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APRIL 18, 2019

The Truth About the Scooter Economy?—?An Insider’s Perspective “Bird Zero” that are custom designed by the company There is a story arc of the electric scooter market that took the world by storm in 2018, was second-guessed late in the year and has quietly re-emerged as a powerful force of growth where few really appreciate the speed and scale of what has happened.

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South America Global New York City Software Review 250

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FEBRUARY 28, 2019

Photo by Filipe Delgado from Pexels We’ve all been in meetings that get off track?—?sinking ever down the proverbial “rat hole,” from which rescue feels impossible. How does it happen? And how can you avoid it? This is part of a series on Managing Boards. In my last post I wrote about board preparation before the meeting and frankly this can be applied to any type of meeting.

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FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Most board meetings are administrative updates that accomplish very little other than inform board members about the performance of the company since the last board meeting. That’s certainly one function of every board but if your board is your “brain trust” and the people you can most use as a sounding board to help you make the toughest decisions in your company and if its the one group truly privy to your most confidential information and your hardest choices then it’s a shame if you don’t ge

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FEBRUARY 24, 2019

When you set up a board it is often initially a combination of the founders and the early investors. It can start 2–1 founders to investors and then sometimes moves to 3–2 but sometime around the A, B or C round the idea of “independent” directors comes up. This post sets out how I believe founders (and investors) should think about independent board members having worked with many of them for the past 20 years.

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FEBRUARY 24, 2019

I have been writing a series on how startup boards get selected, who sits on them and what to avoid. I will also delve into how to prepare for them, how to make the meeting effective and how to best follow up to make sure people take action. Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash In response to one of my posts I saw this great Tweet by Bilal Zuberi and it resonated.

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FEBRUARY 8, 2019

As you may know we run an annual conference called The Upfront Summit in which we try to bring together the world of investors, entrepreneurs and interesting people from the world of sports, politics, music & film. We do this to showcase what is uniquely LA and to create a more cohesive network in our community. We have sought ways to make it more open while not turning it into a mega conference so while we have capped it at 1,000 attendees, starting a couple of years ago we opened up the ev

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FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Stacey Abrams Interviewed by Lisa Borders, CEO of TimesUp This past week Stacey Abrams spoke at The Upfront Summit in a 25-minute talk followed by a breakout town hall discussion. You may know that later today she will deliver the response to The State of the Union speech by the president. She was interviewed by Lisa Borders, CEO of TimesUp (who spoke separately, video will be released soon).

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JULY 17, 2018

One thing that comes with being a venture capitalist is you see hundreds and hundreds of businesses. You get to have interesting conversations with founders and review business plans and then see how these businesses evolve over the years. A firm like ours has almost 100 different investments across all the various partners so we get to see some businesses very intimately.

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JUNE 22, 2018

There are times to fight. No great startup has been built without getting one’s knuckles bloody at times. This is especially true because incumbents now know how much is at stake when they let a startup get a huge head start in a market. So if you’re in a battle, if you’re right, if you feel confident you can win and importantly if the prize for winning is worth the fight?

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JUNE 18, 2018

For Father’s Day I was watching the most heartfelt movies I’ve seen in a long time, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It is a movie that will both lift you up with the possibilities of how much of an individual person can have a positive impact on masses of people as well as challenge you about what you’re doing to make the world a slightly better place. It is a movie that will have you laughing raucously and sniffling uncontrollably in joy and sorrow.

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MAY 30, 2018

One of the hardest things about the fund-raising process for entrepreneurs is that you’re trying to raise money from people who have “asymmetric information.” VC firms see thousands of deals and have a refined sense of how the market is valuing deals because they get price signals across all of these deals. As an entrepreneur it can feel as intimidating as going to buy a car where the dealer knows the price of every make & model of a car and you’re guessing at how much to pay.

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MAY 28, 2018

There’s a quick litmus-test conversation any early-stage VC will have with the founder and it’s one that you should be as prepared for as your elevator pitch. It goes something like this … VC: “How much money are you raising?” Founder: “$8–10 million” VC: “What’s your current burn rate?” Founder: “$250k / month.” VC: “So at a constant rate of burn rate you’d be raising enough for 2.5–3 years.

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Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Dilution 247

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MAY 13, 2018

This is part of a series of advice for founders who need to raise money from venture capitalists. The first in the series is “ Lemons Ripen Early ,” which also has a link to other posts. The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed.

