2011 was a bleak year for venture capital fundraising in Europe and only a little better in the US. According to Dow Jones stats in Europe last year 41 funds raised $3bn, a 20% decline in the number of funds that raised capital and an 11% decline in capital raised compared with 2010. Q4 [...]
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The difference between success and failure for companies is making the right decisions – no surprises there. Another truism is that making the right calls is often a subjective process, with no right or wrong answer. Decisions like whether to hire candidate A or B, or what your budget should be for next year [...] "VCs are people too". That was what I was thinking this morning as I read Fred Wilson‘s post about approaching VCs when they are out in public. Fred says it is ok say hello and hand over a business card, but make it quick and don’t pitch. That makes sense to me. All [...] Thirty-ninth 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, [...] 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 [...] 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. [...] Data just out shows that Q3 was a great quarter for M&A. As you can see from the charts below total deal value and average deal size were up quarter on quarter and year on year and deal volumes are also pretty robust. On top of that Groupon finally went public (pricing at $20, [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] Q3 fundraising data up on Geekwire yesterday paints a gloomy picture for the startup industry. You can see from the chart below that the amount raised by US funds in the quarter just closed fell precipitously. You can also see that the data set is pretty volatile and there is therefore a possibility that [...] |
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