Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2010

I’m often asked by people, “how do I get into VC?&# Well, I know 3-4 VC jobs that are publicly available. If you worked for firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs, Google and the like you’re probably more likely to rise to the top of the stack. Plus, show my you can write! Are we elitist?

Venture Capital 290

Venture Capital Technical Review GRP Partners Email 290

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2011

I took the opportunity this past week to publish summary notes of some of the VCs and entrepreneurs I had interviewed on This Week in VC. Back to regular writing this week so check back in. What did you do before VC and how did that lead you to VC? (1:00 How did you get into VC? (9:30 Thank you. (if

Capital 265

Capital Venture Capital Veoh Startup 265

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. As a VC you want to feel like you have “proprietary sources” of deal flow. I tapped my friends at big tech companies (Salesforce, Google, Oracle). It makes it extraordinarily hard to raise the next round of capital. What stage?

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Startup Pricing Invest 347

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 12, 2014

Prorata investments rights given investors the right to invest in your future fund-raising rounds and maintain their ownership % in your company as your company grows and raises more capital. Put simply – if you invested early in Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. ” Some do, some don’t. Thus begins the dance.

Guide 336

Guide Venture Capital Startup Writing 336

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

But VC is like congress. In the original version of his post, Andy writes. “This essay is dedicated to the great VC’s on my board who I am lucky to work with: Sameer Gandhi from Accel, Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed, and Kirsten Green from Forerunner. . Their data looks at tech VCs. Because they know him or her.

Venture Capital 374

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Invest Funding 374

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

He writes with a great perspective and is well worth reading. I came across this blog post about getting a computer science degree as the best degree for getting into venture capital or working at a VC-backed start up. I just completed an exercise where I went out to hire a new associate for my VC firm, GRP Partners.

Startup 337

Startup Venture Capital Study Course 337

InfoChachkie

NOVEMBER 23, 2015

VC's love to talk about their successes. Yet most VC's bury their failures under six feet of denial. In the startup world, the former happens when a VC makes a bad investment, and the latter occurs when they miss a great opportunity. In retrospect, our decision was both perfectly rational and completely lame. > -jeff.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Technical Review Software Review Southern California 100

Both Sides of the Table

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.” My job as a VC isn’t to beat myself up or any other partner up for the one deal we didn’t do. Mostly kidding.

Snapchat 214

Snapchat Invest Technical Review Dollar Shave Club 214

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 29, 2014

They get pissed off if a senior executive at Google doesn’t take a meeting with them, if people are late to their meetings or if they have emails that are unreturned. I wrote an example of why this matters when meeting VCs but it’s true of all exec. You need to know how to write good & action oriented emails.

Venture Capital 389

Venture Capital Email Startup Conference 389

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This is part of my series on Raising Venture Capital. Many businesses that pitch to me have White Elephant issues and I’d like to tell you how to deal with these when you’re raising venture capital. But the VC is thinking about the issue whether you address it or not. Deal with your White Elephants.

Venture Capital 264

Venture Capital Startup Training Sales 264

TechCrunch LA

MARCH 8, 2019

Warren’s plan called for regulators to be appointed to oversee the unwinding of several acquisitions that were critical to the development of the core technology that make Alphabet’s Google and the social media giant Facebook so profitable… and Zappos. In this case the barrier would be reduced access to capital.

Technical Review 144

Technical Review Startup Chief Technology Officer Social Media 144

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. We can now write $20M, $25M, and $30M checks to existing, breakout companies in our portfolio.

Southern California 113

Southern California Capital Funding Invest 113

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 14, 2014

In fact 61% of all mobile searches where a customer contacts a business it is via a phone call (source: Google). It’s why the first company I ever invested in as a VC – Invoca – just announced a $20 million funding by Accel Partners. Google knows it. The quote comes from Google. THE FULL STORY.

Email 339

Email SaaS Venture Capital Google 339

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2010

This is where VC comes in and why it’s needed in the industry no matter how much populist sentiment exists against the VC industry. In the latter cases many companies (Flickr, Delicious, Blogger, Writely in 05-08 and lately Invite Media, Aardvark, Dodgeball, etc.) got picked up early without raising a lot of VC.

Invest 284

Invest Angel Venture Capital Startup 284

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2010

This is part of my ongoing series on Raising Venture Capital. Recently I’ve been debating with a number of young startup companies that are raising money in the next few months, “what is the right about of capital to raise at a startup?&#. Google suddenly makes your product category free). -

Startup 319

Startup Venture Capital Capital Competition 319

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 8, 2014

Given how efficient markets are when a large market like LA starts to blossom it attracts capital pretty quickly. billion in venture capital to LA’s technology startups and 2014 will shatter that figure. The patents Overture held became known in small circles as Google’s ’361 problem as outlined here.

Entrepreneur 376

Entrepreneur Snapchat Startup Google 376

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

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel. There are real changes in the venture capital industry and it would have been fun to talk about them. The VC industry is segmenting – I have spoken about this many times before. So in the past we needed VC to really get a startup going.

Venture Capital 308

Venture Capital Training Startup Entrepreneur 308

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 25, 2010

“Yes&# was given to me by one of my favorite angel investor / seed VC’s to work with – John Greathouse of Rincon Venture Partners and author of the blog InfoChachkie that you should check out because it is filled with great info from a guy who has been a very successful operator. You should, too.

