A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 29, 2021

Some of the best entrepreneurs and developers have moved over. It reminds me of the early days of web2 in 2001/2002/2003, when we started USV. The good news is there are literally tens of thousands of teams building new things on a web3 stack now. The tooling is getting better. That was also a time of great cynicism.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 18, 2009

This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. You’ve got to be able to come out of unsuccessful VC meetings, pull your socks up, and go into the next pitch. The best entrepreneurs have a survival instinct.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Just ask anybody who was trying to close funding the fateful week of September 11, 2001 or even March 2000. I would argue that the shut-down of September 2009 was equally severe yet there are signs that this “VC Ice Age” has begun to thaw. Why did the VC markets freeze so quickly? Short answer – yes.

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David Teten VC

OCTOBER 31, 2024

R136 Ventures partners with creative entrepreneurs to help scale their mid-to-late stage startups. Between 2001 and 2005, I worked on a pioneering mobile banking platform for a young bank, that became the de-facto best-in-class standard among banks in Central and Eastern Europe, well before the iPhone era.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2015

” And yet we entrepreneurs who will sign up for the journey accept that failure is a possibility and the true entrepreneurs know that they must stick with the ship even if it’s sinking. First time entrepreneurs can fall prey to hubris. But markets don’t generally love failure. Why or why not?”

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

I believe the rise in angel investing is here to stay and the professionalization of this class (aka “super angels&# or “micro VC&# ) is a good thing for the VC industry and for entrepreneurs. Mostly, this segment of the market (like all of VC) is stacked in favor of the few. Unfortunately that’s a myth.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 22, 2010

Due to competitive markets we ended up with a pretty good term sheet until we needed to raise money in April 2001 and then we got completely screwed. And for some strange reason entrepreneurs didn’t share this information. I just want to figure out what a fair valuation is.&# I figured all the VC’s talked so we should.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel. The VC industry is segmenting – I have spoken about this many times before. The VC industry has different segments in it that have different fund sizes, different investment amounts and different risk / return expectations. Answer: Not much. It’s a shame.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. We were based in London.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series “ Start Up Advice &# but I’d really like to call this post, “VC Advice.&#. A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and is running a high-profile, early stage company in NorCal. VC’s who don’t get this are naive. That’s when the VC has lost.

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TechCrunch

MAY 17, 2022

The judges for this pitch-off will be Yoon Choi (Muirwoods Ventures), Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) and Gabriel Scheer (Elemental Excelerator) on day one; and Sven Strohband (Khosla Ventures), Victoria Beasley (Prelude Ventures) and John Du (GM Ventures) on day two. ” Mar Hershenson — Pear VC. John received his Ph.D.

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TechCrunch

APRIL 11, 2022

At the same time, he added, “high interest rates may also increase the demand for venture capital when bank lending is less attractive to entrepreneurs.” Whether we will see as dramatic a correction in the next few years as we did in 2001 to 2003, however, is anyone’s guess.”. “If coming on as Overlooked’s first institutional investor.

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 24, 2015

I’ve seen friends (and family members) lose much of their savings that way over the years because “Black Swans” happen and in 1987, 2001, 2003 & 2008 (just to name a few from my memory) huge market gyrations caused much financial distress to people seeking short-term gains. I know what I don’t know.

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Dream It

APRIL 12, 2020

During our recent Dreamit Kickoff week, Bullpen Capital Founder and General Partner Paul Martino ( @ahpah ) spoke with our Spring 2020 cohort about the state of the VC ecosystem in the current economic crisis. Paul Martino, General Partner at Bullpen Capital. It went from 1 million employed people to 750k employed people within 18 months.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

A reminder that it is important for all entrepreneurs is to remember to be careful about “deal drift.” I lived through this again September 2001. Many deals – VC or otherwise – didn’t close. VC, sales, biz dev, M&A or otherwise. Especially in VC. Anybody who didn’t close was dead. Any deal. Things change.

