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Praying to the God of Valuation

Both Sides of the Table

2001–2007: THE BUILDING YEARS The dot com bubble had burst. Almost no financings, many VCs and tech startups cratered for the second time in less than a decade following the dot com bursting. During this era, from 2009–2015, most founders I knew were in it for building great & sustainable companies. Until we weren’t.

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7 Attributes of An Entrepreneur's Startup Dream Team

Startup Professionals Musings

Thus the top priority of every entrepreneur who wants funding should be to build and highlight their “dream team” of co-founders, executives and advisers, to attract the biggest and best investors. Even if your product is a technological marvel, I look for balanced strength on the team in finance, marketing and operations.

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The Changing Venture Landscape

Both Sides of the Table

And the loosening of federal monetary policies, particularly in the US, has pushed more dollars into the venture ecosystems at every stage of financing. What Has Changed in Financing? They might be ideas they hatch internally (via a Foundry) or a founder who just left SpaceX and raises money to search for an idea.

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Rally Software Acquired By CA Technologies for $480 Million

Feld Thoughts

For example, from a post in 2008 about Rally’s $16.85m financing , I riffed on the origins of the company. I remember my friend Ryan Martens sitting down with me and Chris Wand around 2001 and walking us through his idea for changing the how he approached managing the software development process.

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Be Careful not to be Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Both Sides of the Table

Justyn Howard, founder of Sprout Social has a blog post that he’s written about his experiences of migrating from scrappy tools to more efficient ones (i.e. We went “nuclear&# and slimmed down to 33 people (yes, I know, still large by today’s standards but this was 2001), raised $10 million and we built a real company.

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On Bubbles … And Why We’ll Be Just Fine

Both Sides of the Table

I recently spoke at the Founder Showcase at the request of Adeo Ressi. I said that at the Founder Showcase, too. And for many of these they were (over) funded 7-10 years ago and don’t necessarily all represent great returns for investors or founders. Or worse yet they may never get financed. Have a cushion.

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My story and support for the Founders Visa

K9 Ventures

In the past few days there has been a lot of discussion on the topic of a Founders Visa. The credit for starting this fire goes to Paul Graham from Y Combinator , who wrote a great essay titled The Founders Visa in April 2009. As an immigrant founder, this is a topic that I can relate to and care about.