Guide 293

Guide Funding Venture Capital Technical Review 293

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

She hasn’t raised any venture capital. It represents the great majority of entrepreneurship and eschews the fairytale rags-to-VC-riches stories we so often read about in the press. I blog on entrepreneurship & VC precisely because entrepreneurs and other VCs are my customers. That may soon change.

Startup 363

Startup Entrepreneur SEO Venture Capital 363

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 1, 2011

I think that’s the beauty of both capitalism and innovation. Would Google have become today’s juggernaut without Yahoo! What if Google had paid attention to Dodgeball – would there be no FourSquare today? I hope to offer experiences from being an entrepreneur and being a VC.&#. So which is it?

Startup 391

Startup Blogging Venture Capital Writing 391

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2013

For the past 5 years or so Google, Facebook and a handful of tech industry giants have been quietly buying scores of early-stage startups for their talent. Almost certainly the startup would have raised some capital. You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! Acquihires and Venture Capital. I’m a VC.

Press 357

Press Startup Yahoo Venture Capital 357

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

And any even casual follower of the tech industry knows that Google Plus has been criticized for cracking down on anybody who wasn’t a “real person.” Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Quora, Tumblr. Where you can talk about topics that it might not be appropriate for a VC to discuss in writing.

Social Network 329

Social Network Startup Blogging Venture Capital 329

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2012

I recommend that you start by writing down the attributes you would want people to think about when they think about your brand. The birthplace of sponsored search (Overture), semantic search (Applied Semantics which became Google AdSense), comparison shopping (ShopZilla, PriceGrabber) and many others. Think about venture capital.

Startup 304

Startup Venture Capital Los Angeles Woodland Hills 304

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 14, 2012

…” I’ll write soon on my views of why I believe Instagram took off as a social network and what I think comes next. 99.9999% of you won’t be contemplating raising capital at $500 million any time soon or selling for a billion. My friend Christin Herron of Intel Capital weighed in on the issue.

Venture Capital 316

Venture Capital Pricing Social Network Acquisition 316

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!” Have easy access to capital by investors who are committed to building businesses at Interent scale. One of them is profitability.

Startup 418

Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. As a VC you want to feel like you have “proprietary sources” of deal flow. I tapped my friends at big tech companies (Salesforce, Google, Oracle). They are venture bankers not investment bankers. What stage? What price?

Startup 361

Startup Venture Capital Pricing Technical Review 361

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

You join teams that got good write-ups on TechCrunch, have great VCs, have star CEO’s, whatever. In fact, just a short Google search reveals that I’ve referred to him frequently through the years. Writing a book will be fun. You hire people who look good on paper. After 6 months – you know.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Startup CTO Coach Venture Capital 320

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

They have marked-up paper gains propped up by an over excited venture capital market that has validated their investments. Argument two says, “big companies can’t innovate anymore so Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Remember it was only 2008 where Microsoft and even Google were laying off employees.

Invest 299

Invest Angel Technical Review Venture Capital 299

Tech Zulu Event

DECEMBER 2, 2014

As the capital needed to start a small business continues to fall, the number of software companies being started is exploding. Now, you’re handling payroll and doing writing as well. You may even discover that you enjoy writing more than crunching numbers. Image courtesy of Refinery29 via Pinterest. Startups are hiring.

Startup 102

Startup Social Media Writing Google 102

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

The company recently raised a round of funding from Santa Barbara-based ScOps Venture Capital. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and others have had to raise tons of capital and have super-solid foundations to go with the hyper-local play. How did you connect with Kevin and ScOps Venture Capital, and why did you decide to raise a round?

Startup 113

Startup Venture Capital Beverly Hills Acquisition 113

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

This is where VC comes in and why it’s needed in the industry no matter how much populist sentiment exists agains the industry. In the latter case many companies (Flickr, Delicious, Blogger, Writely, etc.) got picked up early without raising a lot of VC. Either scenario requires angel deals to be funded further.

Invest 152

Invest Angel Venture Capital Startup 152

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

” It was meant both as a call to those writing angel checks into other people’s companies that they ought to think about putting that capital toward themselves either by becoming a startup founder or (and this was my real point) by taking an under-market salary in a company where they can learn the right skills to do it in the future.

Technical Review 150

Technical Review Startup Venture Capital IP 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

I’m not going to cover in this post the obvious post-show marketing tasks such as following up on all those business cards you grabbed, communicating with all those people who registered at your site and leveraging your new found fame to score venture capital. If you need VC, no better time than the present. Get over it.

Startup 310

Startup Press Venture Capital Journal 310

socalTECH

APRIL 8, 2014

There seems to a perpetual shortage of local venture capital investors in the region, despite the huge growth in startup activity here, particularly along Silicon Beach. We''ve also had a pretty wide range of check writing in terms of amount. Plus, there are companies like Yahoo, Google, and others who have set up shop here.

Seed Funding 220

Seed Funding Santa Monica Funding Startup 220

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2010

So it was my great pleasure to host Chamillionaire on This Week in VC this week talking marketing, entrepreneurship, old media and, of course, music. As a teenager he experimented with writing & producing his own rap music and received a lot of feedback from elders that he had a talent with words.

Entrepreneur 356

Entrepreneur Venture Capital Startup Email 356

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2013

It will affect your ability to get the right jobs and promotions as well as your ability to attract talent and capital. This started as a post in which I was going to write out tips to personal branding and became in stead an essay of my own branding journey. I talked with a few VCs and batted around the idea of becoming a VC.

Technical Advisors 385

Technical Advisors Marketing Startup Venture Capital 385