As many of you will know Paul Graham has been at the forefront of innovation in small company financing for a couple of years now. He is the founder of Y-Combinator, a startup accelerator that developed a new model for financing and helping companies at the very earliest stages and which has now been [...]
You might have seen that Dave McClure who has been making seed investments in the US for the Founders Fund and the Facebook Fund over the last twelve months has recently raised his own fund. In this interview with GigaOM he talks about the sort of things he likes to see in startups and [...]
On holiday over the last week or so I have been reading a lot of the chatter about seed funds/smaller VC funds in the US and I planned to sit down and digest all of it today and produce some thoughts on parallel developments in Europe. Unfortunately my day has totally run away from [...]
You might have seen this graphic on Techcrunch last week. It shows that VCs in the developed world expect their industry to shrink over the next five years.
The most dramatic rate of decline is expected in the US, but the picture in Europe is not much better, and crucially the industry [...]
Alan Patricof is one of the most experienced and successful VCs around. He was one of the founders of Apax Partners which is one of the most successful venture and private equity companies in European history and his investment successes include Apple Computer and AOL. Most recently he founded an early stage venture fund [...]
If you have been reading this blog over the past couple of weeks you might have picked up that I’m a big admirer of Steve Blank and his thinking about how to build startups. Yesterday he wrote a blog post entitled Welcome to the Lost Decade (for Entrepreneurs, IPO’s and VC’s) which sets out [...]
It is quite common for conferences to have a ‘venture capital panel’ with a collection of VCs, angels and maybe advisors who typically discuss what it is that VCs are looking for and how entrepreneurs might go about getting themselves funded, often with a sector focus. I was on such a venture capital panel [...]
An Economist article from last week opened with the sentence I’ve chosen for the title of this post, and it goes on to give a good account of where the European startup ecosystem has gotten to over the ten to fifteen years it has been in existence, both positive and negative.
On the [...]
Back in May Nicholas Lovell (pictured), author of the Gamesbrief blog, and former games entrepreneur and analyst published an e-book entitled How to Publish a Game which is an excellent manual for developers who are considering how best to get their games to market in the new, iPhone enabled, world of self-publishing.
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Convertible bridge loans are an investment instrument often used by startups, usually to raise a smaller amount of money ahead of a bigger round. It is called a bridge loan because it bridges the company until the full funding round (or sometimes to another event, e.g. an exit). It is called a ‘convertible’ [...]