Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 20, 2020

Yet as I mentor entrepreneurs around the country, it still seems to be one of the least understood approaches to startup funding, with more myths than accredited angels and professional venture capital investors combined. With this model, a startup pre-sells their product early, at a cheaper price, in exchange for a pledge.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 18, 2016

As an entrepreneur looking for professional investors, one of the quickest ways to lose credibility and get rejected is to start with a ridiculously high pre-money valuation. It’s like trying to sell a home still being built at next year’s dream market price. Relate your startup to similar startups funded with a higher valuation.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

million in funding on TechCrunch led by Harmony Partners and Upfront Ventures to double its footprint of 3 cities (New York, Chicago & Washington DC) to 6 in 2016. They have high-priced property and zero innovation. They had instilled in me a discipline that few well-funded but inexperienced startups have. Little old us.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 14, 2016

Based on some good estimates of how many new ventures have been started in the last five years, the statistical odds of any individual startup making it to this level are less than one in a million. But, of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Don’t be afraid to give up equity to get a small share of a very large pot.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

After listening to hundreds of startup pitches, and reading even more business plans, most new venture investors develop their own favorite list of “red flags” that signal the beginning of the end of their interest. Of course, customers love free, but investors hate it. Sleeping giants do wake up.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 24, 2016

Every entrepreneur I know starts out with a strong conviction that their solution is a perfect match for their target market, and yet almost every one later admits a need to “pivot” before finding their groove. Course corrections, or pivots, are normal for new ventures, so expect them and don’t make excuses.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 14, 2014

Of course that website isn’t completely up to date but it’s a great resource for seeing the overall picture. Of course unsolicited spam has very low open rates and is filtered by the major providers. But let me start with some data. That number is projected to GROW to 70 billion by 2016 (Source: BIA Kelsey).

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 8, 2016

As a startup advisor and investor, I find that more and more entrepreneurs avoid using the term “profit” in pitching their new venture. Of course, I understand and don’t condone bad actors who get greedy, and exploit ways to unjustly squeeze customers and employees. Without profit there is no business.

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Xconomy

SEPTEMBER 9, 2016

The Obama administration wants to speed up cancer research with its “Cancer Moonshot” program—packing 10 years’ worth of work on prevention and treatment programs into five is one of its rallying cries. — David Shaywitz (@DShaywitz) September 9, 2016. There are policy issues.

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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. Of course it’s too early to predict whether this is a trend or an aberration but the smartest people I know in the industry are predicting the former. Why does this matter? So here’s my take away.

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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. Most are sitting on large portfolios of private companies that are raising money now or will need to do so in the future and they know that they’re up against some headwinds.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2016

But the story started more than 6 months ago. We started planning our fund raising as much as 14 months ago. Many had started IPO’ing and we started to think about our future. Jason himself had enjoyed “the art of the start” as I think Guy Kawasaki once coined. September started easily enough.

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Xconomy

AUGUST 12, 2016

Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research founding director Tyler Jacks has spent decades making important contributions in cancer research, but until forming Cambridge, MA-based Dragonfly Therapeutics, he’d never spun a startup out of his own lab at MIT.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2016

The funding environment for tech startups is an ever shifting ground as we go through predictable shifts that go hand-in-hand with the slowing of the overall market. In other words, it isn’t that VCs suddenly got smart, it’s that the costs of starting a company went down dramatically. Boom in Number of Startups. Rise of Angels.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 18, 2015

Fast forward 3 years and looking out into the 2016 horizon, what do I see? “Trade in an asset at a price that strongly deviates from an asset’s intrinsic value” The arguments against that, “This time the startups have real revenues!” Final venture outlook 2016 from Mark Suster.

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