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Startups and Intellectual Property (IP)

May 16, 2012
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Lately questions about Intellectual Property or IP have been cropping up left and right.  Eliot Durbin (my partner at BOLDstart Ventures) and I had a long discussion this morning in preparation for his panel today about IP and patents.  Last week, we met with a company and when we asked about their core IP, they [...]

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What entrepreneurs can learn from Jeff Spicoli

Jan 25, 2012
in Entrepreneurship

I know I may be dating myself here, but over the past few weeks I couldn’t help but think about the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High and one of the standout characters, Jeff Spicoli.  When asked by Mr. Hand, his teacher, why he keeps coming late and wasting his time, Spicoli answers, “I don’t [...]

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Startups getting caught in No Man’s Land

Sep 29, 2011
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

“No Man’s Land” is traditionally known as the area between two trenches.  This is a reference to World War I and the vicious trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat that characterized that war. In “No Man’s Land” lay a wasteland of dead bodies and other debris and shrapnel.  Increasingly I am seeing many startups who were ably [...]

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The New York Startup Market Rocks and is REAL

Apr 15, 2011
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

OK, I may be biased having been an early stage VC based out of New York since 1996, but I must say that the vibe, energy, and people at the Techstars NYC Demo Day event yesterday was simply awesome.  Dave Tisch and team simply did a fantastic job guiding the startups, recruiting the mentors, and [...]

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Reflecting on passed investments

Apr 5, 2011
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Every 3 months I dig through my “passed company” folder to look at what investment opportunities we passed on and why.  Inevitably, there are a few companies that are near-misses, but we end up passing on for whatever reason.  Did we pass because we didn’t think the team was great or because we didn’t believe [...]

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Know When to Hold 'em, Know When to Fold 'em

Feb 14, 2011
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

I had a tough call with an entrepreneur this morning.  His company raised a fair amount of seed financing but did not hit the milestones it needed to in order to raise a real round of venture capital.  The product is nice but they took too long iterating and releasing a subsequent version while the [...]

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Put your users first!

Jan 13, 2011
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

As a VC who invests in seed and first rounds, I love revenue just as much as the next guy.  However, the focus on revenue should play second fiddle to a user/customer first experience.  Over the years, how many times have we seen companies grow from next to nothing in user base and somehow forget [...]

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Standard investor update for startups

Oct 20, 2010
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

I remember when we hired a new CEO for one of our portfolio companies and my tip to him was to overcommunicate.  We had a few large VCs on the board and a number of high-profile angels that could also help in various ways.  His job was to keep everyone up-to-date but also to know [...]

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Scaling your management style

Sep 30, 2010
in Entrepreneurship

After meeting with a number of entrepreneurs I recently seed funded, it was clear to me that one of the major challenges founders face is how to continue to scale their management style.  My preferred seed investment is in an engineering driven/product focused team who can code and get product out the door under the [...]

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The consumer Internet business is not easy

Sep 28, 2010
in Entrepreneurship

It's not easy to build a service that everyone loves and even harder to build one that gets 3000 new users a day on an installed base of 2 million users.  Once there you may think of yourself in the drivers seat as having built a successful company.  Unfortunately, this is where the need for [...]

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