Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 20, 2015

We love capital efficiency until we love land grabs until we abhor over funding until we get huge payouts and ring the bell for more funding until we attract every non-VC on the planet to invest in startups until it crashes and we start the cycle all over again none the wiser. The industry did that in 2007. VC funding.

ventures 419

ventures VC capital SaaS 419

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2014

There has been much discussion in the past few years of the changing structure of the venture capital industry. The rise of alternative sources of capital (crowd funding and the like). 15 years ago we were at the peak of Internet hype with the launch of many over-capitalized businesses with a market size & opportunity was limited.

VC 398

VC venture capital peer-to-peer ventures 398

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 5, 2021

And I suspect it is getting more profitable, not less, as the capital markets and M&A markets are providing robust liquidity options for managers. These are the gross return multiples of all of the funds that are “mature” meaning the returns are pretty clear now: Multiple Year Of Initial Investment 8.66

VC 279

VC board investing investment 279

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

But any entrepreneurs raising capital should keep in mind that this opening of the markets could possibly be temporary. It helped me avoid chasing deals (and a house) in 2007/08 and it led to GRP’s fastest pace of investment in many years in the first three quarters of 2009 at a time when many others weren’t investing.

VC 263

VC board investing investment 263

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 24, 2014

I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. I divided success into the phases of venture capital and 18 months into writing my first check here was my view (details on each in the link above).

VC 387

VC venture capital financing finance 387

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2010

Our guest this week on #TWiVC was Dana Settle , partner at Greycroft Partners , a venture capital firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Current rount: $8.14mm in Series A from Redpoint (lead), Foundry Group, with previous investors, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital (Chris Sacca), Ravi Narasimham. Founded in 2007.

VC 240

VC peer-to-peer advice ventures 240

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 2, 2014

What might be a more relevant date is May 22nd, 2007. Venture Capital & Technology' Three years ago today, I grabbed the domain name BrooklynBridgeVentures.com. It''s kind of a funny answer to "When did you start Brooklyn Bridge Ventures?". After my two year stint was up, I bought a domain name. Yeah, so, somewhere in there.

venture capital 293

venture capital VC ventures technology 293

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 3, 2009

When Twitter first became popular with niche crowds in 2007 it seemed to take hold initially with bloggers. Bill Gurley , a well known VC from Benchmark Capital, seemed to have a 2-year hiatus from blogging and has now picked up the pace. And I’m enjoying being part of the two-way conversation again as I was from 2005-2007.

VC 219

VC creativity networking media 219

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

by Michael Woolf that is worth any startup founder reading to get a sense of perspective on the reality warp that is startup world during a frothy market such as 1997-1999, 2005-2007 or 2012-2014. There are many times when being overly capitalized before you’re ready is a negative. Availability of Capital.

startup 383

startup VC frameworks capital 383

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 11, 2014

I didn''t actually get to meet him in person until SXSW in 2007. Venture Capital & Technology' He was an interesting guy and I watched him throughout a bunch of interesting projects, like a complete open source business where all the employees got to make the decisions. That was the year Twitter took off.

board 274

board venture capital creativity entrepreneurship 274

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2015

At the time almost nobody had heard of the following funds: FirstRound Capital, TrueVentures, Floodgate and SoftTech. By fund II (2007) he was able to raise $15 million (if you watch the video you’ll hear an interesting story of how he did this) and he had a proper fund. I think they were all brand new or just forming.

VC 348

VC peer-to-peer frameworks board 348

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2015

I know that I had things easier as a new VC because I came into the business in 2007 when the market was frenzied like today but an order-of-magnitude less so and the world wasn’t living in public. It’s true that my job requires more travel than I’d like.

advice 398

advice VC entrepreneurs transportation 398

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2013

Early in his days when he was raising capital for DocStoc he came to see me a lot. When I joined GRP Partners in 2007 I was offered a role as a General Partner. I wrote about there here. When you want press, it will come. Some practical examples. Jason Nazar is a master networker. As good as they come. And then I think about me.

advice 407

advice VC networking entrepreneurs 407

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2016

My partner Greg Bettinelli (worth following on Twitter) was recently named by The LA Business Journal as the “ Top deal maker in Los Angeles in Venture Capital.” I joined Upfront Ventures in 2007 and took over as co-Managing Partner in 2011 along with the founder, Yves Sisteron. From 2007-2012 I scoured LA constantly.

disruption 226

disruption VC communities ventures 226

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

2007, 2011) and for the hottest of companies and in bad markets for fund raising (2003, 2008) prices test the bottom end of the range. I saw this kind of pricing when I first entered the VC market in 2007. So rounds tend to be “range bound&# where the top end of the valuation spectrum often being done in boom markets (i.e.

startup 336

startup advice pitching investing 336

This is going to be BIG.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

I started a company back in late 2007. When I joined First Round Capital in October of 2009, I limped in with about $31,000 in credit card debt and no immediate savings. If I had kids, I wouldn’t have been able to make it as long—but if I had kids, I probably would have raised more capital and just taken more dilution to cover that.

financing 286

financing finance pitching founder 286

Gust

DECEMBER 13, 2011

Here are the trends in venture capital financings from 2006 through 2010 – the number of seed stage deals funded and total investment by region in millions of dollars. . For VCs, I chose to look at all seed stage VC deals (from MoneyTree©) as well as those in five of the most active regions in the country. All Seed-VC. Silicon Valley.

entrepreneurs 162

entrepreneurs angel investing VC venture capital 162

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

I know that most people who are close to them tend to deny their existence, as we saw in the great housing bubble of 2002-2007 and the dot com bubble of 1997-2000. I guess that makes USV, Spark Capital, Foundry Group, Accel, Benchmark, Revolution (along with several others) pretty happy right now. source: Capital IQ.

real estate 309

real estate entrepreneurs finance financing 309

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

And Mike believes that entrepreneurs often need less capital to get started these days. Founded 2007 in Boulder, CO. Current round: $8.5mm Series-C led by Jafco Ventures with DCM , Emergence Capital, and August Capital participating. Tags: This Week in Venture Capital. Competitors: Google. Total raised: $18.3mm.

