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I probably get around a dozen e-mails a week asking me how to get into venturecapital. On top of that, anytime I talk to anyone who wants to get involved in startups but isn''t sure what they want to do, inevitably, I hear, "And then I was thinking maybe I should look into venturecapital, too.".
Brooklyn Bridge Ventures , the pre-seed and seed stage VC fund I run in NYC, has invested in 64 companies in the last six and a half years. The diversity is the direct result of our mission—to build the most accessible venturecapital fund in NY. Twenty-five of them have at least one female co-founder.
Most VCs did well academically and had enough career success that a venture firm was willing to give them an investment role or they were able to raise their own fund. Fundamentally venturecapital is about human capital. In the end I know the only true differentiator in venturecapital is the company you keep.
I was working for the GM pension fund, an institutional LP, as an analyst, doing a research project on consumer private equity and venturecapitalinvesting. Jerry was a great guy and his love of retail investing kind of stuck with me. Leading an investment into an ice cream chain, however, that's another beast.
Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll complete my next investment. It will be the 105th deal out of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the firm I started back in September 2012, and it will be the last deal I’ll be making out of my third fund. It will also be my last venturecapital deal.
About seven years ago, I wrote a post on breaking into venturecapital and I continue to point the five or six people a week who ask me how to break into venture. Like lefties out of the bullpen, VC firms now have recruiting partners, pr and marketing experts, technologists-in-residents--and USV even has an on board activist.
The board diversity problem is a symptom of a much broader problem around lack of diversity in founders that get funded and lack of diversity in VC firms. Most startup boards are made up of a few founders and a few VCs. No wonder you have no diversity on the board. Boards don’t need three or four VCs on them.
One of the least understood parts of the venturecapital industry and venturecapital firms is how investment decisions actually get made. For anything that would be considered a normal investment for the partnership most firms try to make sure every partner has seen the deal and has a chance to weigh in.
I was having dinner with a friend last night and we were chatting about venturecapital 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%).
Seed investments are down by any measure (funds, deals, dollars) over the past 3 years in deals < $1 million AND in deals between $1–5 million. Over the past month a colleague ( Chang Xu ) and I sifted through data on the venturecapital industry (as we do every year) and made a bunch of calls to VCs and LPs to confirm our hypotheses.
Passive venturecapitalinvesting is a relatively new idea. As later stage investors permeate venturecapital, they are amassing index funds of startups. If the public equities market is any indication, passive investing is here to stay. Classically, venturecapital has been an active asset class.
I’ve written a few posts about boards recently as part of a series on the subject. I admit that I haven’t yet read it but I’ve had numerous discussions with Brad over the years about board structure & conduct and consider him a mentor on the topic. Offering a sparring-partner function on strategic decisions.
how on Earth could the venturecapital market stand still? One of the most common questions I’m asked by people intrigued by but also scared by venturecapital and technology markets is some variant of, “Aren’t technology markets way overvalued? That used to be called A-round investing. Of course we can’t.
Bolster came out of stealth and into a beta period today and is opening up its marketplace to companies that want to access fractional talent and to executives who want to work at high growth companies in interim, fractional, advisory, or board roles. The full marketplace will launch soon.
I''m excited to see Christina and Logan''s vision come to life and I''m excited to be on board as an investor. VentureCapital & Technology' They launched the pre-sale of their first set of rings today--their own design. You should check it out.
The venture asset class seems to have already decided that AI is the next great investment opportunity, but I’m not so sure it’s going to disrupt business and create the across-the-board wealth that has been predicted. I got to see all of the top VCs pitching their funds. Technology has already made the world pretty efficient.
This is a big news day at Upfront Ventures. But as sweet as that success has been (we invested pre-revenue in a small team) today my even more important news was the further expansion of our partner ranks. Hamet started his career in VentureCapital working for the first post-apartheid VC fund in South Africa.
One of the things that founders have the most angst about is whom they should have on their board and at what stage of the business. This is smart because amazing board members can be transformative with important advice and access and can also help attract other great board members (and team members).
VentureCapital & Technology' If I take three months, then I''m pretty sure I can forget ever seeing another deal from whoever showed me the opportunity in the first place. Tell me how I''m being unreasonable.
There''s been some writing about how VCs and founders interact with each other and it inspired me to take a step back and reflect on what my role is supposed to be with regards to the investments I make and the founders I deal with. VentureCapital & Technology' Here''s what I came up with. I am not an expert.
Changes in the Software World & in VentureCapital. But notably you had the following changes: Horizontally scalable computing & storage systems, which meant you required less capital up front for hardware. We have invested $17.3 VentureCapital. And then the world changed. Welcome to the future.
That was a question posed to me by a new analyst at a venturecapital fund. While there are lots and lots of really kind, generous people working in venturecapital--the recently retired Howard Morgan, Hunter Walk, Brad Feld, and Karin Klein for example--it's really tough to argue that there isn't widespread jerkery.
Investment experience (5 years a VC at Battery Ventures). Operating experience (Helped run parts of CitySearch & UrbanSpoon, tons of product management experience, Board of Hatch Labs which helped spawn Tinder). Competitive (Athlete: skier & rowed at Princeton, hates losing at everything she does).
