Alright, in my last post I argued that bootstrapping is just as over-rated as raising venture capital. But for those who decide to pursue fundraising, here are some things entrepreneurs should avoid when raising capital.
For all of the talk about how much excess capital there is, it’s actually hard to raise capital because very few projects fit the VC profile—even though many VC-funded… → Read More
Last week at Le Web, Alexia interviewed Sean Parker and Shervin Pishevar onstage in what turned out to be one of the most-buzzed about sessions. Here is the full video for your weekend watching pleasure. It’s a great discussion that ranges across the state of startups, venture capital, music, and politics .
Parker bemoans the surplus of venture capital for its effect of diluting the talent in… → Read More
The venture capital industry is going through a ton of disruptions lately. One of the better explanations I’ve heard recently of what is going on comes from Duncan Davidson, a managing partner at Bullpen Capital who gave a great talk on the subject at TechCrunch Tokyo last week. I interviewed him backstage on video, where he summarized his views.
Just as there are now legions of “lean startups”… → Read More
In Part III of my interview with Accel partner Jim Breyer, we get into the disruptions occurring in the venture capital industry itself with the abundance of angel money and the impact that is having on traditional VC firms. In the video interview above, I ask him whether he thinks there is a Series A Crunch. “I don’t think there is,” he states, echoing what Paul Lee has argued here before. … → Read More
In this video interview, I ask VC Jim Breyer what he thinks about the current IPO market and whether he agrees with Steve Case, who argues that we need more IPOs to create more jobs—“90% of job growth is after a company goes public.”
Breyer disagrees with Case that IPOs are the answer. At About the 2:35 mark, he says that the IPO process could be made a little bit easier, but ushering in… → Read More
A lot has been written about the Series A Crunch. The gist of the argument is that the number of seed financings have gone up (with the advent of incubators such as Y-Combinator, TechStars, and Excelerate, as well as a new generation of Super Angels, who may or may not be hanging out at Bin 38), but the number of Series A financings have remained relatively steady. Ergo, the percentage of… → Read More
As is abundantly clear from all the entrepreneurial activity on display at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing, China is growing as a startup center. In the third quarter of 2011, $1.3 billion in venture capital poured into China, up 84 percent, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.
At the same time, VC dollars slid 12 percent in Europe to almost exactly the same amount: 951 million Euros or $1.3… → Read More
At the beginning of the year, super investors Ron Conway and Yuri Milner created the controversial Start Fund to invest in every new Y Combinator startup. They offered each YC startup to graduate from Paul Graham’s rigorous selection process $150,000 in an uncapped convertible note with no discount. Some venture capitalists didn’t like the precedent this set. But at least one more big one, … → Read More
There may or may not be a cash crunch in Silicon Valley, but if you are Vinod Khosla you don’t have to worry about it. His venture firm Khosla Ventures just closed a new $1 billion fund (Khosla Ventures IV), which we first reported was in the works last May. (He raised $1.05 billion, to be exact). His portfolio is half cleantech and half Internet/mobile, and he plans on keeping it that… → Read More
Everybody knows that when you raise money at a startup your ownership percentage of the company goes down. The goal is to have the value of the startup go up by enough that you own a smaller percentage of a much larger business and therefore your total personal value goes up.
The simplest way to think about this is: If you own 20% of a $2 million company your stake is worth $400,000. If you… → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, five VCs gathered to talk about the state of investing in Silicon Valley and what skills and qualities make a successful venture capitalist. James Slavet of Greylock, Joe Kraus of Google Ventures, Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures, George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, and Rich Wong of Accel Partners each weighed in on how venture capitalists are trying to make a… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jules Maltz is a General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a late-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park. You can follow him on Twitter @julesmaltz.
Whenever I’m about to make a new investment, I always think about the 2×2 matrix I learned from Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital.
