Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

Nearly four months ago we rebranded at Upfront Ventures. You can watch the video above for a very brief overview of why we rebranded and where we see our place in the VC ecosystem along with what has changed in our industry. Relaunching our brand is part of our larger initiative to build a VC firm of the future.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca For the first 5 years or so after I became a VC I didn’t talk much about what I thought a VC should be excellent at since frankly I wasn’t sure. It’s easy to think the role of a VC is to have strong opinions about markets, trends, tech dynamics and so forth. The role of VC is sparring partner.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 28, 2018

There’s a quick litmus-test conversation any early-stage VC will have with the founder and it’s one that you should be as prepared for as your elevator pitch. It goes something like this … VC: “How much money are you raising?” Founder: “$8–10 million” VC: “What’s your current burn rate?” A VC is looking for reasonableness.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 10, 2020

Many founders want to do SAFE note financings for their early rounds to save time and money. My response to that is “let’s do a priced round, we can use a standard financing form we both like, we won’t use a lawyer on our side, and we can close in a week.” Everything else is pretty standard anyway.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 13, 2014

After years of trying to persuade Kara Nortman to become a partner at Upfront Ventures I can officially announce now that she’s joined us effective immediately. Investment experience (5 years a VC at Battery Ventures). Kara has worked in finance in Boston, NYC and Silicon Valley.

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This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 28, 2013

However, in this moment, I think one''s career in venture capital depends on changing your perspective. The biggest question I think VC''s face right now is whether or not, in the future, the best founders will look and act like the best founders of the past. It was exactly how you''d imagine a venture firm to throw a party.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. As a VC you want to feel like you have “proprietary sources” of deal flow. They are venture bankers not investment bankers. ” I love businesses that don’t lend themselves well to VC Panels at conferences or Demo Days.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 26, 2022

Photo by Scott Clark for Upfront Ventures (no, Evan is not standing on a box) Last year marked the 25th anniversary for Upfront Ventures and what a year it was. 2021 saw phenomenal returns for our industry and it topped off more than a decade of unprecedented VC growth. What do you do with a $650 million platform?

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 27, 2014

What you’ll see if you watch the video is an unscripted and unfiltered look into how Scott Kupor & I see some of the changes and challenges of the venture industry. The only point we didn’t seem totally aligned on was what we happening to the “middle of the VC market.” tl;dr version.

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Dream It

DECEMBER 19, 2019

million Series A financing round led by San Francisco-based Builders VC. Also participating in the round are Dreamit Ventures , Spring Point Partners, Red & Blue Ventures, and AWT Private Investments. The deal was led by Builders VC partner Mark H Goldstein, who is also the Chairman of the UCSF HealthHub. “In

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This is going to be BIG.

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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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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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

This is part of a series of advice for founders who need to raise money from venture capitalists. The typical VC process is as follows: They say there are three rules in property: Location, location, location. Of course there’s no exact number of VCs you should meet?—?these Same with VC. these are simply guidelines.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

Viewing the article through the lens of a venture capitalist there’s much to agree with under the mantra of “growth!” He also nails the reason why venture capital is still necessary to grow large businesses quickly in a world where the costs of running startups have fallen dramatically. So I like that bit, too.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2013

If you track the venture capital industry it would be hard to miss the conversation going on this week over AngelList “Syndicates.” My favorite new VC blogger, Hunter Walk, weighed in with some thoughtful comments about how Syndicates might actually pit, “ angel vs. angel.” Must be doing something right!

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2016

Non VC Growth Rounds. The other major trend of 2012–2015 was the entrance of “non VCs” into late-stages of venture capital , which mostly consisted of hedge funds, mutual funds, corporate investors, sovereign wealth funds and even LPs doing direct deals. VC Infighting. Some called this “buying logos.”

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Dream It

APRIL 12, 2020

During our recent Dreamit Kickoff week, Bullpen Capital Founder and General Partner Paul Martino ( @ahpah ) spoke with our Spring 2020 cohort about the state of the VC ecosystem in the current economic crisis. Will a financial crisis affect how venture funds deploy capital? Startups should know how VCs work.

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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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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 8, 2015

But Fab fell into the trap that many companies who go down the VC route fall into--too much money, too soon, and growing too fast. Small world, it turns out I also knew his husband from the finance world having met him over 10 years ago. Venture Capital & Technology' That was the core of what Bradford brought to that company.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 24, 2014

I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. In 2010 somebody posed the question on Quora, “Is Mark Suster a Successful Venture Capitalist?” years ago. Since then? None have exited.

