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I’ve had two conversations this week with people from entrepreneurial and operational backgrounds who are looking to become venture capitalists. They were smart people who I respect for their achievements and intellect, but I’m not sure their ideas about adding value to a portfolio of venture capital investments will work well in practice. Before [...] I started reading Eric Ries‘s new book The Lean Startup last night and so far it is very, very good. Almost ‘can’t put it down’ good, or at least as close to that as you could expect from a business book. Most of you will be familiar with the lean startup methodology by [...] Only a small subset of companies should think about raising venture capital – those that genuinely have potential to exit for say $100m and can substantially increase their chances of getting there by accelerating investment. This is an important point as many companies that don’t meet these criteria waste time trying to raise venture. [...] Consumer services getting to their first million users often takes a bit of magic and fresh off their big financing at a $4bn valuation the guys at Dropbox have been describing what they did (from Techcrunch): Dropbox released a video on Digg during its private beta launch. In that video [they] team layered “easter [...] Startups accounted for all job creation in the US over the last 30 years, and there were 44 million created. That’s fantastic. I’ve heard similar stats in the UK too (although haven’t seen them in writing, pointers welcome). This is one of the reasons I come to work every day. It will be [...] The Friday before last I was on an investor panel at the Like Minds conference down in Exeter. As I’ve mentioned before I do these panels in the hope of making the process of raising money more widely understood and therefore easily accessible, thereby encouraging more entrepreneurs to start companies. You can find a [...] Thirty-sixth in a series of weekly posts by myself and Nicholas Lovell of Gamesbrief which answer the fifty questions you should ask before raising venture capital. We expect the series to run for a year after which we will collate the posts into a book. You can find the rationale behind the series here, [...] Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures put up an interesting post on Friday about the importance of staying focused on your business and not getting distracted by the overall macro-economic picture or whether we are in a bubble or not. I agree with this up to a point. Roger titled the post ‘Know thyself’ and [...] As I’ve said many times I think the startup ecosystem here in Europe is getting stronger all the time. One of the reasons for that is that the entrepreneurs are getting better. That is something I observe on a daily basis at the companies we see. When I’m asked to explain why entrepreneurs are [...] I got back late last night from a weekend away in Sicily with the ICE networking group and one of the main topics of conversation during the presentations and panel sessions was company culture. We came at this via talks on recruiting developers by Andy Young and Damian Tanner and on OKR by Sam [...] |
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