Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
At the tail end of last month I wrote that small boards are usually better, and promised to return with a post about adding value from the board. This is it.
As with VC value add,
the primary value add that everyone talks about is contacts. An introduction to a potential employee, partner or customer [...]
I was with Umair Haque last night and he urged me to read and respond to his Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution - something I was keen to do for a couple of reasons.
He is urging us (and by us I mean investors, entrepreneurs and pretty well society at large) to get focused [...]
The first web bubble was much bigger - at the peak in 1999-2000 VCs were investing c$30bn per quarter, but in 2006 it was only $5bn. Exit comparisons are similar - in 1999 270 venture backed businesses went public for $21bn, in 2006 just 57 companies went public raising $5.1bn. In 2000 318 [...]
Before I went on holiday I asked Are serial entrepreneurs any better than first time entrepreneurs? and got an avalanche of comments which raised some further points of interest that I have been meaning to share with you for the past week or so (or should I say re-share - and as ever a big [...]
I was on a call yesterday with a subset of one of the boards I am on and one of the directors was talking about how difficult it is to add value on boards.
I agree with that. It is definitely difficult. Also definitely possible, but it usually requires a lot of care and [...]
Until this morning my answer to this question would have ‘Yes, absolutely’, but new research reported today in the Financial Times casts doubt on that assumption:
In the UK, the evidence is that novices are neither more nor less likely to have a business that either grows or survives than experienced founders. In Germany, where much [...]
Jeff has been around tech investing for as long as I can remember, so when I saw a post from him on Techmeme entitled What I look for in Startups I clicked through straight away.
He says:
These days when I’m making a decision about a startup opportunity to invest in, I put the people first, I [...]
In a week where we have been talking about the New-new-thing it is good to see Sir Tim Berners-Lee chiming in with his thoughts on the future of the web - courtesy of the Beeb. Like most of us (I suspect), he thinks that the internt driven wave of innovation still has a long [...]
Last week I blogged that venture investment in Europe is holding up, despite the credit crunch.
At least one of you (Phil) was sceptical, and wanted to see a list. You can now find it on Techcrunch UK.
This proverb is a work of fiction from Iain M Banks in latest novel Matter, but it could well be for real:
One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.
