Archive | Venture Capital RSS feed for this section

Learning lessons from Amp'd Mobile

Jul 31, 2007
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Wireless

I am not here to pile on the Amp’d Mobile situation, but I find it is always important to learn as much as you can from your mistakes and from other people’s mistakes.  Rafat Ali has a great interview with Peter Adderton, the former CEO of Amp’d Mobile.  Here are a couple of interesting points [...]

Read full story • Comments { 2 }

Are all of the venture returns in B2B?

Jul 16, 2007
in Venture Capital

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today about how the resurgence of tech IPOs have really come from "less glamorous, business-focused companies selling such products as telecommunications equipment and computer storage."  In fact many of these companies have market caps > than $1b each.  The article is right in that alot of buzz [...]

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Don't forget to look at venture debt when raising a new round

Jun 11, 2007
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

We all know the story – it is incredibly cheaper to start a web-based business versus 5 years ago with the rise of open source software and commodity servers.  However, while getting started with thousands of users is cheap, scaling to significant numbers will require some dollars.  The good news for you and for venture [...]

Read full story • Comments { 6 }

Microsoft VC Summit 2007

Mar 19, 2007
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

The day after Microsoft’s TellMe aquisition, I was at Microsoft’s eighth annual VC Summit.  Unfortunately, I missed Steve Ballmer’s opening discussion, which in my opinion, is always one of the most entertaining and informative sessions of the event.  For the last few years, Steve spoke at the end of the event but for some reason [...]

Read full story • Comments { 4 }

The similarities between venture capitalists and social workers

Dec 20, 2006
in Venture Capital

I had an interesting call this morning with an entrepreneur who had been up until the wee hours of the morning reviewing legal documents for a big strategic partnership.   He apologized about his state of mind which wasn’t exactly calm and cool, and we proceeded to discuss the issues and parse out the major ones [...]

Read full story • Comments { 5 }

Podcast with Heather Green of Businessweek

Sep 14, 2006
in Venture Capital

I recently had the opportunity to do a podcast with Heather Green of BusinessWeek and Blogspotting.  If you have a desire to hear about some of the areas I find interesting and to learn about pitfalls to avoid for startups, I suggest that you download the show.  My only regret is that we did not [...]

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Add Startup Review to your blogroll

Sep 13, 2006
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Nisan Gabbay of Sierra Ventures recently contacted me with respect to his new blog, Startup Review.  According to Nisan: Startup Review will be a blog that profiles successful Internet start-ups in a case study format. The case studies will analyze the key factors that made the companies successful, with an emphasis on strategy and product [...]

Read full story • Comments { 3 }

Platform Wars, battle for startup mindshare

May 19, 2006
in Venture Capital

Have we been through this discussion before?  Remember the eWeek article from last year titled "Is .Net failing to draw VC loyalty?" and the corresponding discussion in the blogosphere, including my post?  Well, it seems that SAP is taking a page out of the old Java venture fund camp to seed companies and help them [...]

Read full story • Comments { 1 }

Microsoft VC Summit

May 12, 2006
in Venture Capital

I had the opportunity to attend my third Microsoft VC Summit in California on Thursday.  It was a great opportunity for VCs to network with Microsoft’s top executives.  This year’s focus was on Unified Communications, Saas, and Windows Live (includes MSN).  While I won’t go into excruciating detail on the sessions, one of the highlights [...]

Read full story • Comments { 11 }

VCs and VOIP

Apr 27, 2006
in Venture Capital, VOIP

Here is a link to an article on VCs and VOIP (via Andy Abramson of VOIPWatch).  There are some VCs who think it it too crowded and others (like myself) who still see opportunities.  However, the one thing I was not pleased about is that the only quote the author uses for me did not [...]

Read full story • Comments { 1 }
« Newer Entries
Older Entries »