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APRIL 6, 2020

There is so much confusion and misinformation out there about the government sponsored “payroll protection plan” loans to companies that the heads of every small business CEO in the country must be spinning. We have been advising a lot of entrepreneurs so I thought I’d “open source” some of the advice I have been sharing. I am not claiming to be the world expert on this.

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APRIL 1, 2020

In the past two weeks we have entered perhaps to most surreal experience in any of our lives. I think intuitively many of us believe it may be a more lasting impact than just “60 days at home,” which is why we almost have a nervous laughter when we call (Zoom!) somebody we haven’t spoken to since before the crisis and acknowledge how bizarre we all feel right now.

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AUGUST 26, 2019

Some Seriously Great News. No, Seriously … Exactly six years ago today I received an email from my friend Ynon Kreiz introducing me to Andrew Stalbow and Petri Järvilehto. Ynon had been the CEO of Maker Studios and I trust his opinion a great deal so of course I took the meeting. Andrew and Petri had left game developer Rovio (of Angry Birds fame) and were creating a new games company called Seriously that would combine compelling intellectual property (characters), great narratives, and fun gam

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MAY 22, 2019

Announcing Projector?—?A Startup I’ve Been Excited to Tell You About for Years A few years ago I spent time in prison with Trevor O’Brien , the founder of Projector. Yes, I always imagined announcing the company that way. We were of course there to work with incarcerated men on developing entrepreneurial skills on behalf of Defy Ventures. We had met previously when Trevor was a product manager at YouTube and Upfront had funded the largest video producer on YouTube, Maker Studios.

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MAY 21, 2019

Managing Your Startup Board?—?A Short Presentation I was invited to do a keynote presentation at the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this week in Sausalito. It was an amazing gathering of some of the most ambitious early-stage CEO’s looking to make a dent in fields related to healthcare, biology, AI and other transformative fields. It’s encouraging to know that there are still great VC firms like KV that are looking to make these short of big bets on shaping the future.

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MARCH 11, 2019

Photo by Juliette F on Unsplash Networking is a critical part of relationship building and there is no event more valuable to building relationships than the proverbial “breaking of bread” with people. I personally run many group lunches & dinners and I attend even more so I’ve developed a set of tips I often pass along in how to make these the most effective they can be.

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FEBRUARY 25, 2019

I’ve sat on many boards over the past 2 decades and seen my share of high-functioning boards and low-functioning boards. Here are some observations I have from this exposure: If a company moves from strength-to-strength with predictable outcomes, easy financings, low staff turn-over, limited competitive threats then the composition of the board probably doesn’t matter as much.

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FEBRUARY 21, 2019

Should All of Your Management Team Attend Board Meetings? The age old question for every startup is whom to involve in the board meeting. The reality is that there are some board meetings in which having a broad set of management present is a great idea and there are some meetings where in can be a hindrance. Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash The goal of the best run boards ought to be to balance information dissemination with using the brain trust of the company to guide critical decisions.

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FEBRUARY 6, 2019

I’ve heard a lot of people question whether there is too much money in venture capital chasing too few great deals. “We’re in a new tech bubble!” some have pronounced. “Valuations are out of control” is the mantra of others. Others believe that new business models are emerging that could replace venture capital all together. Every year I try to answer the question of “what has changed in the Venture Capital industry” and this year my colleague Chang Xu and I took a deep dive through the data and

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AUGUST 5, 2018

I just returned from a week’s vacation in the mountains where I had almost no Internet access but was aware that Ronan Farrow had published a damning sexual misconduct article about Les Moonves, the Chairman & CEO of publicly traded company CBS Corporation. Now home, I finally had the chance to fetch the New Yorker from my mailbox and read the article in its entirety and it’s clear to me that Les Moonves needs to go and no doubt will go in the near future.