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venture capital advice VC real estate 301

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Within a year, by late 2000 / early 2001 consulting firms were firing people en masse. On July 27th, 2001 Accenture IPO’s and many of the partners grew fabulously wealthy. I’m certain that if you look at every single one of the entrepreneurs who’ve gone on to build big, enduring businesses they were unfundable once too.&#.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 29, 2010

We received so much positive feedback from our This Week in Venture Capital show walking through valuation calculations & term sheets that we decided to do a Q&A show this week to address topics that entrepreneurs want to learn about. on the entrepreneur side of the table) when I raised at too high of a price. This is wrong.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

This was an audience of mostly first-time entrepreneurs. I spoke about how Amazon Web Services deserves far more credit for the last 5 years of innovation than it gets credit for and how I believe they spawned the micro-VC category. I said that I felt that Micro-VCs were the most important change in our industry. I believe that.

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Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 22, 2014

Through the first six months of 2014, VCs have raised about as much as all of 2013. If this pace of fund raising continues, 2014 would mark the biggest year for VCs since 2001, when the industry raised about $38B. Each quarter, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters gather data on the VC industry.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Please don’t also confuse this with whether a VC should invest in a CEO who’s done it before – that’s a given. This was a reasonable achievement when you consider that it was 2001-02, one of the worst years to be selling enterprise software and we were selling it SaaS style, which was still evangelical back then.

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Gust

OCTOBER 20, 2011

million and is established by negotiations between the entrepreneur and the angel investors. We also have data points for VC investments in seed/startup companies (but not necessarily pre-revenue companies). Strength of Entrepreneur and Team. Strength of the Entrepreneur and the Management Team. Entrepreneur only.

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TechCrunch

JANUARY 29, 2021

In other news: Extra Crunch Live, a series of interviews with leading investors and entrepreneurs, returns next month with a full slate of guests. In the United Kingdom and Europe, government innovation programs have helped entrepreneurs close higher numbers of Series A and B rounds. Image Credits: Acquia.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2010

It also takes options off the table if you eventually find out that this isn’t a VC backable business. I’ve spoken about this in a post entitled, “ Do you even need VC ?&# I’ve seen too many entrepreneurs try to do things on the cheap. But the lower end also has risks. Don’t let that be you.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I had previously raised VC in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005. In case VC’s haven’t figured this out yet, shit rolls downhill. My blog linked to Brad Feld’s blog because I was so grateful for his series on term sheets and he was one of the biggest reasons that as a VC I felt compelled to blog. Folksonomy.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

Most of what I learned about operating startups I learned from the really tough years at my first company from 2001-2003. My company had raised venture capital in April 2001 but we were told that there may never be any more coming. Hell – we fought against the VC’s together! He’s family and he knows it.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

This conversation seems to come up very frequently these days both with portfolio companies and with entrepreneurs just looking for mentorship. I like to tell entrepreneurs that the “fairway&# of fund raising is 25-33% per round. The other thing I ask entrepreneurs to consider is what will happen to competition in a market.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

I know you’re thinking that you have your head on straight but I promise you the experience of finding yourself in this maelstrom will leave any first time entrepreneur spinning. We then had a piece in Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Europe, we ran front cover of Tornado Insider (the top VC magazine in Europe at the time).

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Unvalidated Learnings

OCTOBER 5, 2016

and yet so familiar to every contemporary entrepreneur. A VC treating an entrepreneur that way today wouldn’t stay in business for long… 7. Their growth naturally slowed down with scale but maintained a remarkable consistency over time: $3bn of revenues in 91, $9.5bn in 2001, $21bn in 2010 and $32bn in 2015.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

I raised money as an entrepreneur, like you, in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005 for two different companies. And of course I’ve sat on the other side of the table: As a VC. This is not just the perspective of a VC although I can’t say I have zero VC bias. I’ve raised seed rounds and A-D rounds.

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TechCrunch

DECEMBER 6, 2021

Since BCV’s first fund in 2001, the firm has invested over $4.5 The move to VC felt like a natural transition,” Melas-Kyriazi said. Her commitment to entrepreneurs’ success is second to none; she always goes the extra mile for founders,” . billion to fund young startups, and young VC firms, too.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

Two weeks after Brad’s post I was at the 140 Conference in LA and I held open office hours for any entrepreneur who wanted to spend 15 minutes talking with a VC about their business. But it turns out I met a bunch of really interesting entrepreneurs. But TWTFelipe is an entrepreneur. Felipe grew up in Brazil.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

I asked him if he’d be willing to allow me to interview him for This Week in VC and we filmed it in the offices of Stack Overflow – his new company. This was the moment where Zuckerberg (20 something entrepreneur) schooled Rupert Murdoch. Lesson: Joel had been building a community of readers since 2001.

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