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.
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
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