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MAY 10, 2018

Whether you’re fund raising from angels, seed investors and VCs?—?as an industry we succumb to “herd mentality.” There are a few exceptions and originally thinkers but it’s maddening how much group think and need for social proof there are. Nobody commits, nobody wants to set a price, nobody wants to stick their neck out then BOOM! Reid Hoffman is in?

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MAY 7, 2018

There is an old management saying, “measure twice, cut once” which refers to the benefit of doing some planning. It’s the antithesis of “ready, fire, aim” which seems to be so prevalent in today’s society. The benefits you will receive from doing even some basic planning before you hit the fund raising trail are enormous. This post has some basic advice on how to plan your raise before you hit the road.

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MAY 6, 2018

Fund raising. It definitely has a “d” in it, as in it’s really not fun, raising. But it’s critical for your business, for you as a leader and people who excel at fund raising have an extreme advantage over those who do not. The best entrepreneurs in our industry focus on it year-round as opposed to just once every 18 months. As a VC with scores of startups in our portfolio we have ringside seats to many, many fund raising processes plus I had to raise money across about 5 different rounds of cap

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APRIL 12, 2018

Many people will write the history on why Ring became an enormously successful company and why it became a real-world unicorn in a world when many startups are anointed that merely on paper. Since I had a ringside seat to the company before it really existed all the way through the end I thought I’d offer my version and what I think it means for our future.

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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 11, 2018

If a picture is worth a thousand words then you already know that Chamillionaire is having a great time with his new startup Convoz. He’s here on stage with Snoop Dogg and they had just dialed in Shaq to record a live video for his platform. It was just announced today on TechCrunch. We’ve known each other for nearly a decade and he’s been a friend, a co-investor in startups and a mentor to many startups with whom I’ve worked.

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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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DECEMBER 6, 2017

Time Magazine published its “person of the year” edition today and honored “the silence breakers” for speaking up and forcing our society to confront its position towards men in power exploiting their power for sexual gain. Real change is clearly needed. These brave women who have taken on personal risks and faced doubters to change the culture globally to stop sexual misconduct, harassment & gender bias deserve the recognition x1000 along with the many other women who have spoken up.

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JULY 17, 2017

Starting back in 2015 and throughout much of 2016 people started commenting that my blog had become a lot more political. I guess I didn’t see it quite that way. My blog has always been a mixture of what was on my mind and a blend of venture, startup life, tech views and current society events that related to my interests: Venture, startup & tech.

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JUNE 25, 2017

Fresno State students receive supplies for school with help from Renaissance Scholars staff John Hunt, Jr. (left) and Kizzy Lopez (right). We’re all bombarded with social media campaigns asking for us to Tweet, share, like, change our badge, use a hashtag or generally show outrage at a topic du jour. We jump in when we feel compelled or want to support the person who enlisted us.

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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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MAY 17, 2017

I’ve been involved with several startups where a giant incumbent attacks you and tries to sue you out of existence. When you first receive the threat it feels like the local pizza shop when they first get a call from the local mafia boss and you can feel the shake-down coming. The first instinct is fear, then dread, then panic. You begin to think about how hard it will be to fund raise, sign customers, hire employees, etc. with the cloud of a lawsuit hanging over you.

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APRIL 23, 2017

When you run a startup you’re always on borrowed time. You have cash in the bank, a monthly burn rate and a “cash out” date that few in the company truly comprehend. I’ve never met a founder who wasn’t acutely aware of his or her ticking time bomb and the sense that failure and humiliation is a real possibility. It’s why so few can really start a business from scratch.

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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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APRIL 12, 2017

The modern world is filled with constant distractions. Only those with maniacal focus on results and a willingness not to engage in every activity achieve extraordinary results. As executives we’re all seemingly accessible at any moment to anybody via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Text. We are over-intro’d and at the same time under-resourced in terms of staff to handle the barrage of in-bound requests.

