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Steel In Their Eyes – Why VC’s Should Be Startup CEO’s

Steve Blank

None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “ Hail Mary ” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster. People skills. People skills. Fund raising skills.

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On Funding?—?The Denominator Effect

Both Sides of the Table

The Denominator Effect I recently wrote a post about funding for investors to think about having a diversified portfolio , which I called “shots on goal.” The thesis is that before investing in an early-stage startup it is close to impossible to know which of the deals you did will break out to the upside. Don’t rush to do deals.

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

David Teten

First Round Capital’s forum for portfolio executives is a powerful example of a scaleable resource. The firm attracts deal flow by promising a decision (positive or negative) in under 2 weeks, with minimal paperwork and without repeating due diligence. – Provide hands-on operational support for portfolio companies.

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

David Teten

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. 4) Manage deal flow. 6) Negotiate deal. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce.

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Is gust.com a difficult platform to replicate?

Gust

As such, creating a functional clone of Gust (including all the features under the hood, and ones that have not yet been released), using world-class engineers and state-of-the-art, 2012 project management in Ruby on Rails, would take roughly 20 person-years from soup to nuts (figure about 1/3 of that in product/UX/UI and 2/3 in actual coding.)

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How to Build a Successful and Diverse Venture Capital Portfolio Without Really Trying

This is going to be BIG.

Who is actually building a portfolio whose founders reflect the diversity of the greater population? I went back and calculated the number of companies in the first Brooklyn Bridge Ventures portfolio who have at least one founder who is female, from an underrepresented minority group, or LGBT.

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A Venture Capital History Perspective From Jack Tankersley

Feld Thoughts

Secondly, the driver of returns for the funds raised in 1978 – 1981 was not their underlying portfolios, at what stage, or in what industries they were built. As dollars flowed into the industry, cooperation was replaced by competition, to the detriment of deal flow, due diligence, ability to add value and, of course, returns.