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MARCH 8, 2018

Upfront Ventures has a deep-seated commitment to equality in funding & building diverse teams across all ethnicities, nationalities and genders. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do but also we believe it will help drive large and differentiated returns. In 2017 we began inserting an “Inclusion Clause” into our term sheets because we believe that the culture one establishes at the earliest stages of one’s business will set out the course of how it will grow and develop.

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MARCH 3, 2018

León Krauze from Univisión gave an impassioned keynote presentation at The Upfront Summit on the topic of “invisibility” of immigrant workers in our society. It moved people to tears, was widely Tweeted and several people asked me to share this video. Invisibility. The millions of immigrant workers who silently wash dishes in restaurants, are prep cooks, pick the agriculture that feeds us, build our houses, clean our houses, watch our kids and do our gardening are vilified as criminals by those

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FEBRUARY 28, 2018

There has always been tension between CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies and the retailers who sell their products to consumers. If a consumer will pay a fixed price for a product or service then the battle over who gets the margin in any sale is between the person who merchandises a product and the person who manufactures it. This is an age-old marketplace tension where leverage often determines the value captured.

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FEBRUARY 14, 2018

If you haven’t yet heard about Female Founder Office Hours it is an initiative you should be aware of whether you’re male, female or any other gender identify. The idea is simple enough: several female VC partners at top funds will hold 1-hour meetings with 40 promising female entrepreneurs looking to get advice on their business and pitch in a friendly, non-judgmental, safe environment.

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DECEMBER 13, 2017

Men use similar tropes on why #MeToo may go too far. It’s time to break these down. It’s time for more men to start saying, “enough is enough,” “I believe her,” and “I will step out of my comfort zone and speak up so that others feel empowered to follow me.” Men will make mistakes. But mistakes are much better than silence. Mistakes are better than condoning misconduct, harassment, bias or abuse.

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NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Nearly every successful tech startup I’ve observed over the past 20 years has gone through a similar growth pattern: Innovate, systematize then scale operations. An alternate outcome that I also unfortunately observe in some cases are companies who had extreme early success with an initial product adoption but failed in key areas that limited the growth and therefore the ultimate financial outcomes.

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Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

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SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

Why the Former President of Nickelodeon Joined mitú as CEO. (Hint: 60 million US Latinos driving US growth engine) I am beyond excited to announce the Herb Scannell has agreed to move from NYC to Los Angeles to take on the role of CEO at mitú, the fast growing Latino digital media company, serving more than 100 million monthly unique viewers. Herb is a Puerto-Rican American media executive who was previously the President of Nickelodeon.

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AUGUST 15, 2017

Many board meetings are bored meetings. Management teams whisk through slides trying to get through a presentation to share how great things are going and they are eager to get through the meeting so they can get back to their real jobs. This is a shame since the value that the right board could add is immense if you select the right board members and manage them effectively.

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AUGUST 14, 2017

There’s a lot of mystique about what happens at board meetings and a lot of imagined board-room drama. I read commentary or Twitter or blogs and realize that there are also strongly held convictions that there are these evil VCs who do terrible things to mostly altruistic founders. The image of boards and of investors vs. founder conflicts has been so at odds with my experiences on dozens of boards over the past 20 years that I thought it was worth sharing what I actually see.

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JULY 16, 2017

Like many people these days, I spent much of my 20’s and early 30’s thinking about work & fun and not too much about “the future.” Like characters from one of my favorite novels “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being ” life seemed very light. My first son was born the day before my 35th birthday so the decade that followed was very heavy and consequential.

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JUNE 19, 2017

One of the hardest decisions entrepreneurs make when they start a company and raise outside capital is figuring out what an acceptable “burn rate” is. That is, how much should your company be willing to lose in cash every month as you make investments in staff and equipment that funds technology, sales, marketing and management. Of course there is no right answer but it’s a function of how much capital you have raised, your prospects for raising more capital in the future, your growth rate and y

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JUNE 17, 2017

There are certain topics that even some of the smartest people I talk with who aren’t startup oriented can’t fully grok. One of them is whether profitability matters. It’s common cocktail party chatter to hear people confidently pronounce that some well known startup is sure to blow up because, “How could they succeed when they’re not even profitable!

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Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

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MAY 21, 2017

I am wired to discount people who have total assuredness in their point-of-view, have dogmatic positions or use data as a crutch or substitute for logic. I appreciate people who have strong opinions or conviction but expect them to constantly be testing their opinions and refining their approaches as they encounter new people, facts or logic. I have long believed that humans (myself included) err on the side of over-confidence in their own abilities and thoughts.

