Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

One of the investment themes I’ve been focused on in the past 3 years has been Performance-Based Marketing. When I started investing the US advertising market was $300 billion with only 10% of it ($30 billion) of it being online and measurable. I believe that many social networks confused this idea.

Advertising 284

Advertising Invest RSS CPC 284

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2013

” In the article I discussed the downside of raising capital at a too high of a price and referred people to a previous article I had written encouraging founders to raise “ At the Top end of Normal ” as opposed to stratospheric prices. There is an important psychology that exists in investments. A down round.

Pricing 302

Pricing Seed Funding Invest Venture Capital 302

socalTECH

OCTOBER 22, 2020

Earlier this week, Good Growth Capital (www.goodgrowthvc.com) announced it has started looking at investments in Southern California, adding Krisztina Holly as West Coast Venture Partner for the firm. What kinds of areas does the fund make investments in? We do pre-Seed to Series A deals. We discovered them very early.

Southern California 124

Southern California Capital Technical Review Startup 124

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 8, 2021

Myers, a noted career coach, and author of the classic book, “ Get The Job You Want, Even When No One’s Hiring ,” many job seekers and career changers make the mistake of halting all their efforts as summer approaches, believing that nobody will be hiring until early fall. Invest in career coaching. Tune your business fashion sense.

Tips 168

Tips Startup Coach Networking 168

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 23, 2013

But the number one reason sales stall when customers see the value in what you do is because they often don’t have a reason to buy NOW. If you’ve done a good job in the sales process you’ve already written out a needs document in which your wrote out what you believe the customer problems are with specific examples. Maybe they don’t?

Sales 328

Sales Customer Custom Examples 328

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 7, 2014

I had dinner this week with a top new customer at one of our enterprise software investments. I wish I did more enterprise software investing because when I attend meetings like this I realize that this is my core DNA – rolling out business software solutions to customers. If they want to invest that’s great.

Customer 341

Customer Custom Venture Capital Software Review 341

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 12, 2020

For example, he continues to invest in space travel and energy harvesting ( Blue Origin ), even though we haven’t yet run out of energy, and we still have space for growth. He repeatedly refers to what he calls " divinely discontented " customers. It allows investors to come into alignment with customers.

Slides 137

Slides Customer Custom Satisfaction 137

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2013

And a reminder, prospects that don’t have pain related to what you do are no longer prospects! So I often work with teams to get them to codify the key things they do well that the competition does not. You should never do this. I call the P the first rule of sales or “Why Buy Anything?”

Sales 336

Sales Startup Competition Customer 336

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 19, 2011

They’re essential in helping us get our jobs done because they specialize in something we do not. They do a routine task over-and-over again all year long that we do only periodically. “Why would I do that?&#. Middle Men. Middle People? They exist in all forms of work and life. Recruiters. You name it.

Venture Capital 319

Venture Capital Pricing Startup Outsource 319

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 31, 2020

As an angel investor in startups, I’m a believer that smart investors invest more in you as the entrepreneur than the next billion dollar solution you are pitching. Even if you don’t have previous businesses to reference, relate examples of your problem solving ability and determination in other contexts.

Entrepreneur 124

Entrepreneur Startup Examples Metrics 124

socalTECH

MARCH 16, 2017

We are going to write checks of between $100,000 and $500,000, and we are going to invest in what we are calling first institutional capital. What I am trying to do, is to build a new type of venture capital firm. We help companies do the same kind of thing, except with corporate development. We'll also do some light ad-tech.

Invest 145

Invest Funding Capital Startup 145

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 6, 2010

I wonder if more college students ought to take a journalism course for a semester or do an internship at their school newspaper in investigative reporting. doing a reference call on a prospective employee. doing a reference call on a prospective employee. I tried to do a real-time intervention.

Startup 311

Startup Invest Course Research 311

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 28, 2012

The best advice I could give you for first meetings is that you should have a limited number of discussions until you’re pretty sure that you’re likely to have positive results in fund raising and you should be open in the meetings that you do have. I personally believe it is appropriate to say. What did he do?

