I had a usual week with a lot of meetings. One was with two young entrepreneurs. They raised some angel money, and while they’ve made good progress, they think the likely path is to sell the company to a strategic because progress has been slower than planned. As I’ve written before here, entrepreneurship is hard.
Category: Entrepreneurship
“Only in America”
I was invited to say a few words at an event last night called the “Unity Dinner.” State Treasurer Steven Grossman kicked off the night with a passionate perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship. The key note speaker was Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, and other speakers from the tech side included Joe Chung of
How VC “optics” can drive behavior
I know this sounds strange, but investment firms can have an incentive not to support their companies in future rounds, particularly if there are deep-pocketed co-investors who can do so. It may be part of that firm’s strategy, but also, it can make for some great optics. For example, one of our companies raised a Series
Raising VC money: getting a strong start with your VC
This is the eighth and final post in a Friday series on “raising VC money.” I hope the series has been helpful to entrepreneurs. If you liked it, please consider Tweeting it or linking your blogs to it, so that other entrepreneurs can find out about it? Today, we’ll cover the topic “getting a strong
Entrepreneurship is hard
Entrepreneurship is hard. We are in that part of the VC cycle when entrepreneurship is again “hot” and the popular media is glorifying start-ups. But, I don’t think it’s all that easy. Here’s how hard it can be. I today met with a young entrepreneur. He is from Estonia. He arrived in the U.S. a
A fun dinner
Last night, I had a very enjoyable dinner with two old friends: Andy Palmer and Dave Girouard. Andy and I go way back. He was the CEO I recruited to Vertica in 2005, back when he, Mike Stonebraker and I were working on “big data” before the Big Data label came along and it became