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APRIL 20, 2017

Just over a year ago I wrote about how MakeSpace had raised $17.5 million in capital to build out its operations in 4 cities: New York City , Los Angeles , Chicago and Washington D.C. I pointed out that the storage market in the US alone is ~$30 billion / year and there is no dominant provider — the largest player has < 10% market share. If you have a storage need in one of these cities please consider checking out MakeSpace.

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Technical Review Los Angeles Software Review Artificial Inteligence 268

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FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Upfront Ventures was created 20 years ago as one of the original VC funds in Los Angeles. Back then only 15% of our dollars were invested locally whereas today 50% of our dollars are invested in LA. 10 years ago we found ourselves trying to persuade LPs and VCs that it was worth spending more time getting to know the LA market and now the most common refrain that I hear from them is “there really is something going on in LA.

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FEBRUARY 12, 2017

BuzzFeed. It conjures up a range of emotions anytime I’ve privately expressed my opinion to thought leaders in our industry that I believe it is one of the most innovative companies in digital media. Some, of course, agree with me that BuzzFeed has been and continues to be the gold standard innovator in digital media to emulate. Others are skeptical, “Ha!

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FEBRUARY 7, 2017

Mark Cuban opened the Upfront Summit in an epic interview by Jason Hirschhorn , founder of Media REDEF. Machine Learning / AI They discussed many topics ranging from protection of the press to what Mark looks for in an entrepreneur to investing outside of Silicon Valley and of course Trump and sports. But perhaps to most insightful was their discussion about Machine Learning / AI.

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Artificial Inteligence Silicon Valley San Francisco Technical Review 105

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JANUARY 29, 2017

Trump. In a week there is enough evidence to know that he truly is the narcissistic child and xenophobic race-baiter we saw during the election and that wasn’t just reality TV to get him elected. Here is a quote you should regret believing “ The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” You should all take him literally.

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NOVEMBER 17, 2016

I’ve had this conversation many times. A friend calls me up from: Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, wherever and says, “I’m thinking about moving to Los Angeles (or SF, NY, etc) and I’d love to start interviewing. Let me know if you hear of anything interesting.” I usually slip into counsel mode and tell them it’s a lost cause unless they’re truly committed to living in that city and if they are they should move there first and job search second.

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NOVEMBER 9, 2016

The morning after. I Tweeted vociferously last night in my stupor and despair. Most of my tribe emoted publicly, too, any many more countless others texted me constantly in disbelief. I haven’t felt this way since 9/11. No — I’m not equating the two actions. I’m just telling you the depths of how this decision makes me feel. A number of people I don’t know told me on Twitter to “calm down” or “Everything will be OK.

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NOVEMBER 9, 2016

I received this email from a friend. He gave me permission to publish it but asked to do so anonymously. It was so thoughtful, so gracious, so explanatory — I felt you would all enjoy reading it. It’s from a startup founder. It’s unedited. “i read your tweets tonight, mark. i am there with you. i grew up in the suburbs of cleveland, ohio and i was hopeful because my high school buddies who live there and are conservatives told me they could never vote for hillary, but they couldn’t vote for trum

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OCTOBER 15, 2016

I know the title “I promise you one of the most meaningful days of your life” sounds grandiose but I mean it and I hope you’ll read through to the end and choose to take one small, totally free action, that will change your life and likely those of others. On September 10th of this year I spent an entire day in California State Prison with people who had committed felonies and worked with them on business plans to help them create legal enterprise upon their release as part of Defy Ventures 6-mo

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California Programming Private Equity Equity 150

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SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

Yesterday was the opening of the African American Museum in Washington DC, dedicated to the role that African Americans have played in building our country and our culture. It was signed into law 13 years ago by then president George W. Bush after being sponsored by the bipartisan support of Rep John Lewis (D) and Sen Sam Brownback (R). Many of you saw the photo released above of first lady Michelle Obama embracing former president Bush.

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SEPTEMBER 17, 2016

There’s an old saying in polite circles in the United States that there are two things one should never talk about a social gatherings: Politics & Religion. I think this is so engrained in the psyche of many Americans that in times of great need many still won’t speak out publicly about what they say privately. With just over 50 days until we elect a new president of the US it’s critical for the interests of yourself and your fellow citizens that more of you speak up.

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