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.
“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
My Mother and Her Shoe Boxes
This is a hard post to write. Today is May 12. It is the day of my mother’s birthday. She also died, at age 60, on May 12. That day also happened to be Mother’s Day. It was a difficult day with too many coincidences. Soon after she passed away, I was at the funeral
What is “VC 2.0”?
Kirill Sofronov contacted me after reading my blog post on the recent Kauffman study of VC, in which I reference “VC 2.0.” He asked me to write more about what VC 2.0 is. I think that is a tall order. I will give it a shot, though, using two perspectives as a starting point. First,
A Roundtable discussion with the Business Czar
Yesterday, I participated in a roundtable discussion on Big Data, led by Greg Bialiecki. He is on the Governor’s team. Wade Roush calls him the “Business Czar” in an article here. I’ve been investing in Big Data, before there was such a label, since 2003: StreamBase, Vertica (sold to HP), Goby (sold to Telenav), VoltDB and Paradigm4.