Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

I’m over-paying for every check I write into the VC ecosystem and valuations are being pushed up to absurd levels and many of these valuations and companies won’t hold in the long term. However, to be a great VC you have to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. Where are Things Headed for VC in 2031?

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ventures VC venture capital funders 471

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Many deals – VC or otherwise – didn’t close. VC, sales, biz dev, M&A or otherwise. Especially in VC. You know that every turn of the legal documents can add weeks. They’re not bothered when the lawyers didn’t get the documents out when they promised. Push hard to document turns. Any deal. Things change.

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venture capital advice VC real estate 301

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

” This is a frequent theme of mine when asked to speak to audience about the VC industry. And this is fueled by the VC culture in Silicon Valley. I was recently talking to a VC about a business I was looking at and I was asking whether he found the business interesting, too. It is VC math, like it or not.

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startup VC venture capital entrepreneurs 390

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 3, 2016

In the VC insider baseball world a discussion has gone on about “VC platforms” over the past 5 or so years. While firms define platforms differently, let’s just say they are the services that a VC offers outside of investment capital and partner time on boards or providing intros.

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VC peer-to-peer mix-use leadership 198

TechCrunch

MARCH 9, 2021

Dropbox announced today that it plans to acquire DocSend for $165 million The company helps customers share and track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment. In fact, among the earliest use cases for the company was helping startups track engagement with their pitch decks at VC firms.

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startup disruption pitching VC 139

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

I was on This Week in Venture Capital today with Jason Calacanis talking about the big VC deals at the moment and talking about the VC industry. Didn’t discuss much but I love the online document collaboration area that Box.net serves including players like Dropbox, Drop.io, DocStoc, Scribed and SlideShare. and much more.

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venture capital ventures capital VC 232

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

2 weeks later and we may never have raised any more VC. I hired a senior exec from the building materials industry (we were a document collaboration company for the engineering & construction industry) who was also ex McKinsey. I did almost every VC meeting myself save for when one of my co-founders, Tim Barker, was in town.

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startup founder founder startup VC 299

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 14, 2018

Here’s Why You Should Just Send the Deck I know you have your document sending tool to send your fund-raising deck to VCs and track who read your deck, which pages they read and how much time they spend on each page. Your deck should be so good that a VC asks you for permission to show it to his or her portfolio companies.

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VC pitching strategy investing 239

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2018

Or if you’re a VC raising from LPs you have to list all of your deals, your investment value, your carrying value, your multiples, your IRRs, TVPIs, DPIs, etc along with net cashflows plus your previous LPAs. These collective sets of documents form the basis of what somebody looking at investing would call “financial due diligence.”

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advice VC entrepreneurs investing 336

Dream It

APRIL 7, 2020

Expect quick loan application processing once banks formalize their processes Work with specific investors and your law firm on affiliation to address specific problematic covenants, if your company is VC-backed. What protective provisions are VC firms willing to forgo to ensure that my company doesn’t get deemed as affiliated?

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startup communities VC ventures 348

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2009

One of the questions I’m most often asked as a VC is what I’m looking for in an investment. I once had a debate with a prominent VC on a panel. The moderator asked the question, “if an entrepreneur writes an email to a VC and doesn’t hear back what should they do?&# This VC responded, “Move on.

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entrepreneurs peer-to-peer advice VC 338

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 19, 2011

And yes, VC’s, too. You thought it was going to be as easy as just having term sheet transferred to a longer form document. But every freakin’ week there are delays in getting the lawyers to “turn around&# the documents. Negotiate directly with your VC or acquirer with lawyers present in the room.

real estate 319

real estate VC pitching entrepreneurs 319

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 1, 2010

In today’s post I want to talk about the concept of a VC flightpath. This is my description of a VC process, not one I’ve heard from other VCs so don’t expect it to be accepted nomenclature. Even when you’re getting the VC love this reality I imagined couldn’t be further from the truth.

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VC venture capital pitching board 275

This is going to be BIG.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

Back when I was pitching my previous startup to investors, it had never really dawned on me that they had experienced what I was going through--and that a VC firm was essentially a startup. VCs pitch for money, too. No one ever thinks about VCs having to pitch, who they pitch to, or how it works.

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ventures pitching VC startup ecosystem 280

TechCrunch

MARCH 3, 2021

“Investors see a lot of pitches,” VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman noted. “In We used what we know about language and healthy communication from the millions of documents we’ve processed at Writer to come up with 11 words and phrases to remove from your VC pitch deck: Negative associations.

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pitching VC strategy leadership 113

Gust

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

In recent years, startup accelerators such as Y Combinator, TechStars or 500 Startups, blogs including Venture Hacks, Fred Wilson’s A VC and Mark Suster’s Both Sides of the Table, and other resources have contributed to closing this knowledge gap. See my blogroll for links to many of the best resources.) Knowledge is power.

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financing finance VC entrepreneurs 178

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

Generally speaking in venture capital financings the legal documents will specify that only “major investors” (a threshold set in the agreement – which can be $500,000 investor or more). Fundraising / Negotiations Startup Lessons VC Industry' How party rounds can burn you if it takes time to find your groove.

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venture capital VC board financing 352

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 17, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC “ There’s a great meme developing this morning on the need to simplify funding terms and documents. They eventually took money from non-traditional VC based in the UK. 2006 was the last time I went out to raise venture capital. I have this mentality, too.

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founder pitching VC advice 252

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

If you’ve ever had to take out a loan, you know just how many documents are involved in the approval process. Ocrolus is a startup that is hoping to change that with an automation platform that it says analyzes financial documents with over 99% accuracy. It’s a lot. We wanted to create a new way of doing this.

