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
A “Star Trek moment”
I am flying home right now from a business conference. The flight has wifi. On a lark, I decided to FaceTime the family on my iPad. I couldn’t believe it. It worked! It is pretty to cool to have a video chat with the wife and kids while I’m flying at 38,000 feet and going
Raising VC money: how to negotiate a term sheet
This is the sixth post in a Friday series on “raising VC money”. For the list of topics we are covering, click here. In this post, we’ll focus on “how to negotiate a VC term sheet.” Let’s say that after interacting with a VC, you’re at last invited to the all-critical partners’ meeting (more here)
Seed companies are NOT lottery tickets
Foundry’s Seth Levine recently had a great blog post about what can happen when VCs do too many seeds (more here): I’m seeing an increasing number of Series A pitches where a company has at least one venture investor in its seed, the business is very clearly doing well and where the entrepreneur is simply
New VC data: decline in seeding
Flybridge’s Michael Greeley has a great write-up on newly-released data from the National Venture Capital Association (click here). In particular, he writes about the seed market: “End of the Great Seed Experiment” which is something I have been saying for the better part of a year – there was only $141MM invested in 53 deals
New investment: Cloze
We made a new investment in Cloze and really like founders Dan Foody and Alex Cote. More here.