And while over the past few years we have been laser-focused on cash returns, we are equally planting seeds for our next 10–15 years of returns by actively investing in today’s market. We are excited to share the news that we have raised $650 million across three vehicles to allow us to continue making investments for many years ahead.
30 Investments to date in the areas of AI, autonomy, cybersecurity and space Shield Capital was launched in 2021 by the Managing Partners Philip Bilden and Raj Shah, both of whom have deep experience in technology and investing, driving their passion to support founders of frontier technologies.
If I was going to start a venturecapital fund around a theme, I''d pick something a little different. I''m talking about companies like littleBits , which makes tiny circuit-boards with specific functions engineered to snap together with magnets--"juiced Lego". VentureCapital & Technology' No geographic focus.
Since January of 2010, when I led my first seed investment in Backupify , I have led or committed to 27 investments. That also includes 16 Brooklyn Bridge Ventures deals done and five agreed to term sheets. VentureCapital & Technology' It would have lots of philosophy, religion, theory, fiction, and pontification.
Board Meetings. Frankly, I think venturecapital is that way, too. How do VCs break out of group think when they are shuttling from one board meeting to the next, from one conference to the other and talking with all the same people? How does the world in Los Angeles intersect differently with venturecapital?
Many board meetings are bored meetings. This is a shame since the value that the right board could add is immense if you select the right board members and manage them effectively. Yesterday I wrote a blog post about what the role of a board actually is. Some boards are highly functional, many are not.
If you track the venturecapital industry it would be hard to miss the conversation going on this week over AngelList “Syndicates.” AngelList 101 : As you know, AngelList is a platform where angels can invest in semi-screened tech deals. They will have to sit on boards. Social proof can be helpful.
Perhaps the biggest piece of new news is that after 17 years of operations we’ve changed our name from GRP Partners to Upfront Ventures. Well, the venturecapital industry has changed a lot in the past 20 years … and we have too. What’s up with that? Our portfolio companies value us as sparring partners.
Last week, for just the second time ever, I passed on an investment opportunity because of the terms of the deal--both the price and the legal structure of the agreement. No wonder people are questioning where the boards of these companies were. No one from the firm leading the deal will join the board.
who is a junior investor in the VentureCapital industry. He hopes to find a fulltime position in venturecapital after graduation. He currently serves as a Venture Partner at Mech Ventures where they invest in the future of pop culture. How did you break into tech investing?
Venturecapital is about backing the leaders of tomorrow who imagine the world as it should be and aren’t constrained by what it is today. As an industry we’re not always as good as we could be about our own “creative destruction” to create the tomorrow of venturecapital. So What Does All This Mean?
That's one thing you have to realize about venturecapital. As a single GP (a firm with one investment decision making professional), I get asked a lot of questions about how I manage my time considering the number of investments I make. There are weird parts, like board meetings being an hour a day.
Just ask the people of Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Iowa, Princeton, Dallas or countless other cities that don’t have enough venturecapital. If you don’t live in a major VC zone, I have some tips for how to make it easier to raise VentureCapital. But I do invest outside of LA. Ask SuperCell.
In early June, I wrote this post explaining that I and we need to do more to reduce the inequality issues for Black people in tech, venturecapital, and startups. We have ongoing projects, workstreams, investments, and efforts in each and every one of these areas and we have made tangible progress in almost all of them.
Venture capitalists are chatting this week about a recent piece from The Information titled “ The End of VentureCapital as We Know It.” A capital explosion. Lessin notes that venture capitalists once made risky wagers on companies that often withered away. Its author, Sam Lessin , makes some pretty good points.
Earlier this month, we reported that investors’ sentiments surrounding venturecapital activity going into this were more reserved than upbeat. Partech: The venturecapital outfit pegged funding for African tech at $6.5 The Big Deal: Nigeria topped the African VC investment destination with $1.2
I’ve worked very closely with Matt over the past four years as we share an investment in a company in Los Angeles called NextPlus and we sat on a board together for years. In this capacity I can tell any entrepreneurs raising early-stage capital that I would have Matt on my short list if I were raising. Conclusions?
Generally speaking in venturecapital financings the legal documents will specify that only “major investors” (a threshold set in the agreement – which can be $500,000 investor or more). We led an investment round in a company a while ago in which we wrote a seven-figure check and have taken a board seat.
I''m super proud of Rob, Ben and the whole Backupify team--and this is particularly special for me because Backupify was the first investment I ever made as a VC, and the first board I ever sat on. I joined the board and I was assuming everything would always be up and to the right, because that''s the way success happens, right?
As it was with crypto, sometimes this leads to the development of “new investment rules” that crowd out traditional norms. The Lack of a Legitimate Board. Delaware law requires a board of directors, and these directors are tasked with a “fiduciary duty” to look after the best interest of the corporation. Theranos) is another.
We both wanted to build a practice that would make Los Angeles proud but where we would travel tirelessly to other locations to make investments in the best entrepreneurs wherever they were. Like any firm we of course invest in the San Francisco Bay Area where 33% of my personal boards are. So we talked about his joining.
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