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
Insightful and brutally honest report on VC
The Kauffman Foundation just recently published a report on its venture capital investments. It’s pretty alarming. One of the items they write about is how large VC funds tend to be correlated with poor investment returns: Big VC funds fail to deliver big returns. We have no funds in our portfolio that raised more than $500
Racism today
I’ve been thinking a lot about racism for two reasons. First, Mrs. T. and two of our children went down to Washington DC for spring break. At one point, they were walking around town, and an older person muttered loudly, “They train those little Orientals for war from a young age.” It’s an interesting comment because
Raising VC money: how to negotiate the legal documents
This is the seventh post in a Friday series on “raising VC money.” I’ve really enjoyed writing these posts and to have an opportunity to interact with many folks. Thank you for the encouragement! Today, we’ll cover the topic “how to negotiate the legal documents.” So, you’ve successfully pitched the VC and his partners (more
The new market for seed financings
I was on a panel this morning at the Cambridge Innovation Center (many thanks Ben Hron and Rick Lucash) with NEVCA’s C.A. Webb and NextView’s David Beisel. A lot of entrepreneurs had questions about the new JOBS Bill and the crowd-sourcing opportunities it may create for seed financings. The discussion made me realize again that the early-stage
An interesting weekend
One of our investors invited me to attend their annual retreat, which occurred this weekend. They asked me to speak about VC trends and investment themes. This investor has a very unique and special structure. Basically a number of very wealthy families came together and jointly hired an elite investment staff to invest their capital