Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 6, 2020

But I have been in close contact with the NVCA, many of the major law firms and many of the major VC firms. If your US-based business is adversely affected by Covid-19 such that you would need to lay off employees imminently and having access to capital would enable you to keep more employees on the payroll then you might be eligible.

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MAY 5, 2023

It will also be my last venture capital deal. Venture capital is a pretty opaque industry and if I can shed some light on what it’s like to do this, or to decide to stop doing it, I’m happy to help. I’ve decided that this is long enough for me—especially given the fact that when you’re in venture capital, you don’t just stop.

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FEBRUARY 18, 2019

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 venture capital fund in NY. Twenty-five of them have at least one female co-founder. Fifteen had co-founders over 40.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 30, 2018

VC firms see thousands of deals and have a refined sense of how the market is valuing deals because they get price signals across all of these deals. What was the post money on your last round (and how much capital have you raised)? So why does a VC ask you? In the first place they’re looking for “fit” with their firm.

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JUNE 16, 2014

How long does it take from first meeting a VC to getting cash in the bank? Here were the results: I would guess that getting a third of my deals from events is probably disproportionately high compared to other seed investors on the east coast--and that my VC intro percentage is probably somewhat low. Venture Capital & Technology'

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MAY 12, 2014

million of initial capital with all its fees and stuff, and you''ve got about $6 million of gains. A fund that returns three dollars for every dollar of capital invested would be a $2.4 Venture Capital & Technology' Subtract the $8.3 That''s a little over a million dollar gain for me personally. million return for me.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 1, 2021

But until very recently, raising capital for your startup was significantly easier if it was located in the major startup hubs, most notably Silicon Valley. It takes a long time, at least five years and more likely a decade, to know how changes in the startup economy and venture capital will play out. And we are doing exactly that.

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OCTOBER 7, 2015

After checking out The Information's "open dataset" on diversity in venture capital , I felt pretty disappointed. Most people need a little bit of capital to bring a product to market--or they're an engineer. VCs have an inflated sense of the value of their own time.

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MAY 5, 2015

So I asked a few founders that I've worked with and they mentioned a word that struck me--because I've never heard any of the hordes of people in my inbox asking for internships, VC job recommendations and advice, etc. I think of venture capital as a service business. mention about themselves. Generosity.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 14, 2020

And here we are, with a 24×7 global marketplace for crypto assets that has a market capitalization of over half a trillion and daily volumes in the hundreds of billions. This pales in comparison to the legacy capital markets, but that is always the case with a new entrant on the scene. And many/most do that. USV TEAM POSTS:

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

I’ve heard a lot of people question whether there is too much money in venture capital chasing too few great deals. Others believe that new business models are emerging that could replace venture capital all together. We’re in a new tech bubble!” some have pronounced. Valuations are out of control” is the mantra of others.

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SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

how on Earth could the venture capital market stand still? One of the most common questions I’m asked by people intrigued by but also scared by venture capital and technology markets is some variant of, “Aren’t technology markets way overvalued? How our VC Firms Like Ours Organizing to Meet the Challenges? Of course we can’t.

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MAY 24, 2018

controlling your psychology ) you no doubt have heard me say that raising capital is a sales & marketing process. In order to understand how to “get to yes” with a VC you first need to understand how VC partnerships make decisions and then you can understand how to increase your odds of closing a deal.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 13, 2020

As policy makers around the world seek to mitigate the economic shock from this pandemic, one less obvious but powerful place to look are working capital flows. We also need our capital markets to work so actions like the Fed is taking are necessary and important.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

I always tell founders … “An investors job is to deploy capital and make a return. The typical VC process is as follows: They say there are three rules in property: Location, location, location. Same with VC. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. these are simply guidelines.

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JUNE 10, 2015

The last thing you want as either a founder or even a VC is to have an investor get stuck with you when you're not on the same page about expectations. I recently met up with an investor who I'm not totally sure is a fit for my second fund , so it was important to me that I was upfront about all the reasons why he shouldn't come in.

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DECEMBER 3, 2020

The partner at the fund, the VC, gets to do the fun part—the meeting with founders, vetting deals, negotiating, helping, etc. Having a better overall portfolio of venture capital by adding funds into the mix. In fact, that number is probably even more than the average VC fund has the bandwidth to make. So what’s the point?

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 16, 2015

That story actually begins about eleven or twelve years ago, with a little bit of VC mentoring. I was working for the GM pension fund, an institutional LP, as an analyst, doing a research project on consumer private equity and venture capital investing.

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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. As I was trying to figure out the role I wanted to play in the VC world I decided I wanted to focus on businesses that were building deeply technical products to solve problems for business users. VCs have different views and strategies on this.

