BeyondVC

No matter how many times I told my friend that he needed to get a deck together for a potential capital raise and model out some thoughts on market sizing and financials, I ran into resistance.  It was not because he didn't think it was important or that it mattered.  It was because he was [...]

A friend of mine is putting together his first deck for potential investors.  In typical startup fashion, they launched a product, got a number of users, and then iterated several times to improve the service.  With the product in the hands of tens of thousands of users, they started getting inbound requests from larger organizations [...]

The alarm bells are ringing in Silicon Valley and start-up land today with Sequoia Capital and Ron Conway telling companies to prepare for the economic meltdown and to raise cash by cutting their burn.  This is not new news as being in New York we started to feel the real economic impact in mid-September as [...]

The economy is clearly slowing down and the IPO market is nonexistent.  As I have always said, this is the time to hunker down and tweak your business to get your model right.  If you are interested in exiting today, M&A continues to be the only viable path along that front.  Having been through a [...]

What I like to tell portfolio companies is that on average it will take 6 months to raise capital with some cycles being shorter and some being longer. Given that, it is imperative for a company to start thinking about its next round well ahead of time and the milestones it needs to hit to [...]

It seems that everyday there is a new annoucement of a tiny startup being bought by a large company.  Two days ago it was Jaiku being bought by Google and this morning CBS announced that it is buying Dotspotter, a 10 month old gossip blog.  Put yourself in these entrepreneurs’ shoes – you launch a [...]

I am sure you remember the ebay-Skype deal where ebay coughed up $2.6b upfront for Skype and offered an earnout of up to another $1.7b for hitting performance numbers.  Besides the value of the deal, what struck me most was that 40% of the total potential deal size was based on performance-based milestones.  Fast forward [...]