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VC venture capital financing finance 387

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Go pitch a VC with an idea, and they''ll tell you to build it. Finance is changing. Venture Capital & Technology' Go to them with a prototype and they''ll tell you to launch it. Launch it, and they''ll tell you to get more users. Get users and they''ll tell you to get paying customers. TVs are changing.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 30, 2014

Today I’m handing her the largest A-round check I’ve ever written as a VC as we lead her $10 million A-Round at uBeam. As I’ve written about recently, at Upfront Ventures we started talking a couple of years ago about wanting to fund stuff with more meaning. Upfront Ventures'

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2014

We are often asked how companies get funded, why VCs make the decisions we make and what we’re looking for in entrepreneurs. I think this is a Seriously great example of how this process works for at least one VC – Upfront Ventures. So I hope that offers you insights into how companies move through the VC system.

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Jason Malki

MARCH 9, 2023

I had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Sheffield, the Founder & Managing Partner of Pachamama Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in US early-stage climate tech companies. She is also a Finance Director at Visa and has previously worked for PepsiCo and American Airlines. How did you break into tech investing?

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TechCrunch

OCTOBER 4, 2022

So instead of going out and raising venture capital, we decided that we were going to bootstrap because we could convince some landlords to list their homes on this platform that we had built and derisk some of their problems.”. million seed funding led by Los Angeles–based early-stage VC firm MaC Venture Capital.

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The Seraf Compass

MAY 4, 2022

Daniel Ibri is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Mindset Ventures, which invests in early-stage startups from Israel and USA. He is also a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at INSPER in São Paulo, and member of the Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Seed Capital Committee of the Brazilian Association for PE & VC.

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This is going to be BIG.

MAY 4, 2022

I’m a straight white dude who grew up in NYC and worked in finance. I’m the on-paper poster child for “who can get VC dollars”. Will the money have been worth it if you find yourself out on the street, fired from your own company, just a few years later—replaced by some guy that was in the same fraternity as your lead VC?

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 31, 2020

So today, I will write about 2020 in the context of tech/startups/VC/crypto. 3/ Technology based commerce solutions gain when less people venture into stores to buy groceries, clothes, and other consumer products. And they finance the trend that they are directionally correct about. That’s just how things are.

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TechCrunch

MARCH 16, 2021

The global venture capital ecosystem is inequitable. In the United States’ mature venture capital market, an entrepreneur’s race, gender and age help determine who has access to capital. Yes, venture capital startup hubs can take decades to reach maturity. But there are other limiting factors: geography, for example.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 6, 2013

He wanted to work in venture capital and I was new to the industry and in no position to hire anybody. Monitor had a little internal VC group so he got some experience there. More like a temporary VC just to get some experience and of course we’d pay him. I’ll leave the year out. I saw it as win-win.

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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. Between 2006–2008 I sold both companies that I had started and became a VC. THE VC VALUATION GOD Valuation obsession wasn’t restricted to startups.

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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). Does he blog about venture capital and try to advise entrepreneurs? Has written a book on venture capital. You betcha.

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TechCrunch

MARCH 11, 2021

David Teten is founder of Versatile VC and writes periodically at teten.com and @dteten. 15 steps to fundraising a new VC or private equity fund. Stéphane Nasser is co-founder of OpenVC , an open-source initiative to collect and analyze all VC theses. VC websites by David Teten and Sam Sabin , co-founder of Hireblue.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2014

It was 2009 and it was terribly difficult to get any financing (if you can remember a time like that!) Throughout all of these years I was a full-time VC so Launchpad really came out of evenings and weekends for me. Adam had a full time startup and then was doing consulting (he later raised a VC fund). So we went for it.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 20, 2020

If you search for “vc open for business” on Twitter , you will see almost universal scorn for the idea that VCs are open for business right now. We have mostly seen VC firms live up to the commitments they made pre-pandemic and in the cases where terms changed, it has not been not gratuitous.

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Revolution

MAY 11, 2023

Our findings confirmed a significant shift away from the traditional tech hubs of the Bay Area, New York City, and Boston, with the proportion of seed- and early-stage VC dollars funneling into the Bay Area falling below 30% for the first time in more than a decade. marking its highest level since 2017. Seed- and Early-Stage U.S,

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 11, 2021

Trust, which today has announced a $9 million financing (Upfront is an investor), is a platform designed to help make the most of marketing investment by providing both analytics and a community of likeminded executives to share what’s working, and what’s not, across platforms. Why Did I Invest in Trust?

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