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MAY 11, 2015

That's one thing you have to realize about venture capital. I have no idea. I just know what I do--and what I saw partners at other firms I've worked at do. Every single firm is different. How a partner at a firm spends their time is a function of the number of deals they do, the stage of the company, and their own personal style.

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The Seraf Compass

JANUARY 11, 2023

Now let's take a closer look at capital allocation strategy and the life cycle of a venture fund. In Part I of this article we discussed several key concepts of fund investment strategy and how funds are categorized, whether it be by industry, geography, stage, specialty (e.g. social impact, corporate, etc.) or some other criteria.

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OCTOBER 3, 2016

That was a question posed to me by a new analyst at a venture capital fund. While there are lots and lots of really kind, generous people working in venture capital--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. So what gives?

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 18, 2022

Those values, on a schedule of investments we publish to our investors every quarter, flow through to our financial statements and capital accounts and establish how much an interest in our partnerships are worth at that time. Every quarter our firm goes through a process to value our entire portfolio.

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venture capital capital ventures creativity 235

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JUNE 22, 2020

To a VC, $50,000 a pre-sale isn’t really that much. VCs are less interested that you sold 10 customers, 20, or 100—they want to understand how many you’re selling per week and whether or not that kind of pace would be profitable for your sales & marketing efforts. That’s why we invest in a portfolio.

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SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

I believe that the next generation of top companies are far more likely to be founded by people not on VC radars today. Last week, we ran Fall Fundraising Days , which featured 11 NYC events on raising capital that 800+ individuals attended across the week.

venture capital 252

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 20, 2015

VC funding. 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. It forces innovation.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 14, 2020

The NVCA and Pitch Book are out with their Q3 report on the VC industry and what they report is that the VC industry continues to be very active throughout the pandemic. The massive expansion of later-stage private capital continues unabated. The massive expansion of later-stage private capital continues unabated.

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JUNE 15, 2020

There have been a lot of calls for VC firms to make more hires from the Black and Brown community, as well as to hire more women. There are lots of problems with access to venture connections that account for some of this, but how you invest and pay your own team is the one indisputable thing that is in a VC firm’s control.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

Over the past month a colleague ( Chang Xu ) and I sifted through data on the venture capital industry (as we do every year) and made a bunch of calls to VCs and LPs to confirm our hypotheses. As a result of the IPO window shifting we saw a massive inflow of public-market capital into the latest stages of venture.

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investing investment VC venture capital 328

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 14, 2022

There is a lot of criticism of venture capital in web3. Bitcoin did not have or need venture capital. Ethereum did not have or need venture capital. So why would any web3 project need venture capital? That’s why you might want to take venture capital for your web3 project. It is a good question.

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MAY 16, 2024

There are more active VCs alive today than have ever existed in the history of modern human existence—and that dates back 300,000 years! This is something I talk about a lot with my VC coaching clients. That means a lot of competition for the best deals and more difficulty in standing out. The question is what to focus on.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 11, 2022

Something happened in the past 7 years in the startup and venture capital world that I hadn’t experienced since the late 90’s — we all began praying to the God of Valuation. How might our next phase of the journey seem brighter, even with more uncertain days for startups and capital markets? What happened? And it changed the culture.

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DECEMBER 16, 2014

We’ve been dying to tell you all for a while that we had raised a new venture capital fund and of course given SEC filing requirements the story was somewhat already scooped by the always-in-the-know Dan Primack a few weeks ago. If you want to understand how the VC industry is changing there is a great primer in the link.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 13, 2014

Investment experience (5 years a VC at Battery Ventures). As I like to say (and as Kara humbly hates when I do so in front of others) … she has a much better resume to a venture capital partner than I do. Upfront Ventures VC Industry' M&A experience (Morgan Stanley and later co-headed M&A for Barry Diller at IAC).

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FEBRUARY 21, 2021

Any VC will tell you that the ones they said yes to, they mostly got there right away—and that there are very few “maybe” deals that get tipped over the fence. Or that venture capital is a meritocracy? We know what the racial and gender wealth disparity looks like: This is a lesson taught to be by Jewel from Collab Capital.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 7, 2014

No VC will be so naive as not to see straight through it. When I first became a VC, seed rounds were typically $500k – $1.5 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.).

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OCTOBER 14, 2015

I spoke at Michael Kim’s excellent annual Cendana VC/LP conference today. One of the points I tried to make is that as venture capital investors as an industry we seem to have a healthy disdain for public market investors. What is your revenue growth rate and what does this imply about your number of months of capital remaining?

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