Charlie O’Donnell has published a post on the economics of his VC fund. I really admire him for: starting his own firm, being so transparent about his take-home pay, and the incredible passion that he has for the investing business. I’ve written about it before, but I really do believe that early-stage VC is a
Category: Technology and VC
Software Has Eaten Retail
In a different life, I worked extensively at Bain & Co. in the supply chain and retail industries. It put me on the radar of Amazon.com and various VC firms, as the e-commerce wave was arriving in the late 1990s. I’m thinking about those moments as I read a WSJ article on how Target has fired
Kepha’s Upcoming ‘Annual Meeting’
VCs are very lucky in many, many ways. Investors entrust us with piles of capital in multiple ten-year funds, which are essentially open check books. Portfolio companies count on us to help them source/land great recruits, find potential strategic partners, land early flagship customers, etc. As I’ve blogged before in a series of posts (more here), venture
Investing in The Cloud
I love The Cloud as a consumer, but I’m uncertain about investing in the cloud infrastructure layer as a VC investor. By the former, I love the fact that I can share team documents (Dropbox), back up my iPhone and iPad (iCloud), check email in a low friction way (Google Apps), keep to-do lists (Evernote), stream
The Venture Capital Funnel
Our VC firm’s tagline is “Venture Builders.” As Eric often says, our Mission is about helping entrepreneurs create real businesses, not just products. The are many ways through which to make money in venture capital. One is “venture banking” where you initiate a new investment starting in later-stage rounds, once a company already has scaling
When There Is No Plan B
I had great heart-to-heart conversations this week with many of our portfolio company CEOs. The themes spanned a number of topics, but they all revolved around, more or less, “grit.” I’ve found that grit takes form in many shapes, depending on the person’s personality. For some, grit means getting angry. For others, it is about