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6 Due Diligence Goals When Vetting Business Partners

Startup Professionals Musings

Business partners can be co-founders in a startup, multiple owners of an existing business, or a joint venture. As a former startup investor, I was often involved with due diligence on founders, and I felt that founders should do the same on co-founders, as well as investors.

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The iconic VC-Backed founders are all White & Asian men. So why invest in diversity?

David Teten

(co-written with Katherine Boe Heuck , a MBA candidate at MIT Sloan (class of 2022); past intern at Versatile VC ; and a current intern at Metaprop NYC.). All of the 40 companies’ 92 founders were male. Of the 19 Western Europe/Israel-based founders, all were white. Of the 43 U.S.-based Of course, this dataset is incomplete.

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Why Uber is The Revenge of the Founders

Steve Blank

Why do these founders get to stay around? Because the balance of power has dramatically shifted from investors to founders. — Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed: IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm.

Founder 245
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits.

Lean 335
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The Next Chapter for NextView

View from Seed

Stephanie is someone that we have known for almost a decade and have respected deeply as a co-investor and collaborator at Uncork. Through all of this, what has been obvious is her hunger to serve founders and desire to work with entrepreneurs to bring about the kind of world changing impact we seek to be a part of at NextView.

Cofounder 156
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How We Fight – Cofounders in Love and War

Steve Blank

I often get asked about finding cofounders and I usually give the standard list of characteristics of what I look for in a founder. And I emphasize the value of a founding team with complementary skills sets – i.e. the hacker/hustler/designer cofounder archetype for web/mobile apps. So I asked her to write a guest post.

Cofounder 329
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Announcing NextView Operator Guilds

View from Seed

The concept our Guilds is simple: We want to bring together small groups of Product and Go-to-Market experts to lend their time to support our portfolio company founders and key operators. Pierre Valade, Co-Founder of Sunrise & Mobile Designer at Microsoft. Brian Balfour, Founder & CEO of Reforge. Product Guild.