Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2011

Today’s post courtesy of the Dave McClure school of vocabulary. About a month ago I was meeting with a seasoned entrepreneur. After 10 minutes I felt like we were old buddies because we had both been through the trenches of startup tech land and had had similar experiences. He was recounting one of his higher profile startups to me. He founded the company, raised a bunch of money, built the product and established a good reputation and market position.

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 2, 2011

Back in the 60’s, JFK make a bold proclimation that we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The details of exactly how this was going to happen were a bit sketchy, but having a big hairy audacious goal galvanized the innovation community into achieving something spectacular. In today’s world, one of the bottlenecks we have to innovation is the lack of software development talent.

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Gust

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

The most successful serial entrepreneurs in the world may found three or four, perhaps even eight or ten venture-backed startups over the course of their careers. By contrast, venture capitalists and angel investors typically make scores or even hundreds of investments over the course of their careers. It should therefore come as no surprise that an asymmetry of information exists, mostly gleaned from experience, between founders and investors in a venture financing deal.

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For Entrepreneurs

APRIL 25, 2011

If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post outlines a framework that is designed to fire up your best creative thinking modes, triggering [.].

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Berkonomics

MARCH 28, 2011

Every entrepreneur has that moment of truth – the one that marks the decision to take the path to entrepreneurship or the path to job security with a larger employer. And down the road a bit, most of us face another when deciding whether or not to go for growth, requiring new investment and increased risks. My moment of self-confrontation came many years ago when deciding whether to leave behind the relative comfort of a good income from my one person operation or hire my first employee to allo

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2011

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement&# as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 17, 2011

I went to undergrad at UCSD, which is not a place known for its Greek institutions and my father grew up in South America and had know idea what a fraternity was. So I went to college with no expectation that I would ever join a fraternity let alone aspire to become president one day. Yet being in a fraternity was one of the most transformative experiences I had in college and prepared me better for becoming an entrepreneur than any class that I took.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A slightly shorter version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch ). As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativit

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

Last night I had the great privilege to interview Bill Gross , one of the Internet’s true pioneers. To say he has had an impact on the web would be an understatement. His impact has even helped a small country gain admission to the United Nations. All of that are in this week’s episode of This Week in VC. Summary notes, as always, provide below.

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financing

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 22, 2011

I’m often asked by people what investment areas interest me. It’s true that I have a functional focus on three areas: Performance-based marketing, digital television and mobile computing. I try to invest in things that I know and that I believe I might have better knowledge and relationships than the masses of VCs. I have other areas of interest & competence such as cloud computing and document management given my background.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2011

I’m often asked the question about why there aren’t more women who are entrepreneurs. On my blog I’ve been hesitant to take the topic head on. Somehow it seems kind of strange for a man to answer this question that obviously comes from a man’s point of view. But last week I noticed a blog post by a woman, Tara Tiger Brown, that asked the question, “ Why Aren’t More Women Commenting on VC Blog Posts?

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2011

In this three-part series I will explore the ways that the Venture Capital industry has changed over the past 5 years that I would argue are a direct result of changes in the software industry, not the other way around. Specifically, Amazon has changed our entire industry in profound ways often not attributed strongly enough to them. I believe the changes to the industry will be lasting rather than temporal change.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 27, 2011

This post originally ran on TechCrunch. Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted. By definition, you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absofuckinglutely. This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about. 1.

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technology

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

I recently gave a talk about the Future of Television. I’m still planning to write some in depth pieces on the topic but I thought, “given that this is about how video will consume the Internet over the next 5 years, what better way to exemplify this than with a 10-minute video.” Here’s a link to watch it or click the image below.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 2, 2011

Several people have been asking me to weigh in publicly on the “20 under 20″ initiative announced by Peter Thiel in which he will award up to $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 who agree immediately to pursue entrepreneurship (the implication of which is that they’d drop out of university to do so). Thiel and friends will also agree to mentor these young entrepreneurs.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

This article originally ran on TechCrunch. I’m in Seattle this week. People keep asking me if I’ve “seen anything interesting.&# Of course I have. I’m an entrepreneur at heart so I’m always inspired when I hear stories about innovation. I really liked BigDoor, MediaPiston, OpsCode, BuddyTV, SEOMoz and much more. Can’t list them all.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below. The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N).

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opportunity

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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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

This post originally ran on TechCrunch. I recently spoke at the Founder Showcase at the request of Adeo Ressi. I asked what the audience most needed to hear. He said, “They need an unbiased view of the fund raising environment because there is too much misinformation and everything seems to be changing fast.&#. This was an audience of mostly first-time entrepreneurs.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2011

This article first appeared on TechCrunch. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the proliferation of starutps in the past 2 years. It seems almost incomprehensible that only 2.5 years ago we read the “ RIP Good Times &# presentation from Sequoia. But what does this all mean? Are we headed for a long era of innovation in which startups are the new norm?

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 9, 2011

This article was originally published on TechCrunch. Venture Capitalists typically have partners’ meetings on Mondays. Why is that? Who knows. But probably because as a group we travel a lot. So the industry formed around a day of the week when all partners could avoid having company board meetings or traveling. Yesterday was a Monday. And not a pleasant one.

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B2B marketing

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 19, 2011

I recently sat down with Matt Coffin , the founder of LowerMyBills, which sold for $400 million but was very nearly a bankruptcy only a few years early, and talked “startups.&#. Matt is one of the most transparent, focused & honest startup guys you’ll meet. You can watch him on YouTube , download in iTunes (for gym or commute) 3/31/11 edition.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2011

What a sweet feeling it was last week to see the launch of the photo sharing site Pose , whose application targets shoppers of apparel. If you don’t know it and own an iPhone (soon Android) please check it out. What I’d like to do is tell you the story of how the investment came to be, what my thesis is / was and share some thoughts on macro trends.

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2011

I sometimes feel that the Silicon Valley culture and we as technologists more broadly can breed monoculture in our approach to entrepreneurship, problem solving, market analysis and technology solutions. Experiences way beyond any hack-a-thon, startup blog or your current company engagement can enrich your thinking and challenge you to think more broadly about the solutions you offer in the market.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2011

Yesterday I wrote Part 1 of the series on the changes to the software industry over the past decade that has led to changes in the venture capital industry itself. If you don’t want to read that post, the summary is: Open source computing drove computing costs down 90%, which spurred innovation in technology. Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90%.

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Speaker: Wayne Spivak - President and Chief Financial Officer of SBA * Consulting LTD, Industry Writer, and Public Speaker

The old adages that "cash is king" and "you can’t spend profits" still hold true today. But however well-known these sayings might be, it requires a change in mindset to properly implement a cash flow management system that predicts your business's runaway as accurately as possible. Key to this new mindset is understanding the difference between the Statement of Cash Flows, a historical look at the source and uses of cash, and the Cash Flow Statement, which uses transaction history and forward-l

financing