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FEBRUARY 20, 2017

It’s easy to find yourself caught in the trap of just GSD (getting s**t done) and not stepping back to be thoughtful about whether you’d benefit from doing fewer things but doing those things truly well. It’s the parable of the tree-chopping team that is so focused on efficiency of how fast it can fell a tree that it doesn’t bother to make sure it is clearing the forest in the right direction when one person actually stops the constant cutting to climb a tree and make sure they’re cutting in the

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FEBRUARY 17, 2017

One of the most talked about Fireside Chat’s of the 2-day Upfront Summit was the talk between my friend Joe Green and Pete Buttigieg , the mayor of South Bend, Indiana aka “The Happy Warrior” currently in a bid to become the new head of the DNC ( you can learn more here ). Joe and Pete went to college together at Harvard. Joe went on to create Causes with Sean Parker, then Nation Builder, Fwd.us with Mark Zuckerberg and more recently another startup, which I’m not sure whether it’s public so I w

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FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Every tech or major news journal in the country is preparing to write their Snap, Inc (creators of Snapchat, Spectacles, etc) stories and many of them seem to want a “How does it feel to have missed this investment story.” I won’t speak to most of them due to time and also due to the fact that I simply am not the story and don’t want to pretend like I am.

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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 5, 2017

Glenn Beck holds court at the Upfront Summit with legendary VC Vinod Khosla and UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla (not related) If you asked me a year ago when we were hosting the 2016 Upfront Summit the odds of Glenn Beck speaking at the next Summit I would have emphatically said ZERO. The first sign that there might be more to Glenn Beck than the impressions I had had from occasionally watching a clip from his show was when he wrote a very thoughtful piece about the Facebook algorithm and I was s

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DECEMBER 12, 2016

Today it has been announced that I’m leading a $15 million funding round in Tact , a new generation of Enterprise Software company along with other investors including Microsoft Ventures and previous investors Accel and Redpoint Rather than just waxing lyrically about how great the company is I thought I’d provide some context about why I invested and also about a fundamental change I see in the coming years in the way enterprise software is used.

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NOVEMBER 12, 2016

This election has been hard on our country. I have had numerous conversations with people who struggle to call home and speak with family or friends because the divisions are too raw. These are people who now live in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York City but grew up in Cincinnati, Central Florida, Utah, Michigan and similar places where their parents, families or friends may have different political views.

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OCTOBER 12, 2016

I was asked to be the host at this year’s CoachArt Gala of Champions event on October 27th at the esteemed Beverly Hilton hotel. The goal is to raise money to help children with chronic illness get ongoing instruction in sports, art, music or whatever endeavor would help them get fulfillment in life. You can book tickets here (or make a donation if you can’t make the event) If you happen to live in LA (or in the Bay Area — we’re only an hour’s flight) I would love if you would consider attending

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OCTOBER 11, 2016

Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca For the first 5 years or so after I became a VC I didn’t talk much about what I thought a VC should be excellent at since frankly I wasn’t sure. I was mostly doing my job and trying to figure out how to be better every day. After a decade on the job I’ve started to speak more openly when newer industry colleagues now ask me what I’ve learned.

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar ’s startup Imbellus , a company designed to assess human potential and ultimately change the way we teach children. We led a $4 million investment along with Thrive Capital, GLG and Sound Ventures. The news blogs will cover the what, how and how much but I want to focus on the “why” and try to be instructive of what I think makes for a great A-round startup.

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JULY 4, 2016

In modern society we’re all over-worked and over-loaded with information and tasks and to-dos and obligations. Nowhere is this more apparent than working in a startup where you are definitionally under-resourced and trying to make big accomplishments in compressed periods of time. That’s why focus is critical. Saying “no” often to people who want to divert you from your mission becomes obligatory if you want to make progress.

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JUNE 5, 2016

The funding environment for tech startups is an ever shifting ground as we go through predictable shifts that go hand-in-hand with the slowing of the overall market. The most important shift I would characterize as the market moving from “high conviction” and thus strong follow-ons to “limited conviction” and lots of gamesmanship / games of chicken … at your expense.

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