VC 230

VC ventures venture capital capital 230

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 12, 2011

More importantly, I know them both for a while--Hilary since August of 2007 through twitter and, of course, getting to work with her at Path 101, and Kara since I used to e-mail her about her Boomtown columns in the WSJ over ten years ago. Venture capital isn't a game or club any more than any other industry is.

data analysis 298

data analysis venture capital communities entrepreneurs 298

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

By then I was still on the board of my first company but it hadn’t yet sold (it ended up selling in 2007 to a publicly traded French company). Otherwise, what incentive exists for the VC to put in more capital or to have the founders earn money. Many term sheets ensued. So by this point I hadn’t had an exit.

founder 329

founder VC advice pitching 329

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

What a pleasure that I got to spend an hour talking with both Om Malik (whom I’ve always respected his views) and Paul Jozefak , a venture capital partner at Neuhaus Partners in Germany (and formerly the head of Europe for SAP Ventures). Tags: This Week in Venture Capital. To see the video of This Week in VC click on this link.

VC 225

VC social gaming venture capital networking 225

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

There are real changes in the venture capital industry and it would have been fun to talk about them. Dave McClure argued passionately that since the overwhelming majority of exits are sub $100 million we need to readjust how much capital goes in. Answer: Not much. And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel.

disruption 308

disruption VC entrepreneurs finance 308

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2014

I was having dinner with a friend last night and we were chatting about venture capital and a bit about what I’ve learned. I started in 2007 with a thesis that my primary investment decision would be about the team (70%) and only afterward about the market opportunity (30%). Hedge funds, other public investors, corporates, etc.

VC 374

VC investing investment entrepreneurs 374

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2010

This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital. If you imagine that they did most of their initial investments between 2002-2007 then it’s been 3 years of mostly doing follow-on investments in those old deals. Tags: Pitching VCs Raising Venture Capital VC Industry.

VC 269

VC venture capital investing investment 269

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

They have marked-up paper gains propped up by an over excited venture capital market that has validated their investments. Bad times often require more capital but ironically this is when capital is dried up. The dinner parties now are filled with self-righteous angel investors bragging about how many deals they are in on.

angel investing 299

angel investing investing investment real estate 299

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

Facebook had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users and was everything that MySpace wasn’t. Close shop to try and control monetization and you can only rely on your own internal innovation machine & capital. In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly.

networking 297

networking innovation development opportunity 297

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2018

Today the company officially announced its most recent round of capital ?—?having Capital of course drives scale advantages and when you have “winner take most” markets it also has a way of scaring away some investors from investing in the 3–5th “me too” competitors. having raised $300 million?—?less There is nothing viral!

transportation 256

transportation innovation leadership capital 256

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

This episode of This Week in Venture Capital featured Michael Montgomery, president of Montgomery & Co. You have to be selected to present and it is typically reserved for companies that have already raised early-stage capital and are well into revenue growth. Should you use investment banks to raise venture capital?

VC 242

VC venture capital ventures capital 242

TechCrunch

JULY 13, 2022

Kontent, a platform designed to help companies manage business-related content in the cloud, today announced that it raised $40 million from Expedition Growth Capital as part of a growth capital infusion. Kontent competes against Contentful , Contentstack , Strapi and Storyblok in a headless CMS software market that could be worth $1.6

capital 79

capital incumbents frameworks development 79

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 7, 2022

Travel booking startup Hopper today announced that it closed a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to $740 million. Travel app Hopper raises $96M from Capital One to double down on social commerce by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch.

capital 107

capital leadership disruption ventures 107

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

It had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users, which actually was slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was. Close shop to try and control monetization and you can only rely on your own internal innovation machine & capital. In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly.

networking 318

networking mix-use innovation development 318

Gust

OCTOBER 8, 2014

There weren’t a lot of seed funds in 2007 so this was often done by angels, funding consortia or sometimes early-stage funds that existed then (First Round Capital, True Ventures, SoftTech VC, etc.). 5 million was always the classic definition of an A-round between the late nineties (crazy financings aside) and say 2007.

VC 136

VC advice financing finance 136

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

“I don’t know the exact math, but I hear it again and again: the top 2% of firms generate 98% of the returns in venture capital.” According to FLAG Capital there are 100 active VCs (as defined by making at least $1 million in VC per quarter for 4 consecutive quarters). The industry is dying, except for the top 2%.

VC 374

VC peer-to-peer entrepreneurs investing 374

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 21, 2009

On the third Wednesday of every month I co-chair a meeting called the SoCal VCA (venture capital alliance), which represents participants from all of the top venture capital firms in Southern California as well as prominent members of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA). What are your predictions for the road ahead.

VC 241

VC venture capital ventures capital 241

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

I became a VC 12 years ago in 2007 when the pace of deals was much slower. Just as I was getting the swing of things the world shifted beneath my feet and the stock market went into a free fall and venture capital all but shut down for nearly a year. Accel led the B, Morgan Stanley the C and now HIG the D. Over the past 2.5

VC 223

VC venture capital investing investment 223

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

We raised a seed round of capital in 1999 and our first venture capital round was the first week of March 2000 (e.g. We were now set to close at $46 million in new capital. We found a way to get a round of venture capital closed after all of this. We were based in London. I swam every morning and ran every afternoon.

entrepreneurs 308

entrepreneurs advice real estate venture capital 308