The idea is that if you make a new venture investment… → Read More
Series A financings are on the decline. They peaked at 283 in 2007 and are on pace to barely crack 100[1] this year (all data is from CrunchBase through the end of June—it is imperfect but the best I’ve got, see chart). They’ve also declined in relative terms, representing nearly 40% of all equity financings in 2006, and less than 20% year to date. I believe there are two main reasons for… → Read More
Dow Jones VentureSource released its second quarter numbers for the venture industry today, and there’s a reason they’re not dominating the headlines. They’re pretty boring: Overall investors put $8 billion into 776 deals in the US in the second quarter, a decrease of 5% in terms of invested cash and 2% in terms of deals. The median amount raised per deal was $5.2 million, up from $4.6 million a… → Read More
One of my favorite recent blog posts is Seth Godin’s “Getting funded is not the same as succeeding.” Whether or not we’re in a bubble, it’s a sign of the times that this post has to be written in the first place. As Josh Elman tweets, we’ve gone from RIP Good Times to funding a grilled cheese company in less than three years (Sequoia was involved in both interestingly). Instead… → Read More
It seems that Venture investors are none-too-happy with current IPO activity. According to a study sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association released yesterday, over 80 percent of venture capitalists from around the globe believe “that current IPO activity levels in their home countries are too low”. Low enough, in fact, that it has investors worrying over whether or not… → Read More
Over the years I’ve heard many legitimate gripes from entrepreneurs about the way venture capital firms treat them while fundraising. I must confess an imperfect record of courtesy myself, though I do try to be respectful, and to incorporate feedback. For example, I once resolved never to keep entrepreneurs waiting long for me in our lobby, and I think I live up to that.
But I often hear one… → Read More
Any seasoned investor knows that past performance is not indicative of future returns. That is as true with public stocks as it is with venture capital firms. But if someone were to ask you to rank the top VC firms today based on their probability of success, how would you do it? Remember, looking at past returns won’t help you.
Chris Farmer, a VC at General Catalyst Partners, has come up with a… → Read More
On Thursday, Raj Atluru announced that he was stepping down as a managing director with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where he served as a key cleantech investor since 2001. He will join a private equity group that invests in later-stage clean energy companies, Silver Lake Kraftwerk, which was formed earlier in 2011 by Silver Lake Partners and Soros Fund Management, led by Adam Grosser.
Atluru took… → Read More
U.S. venture capital firms raised more money last quarter than in any period since 2001. The total raised for new funds was $7.7 billion, according to Dow Jones LP Source. The capital going into VC funds was up 97 percent from a year ago, when they raised $3.9 billion. (Venture capital funds benefited from an overall influx of money into U.S. private equity funds overall, which attracted a… → Read More
I guess $1 billion under management just wasn’t enough. Andreessen Horowitz has just announced a new growth fund of $200 million. The fund with co-invest alongside the firm’s most recent $650 million fund, providing more capital for the kinds of late stage deals that have been raging in the Valley of late. (Check out our three part series on the trend here, here and here.)
That “co-invest” part… → Read More
(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series about the late stage, secondary investing craze sweeping the venture capital business. For the first two installments go here and here.)
On May 26, 2009 Mike sat down with Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and a Flipcam to talk about the then-scandalous $200 million investment DST made in Facebook, at a price that valued the company at about… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an in-depth series exploring the ramifications of the explosion of late stage capital being raised by the Valley’s elite venture firms. For part one, go here.
In the mid-2000s when nearly every top venture capital firm was expanding to India and China, Benchmark Capital did not share its peers’ worldly ambitions. In fact, while the firm retained its Israel fund… → Read More
In Silicon Valley it’s not just who you invest in that matters– it’s also when you invest in them. The earlier the investment, the riskier the bet. But the more jawdropping the returns if the company hits it big. It’s so lopsided, that typically just 5% of those unsure early bets create some 95% of the entire venture industry’s returns. Miss one of them, and it haunts you for years. Snag it, and… → Read More
Angel investor and entrepreneur Craig Shapiro is starting a new seed fund based in Los Angeles with the help of friends and advisors like YouTube founder Chad Hurley and Kiva co-founder and Profounder CEO Jessica Jackley. Investors in the relatively small $6 million fund include GM O’Connell, Nicholas Negroponte, Jason Krikorian (co-founder of Sling Media), Ben Goldhirsh (founder of Good and heir… → Read More
A lot of venture capitalists and super angels are not only active investors, but also active bloggers. Below is a list of the top 20 VC power bloggers as compiled by Larry Cheng of Volition Capital based on traffic data from Compete. The metric being used here is average monthly unique visitors during the fourth quarter of 2010.
Compared to last year’s list, there’s been a big shakeup in the VC… → Read More
Back in December, we spotted an SEC filing indicating that Union Square Ventures was raising between $135 million and $200 million for a new “Opportunity Fund.” The offering wasn’t complete and the firm could not discuss it, but today partner Fred Wilson explains in a post what the new fund (which ended up being a $165 million fund) is all about.
The fund is not about going after different… → Read More
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their venture firm, they talked a good game about things being different; about having a smorgasbord of partners skilled in different areas that could tag in-and-out of portfolio companies as appropriate. And a lot of that sounded like the usual “value-add” venture capital spiel.
But two funds into the firm’s life, that vision is starting to take… → Read More
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