Technical Review 316

Technical Review Venture Capital Customer Custom 316

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2010

Chris Dixon provided some commentary on Twitter that he believes I missed “the most important point about fund size.&# He’s specifically referring to his point of view that entrepreneurs shouldn’t take seed money from “big VC’s&# (he defines them as > $100 million). And they don’t.

Venture Capital 265

Venture Capital Seed Funding Pricing Invest 265

socalTECH

JANUARY 2, 2014

But, how do you start? My co-founder also was doing his law degree at Loyola as well, which is where we met. It took a while to do market research, but we ended up starting an app for law. It''s never a great time: you figure out you have a legal problem, and need to find a lawyer. That happens in just a five minute process.

Help 240

Help Startup CTO Hire Pricing 240

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 15, 2011

And figuring out who is referring your traffic is a very important part of determining how you allocate your marketing budgets. As in they weren’t referred by anybody. But since many other websites pull in Twitter data, including links, you don’t always know who is referring the traffic to you. Terribly wrong.

Social Media 292

Social Media Google Media Marketing 292

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2016

How do you find somebody that is exceptionally bright, driven and accomplished and yet still be humble enough to understand that the founders we back are the ones who have invented technologies and have to live with the day-to-day decision-making and hard choices. This latter bit is very important to us and very hard to achieve.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Startup Invest Course 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2010

billion under management.&# I don’t really understand why VCs do this since it’s mostly a meaningless number. – I’ll do a detailed post at a later date but to make sure that everybody has a baseline understand for the more important details of this post I’ll touch on this topic here. What is a VC fund?

Venture Capital 269

Venture Capital Funding Invest GRP Partners 269

socalTECH

AUGUST 10, 2012

How do you streamline that process? A digital marketing tag is typically also referred to as a page code, which customers put on their websites when they want to deploy certain digital marketing solutions. Our customers were getting IT estimates of nine to twelve months to do that migration. Ali Benham: I believe it has.

Startup 171

Startup Marketing Customer Custom 171

InfoChachkie

MAY 7, 2012

If you are fortunate to pitch a sophisticated investor in person, assume they already believe in the veracity of your idea, the market and the underlying technological trends. As a VC, I do not care if you attended an Ivy League school, a community college or if you only have a high school degree. Grubbing For Money.

Ideas 251

Ideas Venture Capital Education Entrepreneur 251

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

If you can’t out-Amazon Amazon, then move on and do something else. Here are some ideas of what I believe matters. We seed funded a company a few years ago called Parachute Home that has grown 180% CAGR (compounded annually) and is now doing tens of millions of revenue with very little capital raised. What is it, really?

Product 296

Product Course Customer Custom 296

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 3, 2009

What is a “strategic&# investor and why do you keep putting the word “strategic&# in quotes? When people refer to a strategic investor they are usually talking about an investor that comes from the industry you serve as opposed to an independent venture capital investor. Investing is our core business.

Venture Capital 279

Venture Capital Startup Entrepreneur Framework 279

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

I’m not a big believer in too much hierarchy. But issues do arise as your company grows. It can be harder and take more time to coach your VP Marketing to get his staff doing what you think is right than just telling them yourself. I also liked to sit in on sales pipeline meetings. Senior management feels undermined.

Startup 308

Startup CTO Coach Technical Review CTO Hire 308

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 11, 2010

[if you're not old enough to get the reference between this image and the title you can click on the image for a prompter]. I recently wrote a blog post about why I believe that startup teams in close proximity perform better. We know prices of deals, compensation, who’s doing well / poorly, etc.

Startup 285

Startup Venture Capital Incubator Entrepreneur 285

InfoChachkie

AUGUST 5, 2013

The Ask: "We love what you are doing so much that we have to work with you exclusively.". Once we do that, we''ll quickly lose interest in you.". Most startups cannot afford the opportunity costs of projects that do not generate near-term revenue. Exclusivity. Exclusivity can kill a small company.

