Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz , who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Inte

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 4, 2011

I was out at Strata, the O'Reilly "making data work" conference. I think that the only VCs there were myself and the IA Ventures team--a stark contrast to some of the other mainstream tech conferences that are pretty densely populated with investor types. What is striking me to me is how many times I was been asked "What are you doing here?". Seems that in the absence of a pitch competition or some kind of immediately obvious venture investment opportunity, people aren't used to seeing VCs.

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Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 14, 2011

We have discussed why never to run out of cash. This insight delves into how never to run out of cash. There are four basic ways to increase the cash position of a company: inject cash through borrowing or investment, decrease spending or payments on debt, increase efficiency of operations, and increase revenues or advance payments from customers.

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For Entrepreneurs

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

How to make sure your sales forecast has been properly validated so it will stand up to test of time (and investor scrutiny). This blog post looks at the process that I would use as a board member or investor to validate a bookings forecast, checking to see if the key elements that are needed to support that forecast have been thought through properly.

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strategy

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

This post originally ran on TechCrunch. Lately I have seen a number of deals announced on TechCrunch in which 5 or more different VCs were participating in the deal. This always makes me chuckle because in my first company we had 5 investors in our first round and we picked up 5 more before we finally sold the company. In my second company I had only 1 investor.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

The venture capital industry is so heavily skewed to Northern California, which the remains spilled over Boston, New York & Southern California. There are of course other outposts like Austin and Seattle. So it was wonderful to hear from a leading venture capital firm based in Washington DC. Revolution is a “stage agnostic&# fund (means they invest early or late) funded entirely by Steve Case , the founder of AOL and co-founded by two other individuals, Tige Savage (yes, pronounced lik

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

As many of you know I run a weekly webcast called This Week in VC that’s getting between 25-35,000 weekly views across ThisWeekIn.com, YouTube & mostly iTunes. Yesterday’s show floored me. I consider Gregg Spiridellis a good friend. We’ve hung out periodically over the past few years and I have enjoyed debating many startup topics.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

One of the great joys of doing the web series This Week in VC every week is that I get to spend time with great people debating the issues of our day including how our industry is evolving as well as insights into how companies got started, got their initial traction and dealt with adversities. “But Mark, isn’t it one big time suck?&#. Oh, yeah.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

This article originally appeared on Silicon Alley Insider. A few months ago I wrote a post called “ Invest in Lines, Not Dots.&# It was my investment philosophy that observing teams’ performance over time was far more insightful than reacting to how good of a product demo they do, how good they present Powerpoint slides or how great tech blogs say they are.

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startup

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. My first startup was no different.

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

Great, so you’ve closed on some cash and now it’s time to get to work—except that now you have all these random people who wrote you checks asking you questions, wanting to know what they can do, introducing you to people, etc. How do you manage these relationships? Investors have the same issue. You met a great team and you want to see what they can do, but you know there’s a great syndicate around the table so you figure that you’re not going to be depended on that much for day to day work.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2011

In case you missed all the kerfuffle this weekend, I posted this blog post originally on TechCrunch. I attempted to do a fair balance job of an increasingly important service – AngelList – started by a friend of mine – Nivi with the feelings of a colleague who I respect – Bryce – who has opted out of the service. I hope I straddled people’s points of view well enough not to have offended anybody while adding a framework for how I think about the service.

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

We all have things that get under our skin--and when they turn up, they get us going from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. Every frustration, every bit of negativity cumulated over every previous encounter--it all just sits there waiting to get turned on like some big machine. Often times, they're things we can do nothing about or they're things we probably shouldn't let get to us, but in the moment, that doesn't matter.

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financing

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 8, 2011

Seven years ago (yesterday, it seems… I had the date wrong in my calendar), I started this blog. I did it because I had gotten into a daily habit of writing working on a book for college students. I never got it published (might go back and edit it at some point), but I liked the discipline of writing and needed an outlet. In seven years, I’ve thought a lot of things.

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 10, 2011

As much as I trumpet New York City as *the* place to build a company nowadays, I’m a full supporter of the meme of building where you are and what suits your company best. There are lots of places that successful companies grow up—and as more cities develop critical masses of technical and entrepreneurial talent, you’re going to see a lot more dispersion of startup success.

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Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Money in the bank is like oil in the car. This is such an obvious observation that you should think that it does not rise to the level of an “insight”. Yet, there is sage advice behind this statement that I could not ignore placing it right in the middle of these insights. As an executive, you have many ways you are pulled every day, both tactical and strategic.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 1, 2011

Recommendation Slicing. The Internet has a problem. It’s one you know well. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting out of hand. In non-geek speak this means that there is so much information out there now it’s hard to separate the good stuff from the rest. We all now visit UGC sites to learn about products & services before we use them.

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technology

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 26, 2011

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

A year ago I blogged about one of my most common mantras that applies to sales, biz dev & fund raising alike: “ Time is the Enemy of all Deals.&#. When times are really good for fund raising many teams delay to maximize their valuation. Sometimes this pays off, other times it doesn’t. So how should you decide what to do? I thought I’d try to offer a framework for thinking about the topic.

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

You know what they say: "The best laid plans.". Over the last week, I've sat down with a handful of entreprenuers and given the same advice--to construct the fantasy model. Yet, we know very well that the most thoughtfully constructed cashflow models and hockey stick traffic predictions never come out the way we thought they would, so what's the point of making them at all?

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 23, 2011

Here's an exercise. It's a little bit lean startup, but it's a little more involved than a customer call. For anyone who is building something to be monetized in the future--a content site, a community for brands to interact in, etc--write up your sales deck for monetization now as if it was six months to a year in the future. So, instead of pitching VCs for money now, assume that everything you tell investors about the future is going to happen.

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opportunity

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 27, 2011

It is easier to start something now than ever before. The ability of social media to help you get escape velocity is great, but it cuts both ways. A strong value proposition carried at the speed of Twitter and Facebook to the right audience could crush your company just as fast as it grew if you can’t scale. Despite advances in cloud infrastructure, many businesses still have fleshy parts—soft underbellies where a human hand is required to keep quality control, stuff something into a

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

picplz_upload , originally uploaded by ceonyc.

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Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 21, 2011

This is one of those “My dad used to say” homilies. You’ve probably heard the accompanying “It takes just as much effort to sell a small deal as a big one” over the years. The truth of this is more nuanced. Some businesses will prosper in the shadow of larger competitors by specializing in those smaller accounts that are just not attractive to those with higher overheads and larger aspirations.

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Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 28, 2011

Place your cash bets behind proven demand. The term, “demand pull – cost push” was created by the great economist, John Maynard Keynes, to describe the two primary drivers of economic inflation. Demand pull: too much demand for a product or service and not enough supply cause a competition for the product that drives prices higher without increasing the intrinsic value of the product.

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opportunity 54

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