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VC accelerator capital ventures 97

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

.” I applaud all efforts by people to take on this issue and especially be Adeo who – let’s be honest – was really the first champion of trying to make the VC world more transparent by launching TheFunded, which didn’t exactly endear him to VCs initially. They’ll get priced soon enough by a VC.”

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startup VC entrepreneurs financing 354

TechCrunch

MARCH 4, 2022

The D’Amelio family, including TikTok stars and digital creators Charli D’Amelio and sister Dixie , are formalizing their investments in startups with the launch of a new VC fund, 444 Capital. Renert notes the fund doesn’t conflict with his work at Tandem, however, as the VC firm chose not to raise another fund at this time.

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VC capital investing investment 98

Gust

SEPTEMBER 27, 2014

A typical VC might see 500 opportunities cross his or her desk every year; for larger, more prominent ones it could be 2,000. VCs therefore use whatever heuristics they can in order to triage the deal flow. That means they spend a lot less time actively seeking out new deals than they do responding to inbound deal flow.

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VC angel investing pitching entrepreneurs 159

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2012

I would never as a VC fund a round and then expect somebody else to pay a higher price right after me. I also would never expect another VC to do that to me. Especially if it was memorialized in the documents why you were doing it. For the most part I agree with Fred. You can do it with equity & a price.

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financing finance pitching VC 294

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 13, 2019

It’s a tricky subject, because VCs only exist to make money—not really to oversee the running of these companies as beneficial to the world, unless it gets so bad that it affects the economic outcome. Not only that, we have other portfolio companies to worry about.

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culture incumbents enablement sustainability 317

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 10, 2015

If you generate outbound email campaigns to groups of potential buyers you can use SalesLoft or tools like Yesware and ToutApp to track whether people opened your emails, clicked on your links, downloaded your documents, etc. So understanding the stage of a VC matters. Also, you need to consider the type of investments each VC does.

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VC entrepreneurs investing investment 329

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2017

The Black Swan should be required reading for any VC or investor. Since I had built 2 document management companies I knew all the reasons why building a document management company would “never work.” I remember when I spoke with Aaron Levie early in the days of Box. billion!

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construction venture capital consulting support 182

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JANUARY 1, 2024

The AI “stack” has emerged with Large Language Models and other important models (like audio, imagery, video, etc) operating in the cloud with well-documented and supported APIs that are available to developers to build on. I think both will grow but not nearly as fast as the sectors that surround VC.

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energy venture capital innovation capital 236

Entrepreneur's Handbook

JUNE 21, 2022

A founder’s guide to startup due diligence What are your chances of actually getting funded by a top VC? The trick, according to private equity lawyer Baz Banai , is to think like a VC , and vet your startup accordingly. As you come across key documents, transfer these into the corresponding folders. Let’s get to it. Weekly ??

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VC startup advice media 86

Gust

AUGUST 23, 2014

“Information rights” (the ability to come into the office and ask questions and view documents). Monthly, quarterly or annual narrative management reports. Annual budgets. original post can be found on Quora @ [link] *. Invested Interests'

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investing investment VC board 139

TechCrunch

MAY 28, 2022

” The document reads like a follow-up course to its infamously ill-timed “Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020” memo of March 2020. The storied venture firm is known to react to macroeconomic events with grand memos aimed at portfolio companies and sometimes the entrepreneurship scene at large.

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VC advice entrepreneurship sustainability 123

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

I want to make sure that my sixth year as a VC doesn’t just become an automatic continuation of what I’ve done in my first 5 years. This can be your star Chief Architect who loves to code but hates having to handle the admin like testing, documentation, recruiting, etc. I don’t want to be on autopilot.

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creativity venture capital entrepreneurs board 400

TechCrunch

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

.” (The Transformer, pioneered by Google researchers, is perhaps the most popular architecture at present for natural language tasks, demonstrating an aptitude not only for generating code but also for summarizing documents, translating between languages and even analyzing biological sequences.) The short-term goal (i.e.,

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 8, 2022

If the bridge documents do not specify anything in this situation, the noteholders will only get their money back, plus interest, in a sale. The ideal discount is between 10% and 20% and so the time frame for the various discounts should be set with that in mind.

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financing finance leadership capital 265

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 21, 2010

They also help you surface things like documents that you shared with other people without having to look through a bunch of old emails to find them. Tags: This Week in Venture Capital VC Industry. Enter Xobni. They help you built insights into whom you connect with the most via email or whom you haven’t contacted in a long time.

venture capital 265

venture capital peer-to-peer capital ventures 265

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2013

And precisely because buyers usually prefer to have limited money go to investors – investors almost always have the ability to say “no” to transactions in the terms of their funding documents (aka “blocking rights”). I’m a VC. And reward your existing top 10% of employees handsomely.

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strategy venture capital advice entrepreneurs 357

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2011

You just have to deal with some insufferable VCs and journalists for a while. It is the same movie I saw 10 years ago when every VC would say to me, “yeah, I get that you’re an online document sharing service, but what’s going to happen when Microsoft enters the market? They risk little but of course knew better all along.

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innovation VC networking disruption 325

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2010

You’ve found a VC partner or principal who has invited you to the Monday partners’ meeting. This is true whether your at a sales meeting or at a VC firm. This happens often is sales meetings or VC meetings. As both an entrepreneur (in VC and sales meetings) and as a VC I’ve seen this happen many times.

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advice VC pitching venture capital 318