but doing those things truly well. It’s the parable of the tree-chopping team that is so focused on efficiency of how fast it can fell a tree that it doesn’t bother to make sure it is clearing the forest in the right direction when one person actually stops the constant cutting to climb a tree and make sure they’re cutting in the

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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. Recently the firms two founding partners (and also Managing Partners) —  Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham  — decided to transition management of the firm to Andy Weissman (who joined in 2012) and Albert Wenger (joined in 2008 and writes one of the most thoughtful blogs in our industry ).

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FEBRUARY 17, 2017

One of the most talked about Fireside Chat’s of the 2-day Upfront Summit was the talk between my friend Joe Green and Pete Buttigieg , the mayor of South Bend, Indiana aka “The Happy Warrior” currently in a bid to become the new head of the DNC ( you can learn more here ). Joe and Pete went to college together at Harvard. Joe went on to create Causes with Sean Parker, then Nation Builder, Fwd.us with Mark Zuckerberg and more recently another startup, which I’m not sure whether it’s public so I w

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Study Media Summary Press 239

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FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Every tech or major news journal in the country is preparing to write their Snap, Inc (creators of Snapchat, Spectacles, etc) stories and many of them seem to want a “How does it feel to have missed this investment story.” I won’t speak to most of them due to time and also due to the fact that I simply am not the story and don’t want to pretend like I am.

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Snapchat Invest Technical Review Dollar Shave Club 214

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FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Upfront Ventures was created 20 years ago as one of the original VC funds in Los Angeles. Back then only 15% of our dollars were invested locally whereas today 50% of our dollars are invested in LA. 10 years ago we found ourselves trying to persuade LPs and VCs that it was worth spending more time getting to know the LA market and now the most common refrain that I hear from them is “there really is something going on in LA.

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Dollar Shave Club Cornerstone OnDemand Riot Games Venture Capital 321

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FEBRUARY 7, 2017

Mark Cuban opened the Upfront Summit in an epic interview by Jason Hirschhorn , founder of Media REDEF. Machine Learning / AI They discussed many topics ranging from protection of the press to what Mark looks for in an entrepreneur to investing outside of Silicon Valley and of course Trump and sports. But perhaps to most insightful was their discussion about Machine Learning / AI.

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Artificial Inteligence Study Netflix Press 105

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FEBRUARY 6, 2017

It was only a year ago that many in the Venture Capital industry were predicting that “winter was coming” and to be fair the author of this post was chief amongst them. Yet as we enter February 2017 the VC funding markets are booming, Snap, Inc has filed for its IPO, AppDynamics was just purchased for $3.7 billion by Cisco and the only winter that can be found is at the ski resorts following California’s epic snowy and rainy January.

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DECEMBER 14, 2016

A room full of some of the top tech leaders in our country: Apple, Facebook, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Amazon, Tesla and so forth. It’s a breath of fresh air to see that Marc Benioff, who has become a beacon for protecting the rights of our most vulnerable citizens, is not in attendance. But I actually fall on the side of the issue that it’s good that our tech leaders are meeting with Trump for 2 reason: Whether I like it or not (I most certainly do not like it), Donald Trump will be

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Oracle IBM IBM Course 150

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DECEMBER 12, 2016

Today it has been announced that I’m leading a $15 million funding round in Tact , a new generation of Enterprise Software company along with other investors including Microsoft Ventures and previous investors Accel and Redpoint Rather than just waxing lyrically about how great the company is I thought I’d provide some context about why I invested and also about a fundamental change I see in the coming years in the way enterprise software is used.

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Software Mobile Artificial Inteligence Oracle 105

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NOVEMBER 6, 2016

It’s hard to feel any positives these days: We’re in the eye of the storm. We’re at peak anxiety. Maximum rancor. We’ve already blocked family members on Facebook or unfollowed obnoxious people on Twitter. We’ve scratched our heads at how one of Silicon Valley’s brightest could back a candidate so overtly racist. And we’ve pulled out our hair trying to explain how the FBI Director could have decided to weigh-in / non-weigh-in to an election 11 days before voting with what turned out to be a whol

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SEPTEMBER 17, 2016

There’s an old saying in polite circles in the United States that there are two things one should never talk about a social gatherings: Politics & Religion. I think this is so engrained in the psyche of many Americans that in times of great need many still won’t speak out publicly about what they say privately. With just over 50 days until we elect a new president of the US it’s critical for the interests of yourself and your fellow citizens that more of you speak up.

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Summary Media Technical Review Startup 150

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SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

Rolf Winkler wrote a piece in the WSJ about A16Z’s returns in which he says they “lag behind Sequoia, Benchmark and Founders Fund.” Scott Kupor of A16Z responded with a comprehensive overview of valuation methodology in a post that while accurate feels more targeted at sophisticated Limited Partners (LPs) who invest in funds. Let me offer you an insider’s take.

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Venture Capital Invest Funding Competition 264

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AUGUST 14, 2016

I love reading non-fiction as a way to challenge myself to understand topics that stretch my understanding of the world around me. I love history and biographies and even novels that are “faction.” This Summer I read “The Third Chimpanze” by Jared Diamond and since he’s my favorite history writer I of course loved it. If you haven’t read Diamond, though, I’d recommend starting with “Guns, Germs & Steel” & then “Collapse” but all three are worth reading.

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Innocal Startup Course Framework 236

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JULY 27, 2016

Density laser tracking above a doorway As I’ve written before I believe Computer Vision will become a major factor as a Human-Computer Interface (1) as sensors and cameras help us make sense of our physical world. There is so much in the media about “The Internet of Things” that it has lost meaning and for many for some strange reason it became a short-hand for wearables.

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Marketing Course Startup Organization 150

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JULY 12, 2016

Luddites. It’s a term most of you know as being somebody who is backward or uninterested in learning new technology. Actually, the Luddites were worse than this. They were a movement in England during the Industrial Revolution who had the objective of ruining machinery that was used to build products at scale. They thought factories were a threat to custom assembly of products and ultimately to the agrarian way of life (as more people were moving to urban environments).

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Resource Education Class Course 150

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JULY 10, 2016

Black lives matter. Saying it out loud is obvious. And important. Agreeing that Black lives matter does not make one anti-police — it simply acknowledges that we understand there is a white privilege in the United States that has existed since our foundation. Having grown up in the US but having lived in Europe for more than a decade gives me a unique perspective to know this problem is more pronounced in America and we have a responsibility to continue to chip away at the problem.

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Course Startup Demand USC 150

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MAY 19, 2016

I’ve spoken before about our desire at Upfront Ventures to fund really big ideas that solve hard problems, are science led and if successful will both have a positive effect on people’s lives as well as make great financial returns. We’re not Pollyannaish about this. We believe that it is incrementally harder to differentiate on simple Internet products or mobile apps and while great companies are built doing this, our goal as a fund is to try and fund things that can be 100x returns if they wor

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