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Is a Venture Studio Right for You?

Steve Blank

Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stage startup failure by helping teams find product/market fit and raise initial capital. They do the most to de-risk the early stages of a startup. I pointed out that there were.

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What’s Your VC Tech Stack? Results from a Survey of Early-Stage VC Funds

David Teten

As a globally focused LP in early stage VC funds, we at Blue Future Partners have observed a growing trend of firms investing substantially in software tools, whether developing proprietary solutions or adopting off the shelf tools. But what tools are they using themselves to automate their own processes?

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Flexible VC, a New Model for Companies Targeting Profitability

David Teten

(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad.

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How to Scale a Venture Capital (or Private Equity) Fund

David Teten

Managers of VC funds typically want to grow their business aggressively, just like the founders we back. But, we normally have a clear ceiling on how high we can grow AUM, before hitting practical limits to deploying capital within the traditional VC model. . This evolves the VC from a server to a router.

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Revenue-Based Investing: A New Option for Founders who Care About Control

David Teten

Though RBI will displace some traditional equity VC, its much bigger impact will be to expand the pool of capital available for early-stage entrepreneurs. . However, only recently have early-stage companies started to use this model at any scale. . RBI structures help to protect the equity of both founders and investors.

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How Private Equity and Venture Capital Investors Are Eating Their Own Dogfood

David Teten

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. Relationship Science makes it easier to understand and map social networks into potential limited partners. 2) Raise capital.

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You Don't Need a Co-Founder

This is going to be BIG.

I've heard a lot of VCs tell founders they need co-founders--and that they wouldn't look at a business at a very early stage without a co-founder. A lot of accelerators treat solo founders the same way--making it an implied requirement to participate. The same holds true for VC funds.