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ESADE Business School Commencement Speech

Steve Blank

As the venture capital business has come roaring back in the last 5 years, startups are awash in available capital. Unfortunately as we’ve learned from recent experience, using Return on Net Assets and IRR as proxies for efficiency and execution won’t save a company when their industry encounters creative disruption.

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Intel Disrupted: Why large companies find it difficult to innovate, and what they can do about it

Steve Blank

As a consequence, corporations used metrics like return on net assets (RONA), return on capital deployed, and internal rate of return (IRR) to measure efficiency. For the first 75 years of the 20 th century, when capital for new ventures was scarce, the smartest engineering talent went to corporate R&D labs.

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A Closer Look At The Quality Of Angel Returns Data

David Teten

The good news for Techcrunch readers: Every major study conducted to date has placed angel investors’ IRR between 18 and 38 percent, as summarized by my Partner John Frankel and Professor Robert Wiltbank in prior Techcrunch articles. Every major angel study conducted to date has shown high IRR.

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How to Impress Angel Investors and Make It into “Startup Heaven”

Up and Running

For example, one of the angels I pitched to cared deeply about our competitive landscape, whereas another wasn’t too concerned about the competitive landscape, he was more interested in our financial assumptions and my team’s ability to implement in an agile fashion. Angels vs. venture capitalists. What impresses angels?

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The VC Shakeout: Are We There Yet?

Agile VC

There are some obvious structural reasons why a shakeout in the venture capital industry takes a long time. The reality is that it wasn’t until the GEC (Global Economic Crisis, Great Recession, Credit Crunch, call it what you will) of late 2008 and early 2009 that the shakeout really began for venture capital.

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