Genuine VC

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Boston’s WebInno Is Now BIG

Genuine VC

Back in June, the local Boston tech community together celebrated the ten year anniversary of the Web Innovators Group, affectionately known as “WebInno.” Now Boston’s largest regular tech conference, every few months it draws hundreds of attendees from the entrepreneurial ecosystem – including founders, software engineers, startup executives, and investors.

Boston 100
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Announcing Our Investment in Renoviso

Genuine VC

A few years ago I replaced all of the decades-old windows in our home with new ones. The entire process was horrible. I used home service lead-gen and recommendation-review sites to identify a half-dozen installers to set up initial in-person consultation appointments. Only half of them even showed up. For those who did, I was offered a set of confusing options with opaque pricing without any relative understanding of the quality of the service or the product itself.

Syndicate 100
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Seeking Nonconsensus

Genuine VC

Tales become legends about founders of exceptionally transformative companies who truly struggled to get any investors’ attention early on. These rejection emails to the founder of Airbnb represent just one of the most recent example of this familiar theme. If a startup were obvious, then everybody would be doing it. And it wouldn’t be an opportunity.

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Introducing the NextView Talent Exchange: Connecting Top Talent to Startups

Genuine VC

Today, I’m thrilled to publicly announce NextView’s Talent Exchange, a program helping both top talent and NextView-backed startups connect with each other more easily, beginning with Boston companies (which make up just over half our portfolio). Below, I’ll quickly explain the genesis of this initiative and share a few more key details. One of my first mentors in venture capital explained to me that the key role of a VC is to “aggregate talent.

Portfolio 100
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Fellow VCs: Here’s Where to Invest $1B+

Genuine VC

'A couple weeks ago my colleague Dimitri Dadiomov published a post on NextView’s “View From Seed” blog which answered the question “Should we take Harvard MBAs Seriously as Startup Founders?” The (obvious) answer of “yes” he supported with comprehensive research about the entrepreneurial activity coming out of Harvard’s business school. We knew that it was formidable, but the sheer number of founders, companies founded, dollars raised, and (early) exits from HBS founders over the past six years

Cofounder 100
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VC Ground Game

Genuine VC

'Conventional wisdom says that the best way to meet with a venture capitalist is to get a warm introduction. (While it’s a good rule of thumb, it’s not entirely true, which I’ve blogged about previously.) However, there’s another way that I’ve seen entrepreneurs use mutual connections that’s even more impactful than a warm introduction: a proactive inbound reference.

Finance 100
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The “Come-from-Behind” Lead Investor

Genuine VC

'As an entrepreneur, if you’re running a venture capital fundraise effectively, you’re treating the process like a sale process: identifying a set of prospects to fill the top of the funnel, cultivating those relationships over a series of meetings, then narrowing down to a handful of contender firms who will ultimately make an offer to invest with a term sheet.