Startup 236

Startup Resource Ideas Customer 236

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2009

So what do we mean by in-stream advertising? Turns out this conversation is pretty important and what many people want to do. And at least in the case of UberTwitter I can tell you they do run their own banner ads. We’re clearly in the early stages on Twitter monetization but let me offer some views on why we find Ad.ly

Ideas 286

Ideas Advertising Google Technical Review 286

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 21, 2010

If you don’t follow the image reference above or the tag line, “ You don’t need double talk; you need Bob Loblaw “ (try saying it out loud) , and if you care! But I don’t have money to pay a fancy lawyer – I’ll just have my cousin do it - Don’t. the link is here.

Startup 318

Startup IP Southern California Entrepreneur 318

socalTECH

MAY 10, 2017

What does Work Today do? I figured if we could do it right, we could engage a broader population trying to find work. When Mucker found out about us, they invested in us, even though it was just me out there in the streets running around Home Depot, unemployment offices, and staffing companies, handing out business cards.

Startup 100

Startup Orange County Platform Capital 100

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

I recently sat down with Troy Carter to talk about what he does and why he believes it is applicable to venture capital. Troy represents what I believe the best magic of Los Angeles is – the merging together of creative talent with technical talent and he brings the lessons learned from these two fields into investments nationally.

Mentor 150

Mentor Venture Capital Marketing Product 150

socalTECH

MAY 30, 2012

If you're a startup business owner, how do you get to the next step, and build your first product? You and I live in the startup, angel, and venture capital world, but most companies have nothing to do with the traditional angel or venture capital ecosystem. We believe that there is more than one way to crowd fund a company.

Startup 223

Startup Equity Venture Capital Ideas 223

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2011

I talked about this in the TWiVC video but I didn’t do a good enough job of writing it up in the summary notes in the post. The reason I’m more nuanced is that I believe that a well-crafted Powerpoint deck can actually set some context for what you’re about to show the VC. The product feedback will be invaluable.

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital Slides Technical Advisors Startup 299

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. Last year I lost a deal in a company that I wanted to invest in and that I thought I should have won. I ask for feedback. I hate losing. I don’t want to lose next time. On Losing in VC.

Outsource Development 333

Outsource Development Software Review Technical Review News 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. Last year I lost a deal in a company that I wanted to invest in and that I thought I should have won. I ask for feedback. I hate losing. I don’t want to lose next time. On Losing in VC.

Outsource Development 328

Outsource Development Software Review Technical Review News 328

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

What do you get when you combine 7 panelist plus one moderator on to a stage for 30 minutes to talk about a serious topic? The VC industry has different segments in it that have different fund sizes, different investment amounts and different risk / return expectations. It’s just not a VC investment. Answer: Not much.

Venture Capital 308

Venture Capital Training Startup Entrepreneur 308

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 26, 2013

This is the last step of the process, where surprises in the evaluation of the management team, documentation, and personnel problems can derail the investment. Some startups do nothing to prepare for the due diligence process, assuming the people and business plan documents will speak for themselves. Personnel situation is stable.

Technical Review 97

Technical Review Startup Satisfaction Summary 97

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 11, 2015

I’ve worked very closely with Matt over the past four years as we share an investment in a company in Los Angeles called NextPlus and we sat on a board together for years. He’s had a ton of recent successes in enterprise software investments but also has a history in doing consumer deals. He’s committed.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Gogii Course Activity 150

socalTECH

AUGUST 7, 2014

We''ll do things like retouch photos for sites like HauteLook, which is now owned by Nordstrom, and Gilt Groupe. We''ll do things like retouch photos for sites like HauteLook, which is now owned by Nordstrom, and Gilt Groupe. We do a whole host of other back-office services in that space. Who are some of those companies?

Startup 231

Startup Technology Outsource Santa Monica 231