Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

I interviewed Eric for an hour for - This Week in Venture Capital. 46:50 Engines of Growth. I find myself nodding – even when the topic is one I don’t expect to agree with such as “fail fast.” ” This week was no exception. 40:05 What happened after Imvu. 41:00 Transitioning from software to writing.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 8, 2014

Given how efficient markets are when a large market like LA starts to blossom it attracts capital pretty quickly. billion in venture capital to LA’s technology startups and 2014 will shatter that figure. It may surprise you to learn that LA graduates more engineers than anywhere else in the country.

Los Angeles 376

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Seattle 376

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 3, 2009

This is part of my ongoing Raising Venture Capital (VC) series. When people refer to a strategic investor they are usually talking about an investor that comes from the industry you serve as opposed to an independent venture capital investor. The reality is that their core business is not venture capital.

Strategic Investors 279

Strategic Investors Venture Capital Due Diligence Early Stage 279

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

When Roger Ehrenberg & I agreed to fund Nick’s first institutional VC round we agreed it knowing that he was staying in the UK, that he was building out product & engineering in the UK and that he was the CEO of the company. He called this initiative VEDO and launched it quietly to some of our bigger customers.

Founder 309

Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2013

Often your sales engineers can do the customizations without bugging the core eng team. The closest analogy I have for a PS person is a “sales engineer” who is normally a technical staff member who assists in sales campaigns. By year 2 I’d like to see PS at 50% maximum, which is still high.

Software Review 321

Software Review Software IP Technical Review 321

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 12, 2011

This week I sat down with Chris Dixon, co-founder / CEO of Hunch and Partner at Founder Collective in the most recent installment of This Week in Venture Capital. 2. Chris then discussed his time as founder and CEO of SiteAdvisor, his first venture-backed startup. Such that during that time, Chris “learned how to learn.”.

Technical Review 281

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence API Cofounder 281

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

You know, the weird thing, Derek, and I should probably let you speak some time, but I was deeply technical when I went into Andersen consulting, and I got paid much less than engineers who graduated, because I had a degree in economics. They paid engineers $4,000 more entry-point. Engineering vs. non-engineering. [00:10:32]

Cofounder 337

Cofounder Technical Cofounder San Diego Startup 337

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2021

This is Venture Capital. You’ll find engineers out of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UCSD, Caltech or execs out of UCLA, Spelman, NYU, etc. In our funds we do about 12 deals / year and see several thousand so the funding rate is somewhere between 0.2–0.5% to start their next company.

Angel Investor 301

Angel Investor Deal Flow Portfolio Forecast 301

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

He grew up in Connecticut attended Yale undergrad and worked for IBM after graduation doing M&A, strategy and venture capital. In addition to Seth, the core team he pulled together consisted of Elaine, a product person with front-end engineering skills and sharp design sense, and Sandy a back-end server engineer.

Connecticut 286

Connecticut Cofounder Web Silicon Valley 286

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JANUARY 6, 2014

When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Brett was formerly SVP of the Marketing Cloud at Salesforce with an enormous organization of sales, marketing, implementation, sales engineers, etc. In the Early Days.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

When you’re building a startup and can’t hire the engineers you need, can’t retain staff, can’t get press coverage and can’t hire sales people – it certainly affects you. It’s what I love about entrepreneurship and about venture capital. That’s not true.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

But the biggest thing to know is this: Companies who are scaling quickly in revenue and with a high gross margin often should invest as much capital in growth as they can manage responsibly because when you find a product / market fit and your company is growing at a very fast scale you want to capture market share before competition sets in.

Burn Rate 383

Burn Rate Balance Sheet .Net Valuation 383

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

Sustaining short-term losses is all predicated on ability to finance the losses through venture capital or other means. In general I find that raising large amounts of money when you haven’t figured it out ends up papering over problems more then helping solve fundamental issues in the business.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2013

Many buying companies price these deals on the basis of $1 million per engineer on the team for an early-stage deal. Usually the location of the engineers matters great so having offshore engineering makes acquihires unlikely. Hire legions of young, impressionable graduates from the top engineering universities.

Liquidation Preference 357

Liquidation Preference Retention Early Stage Lock-up Period 357

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 14, 2009

Do you work as a civil engineer on water projects and have great access to wealthy project developers? Basic search engine research can give many clues and if people do keep a blog and you want to meet the person then many clues are obviously there. Do you work in the comedy industry and know all the venue owners or comedians?

Silicon Valley 291

Silicon Valley Ireland Technical Review Valuation 291

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

What a pleasure that I got to spend an hour talking with both Om Malik (whom I’ve always respected his views) and Paul Jozefak , a venture capital partner at Neuhaus Partners in Germany (and formerly the head of Europe for SAP Ventures). Real-time search engine. Tags: This Week in Venture Capital.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital Non-Compete Vertical Europe 225

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2015

. “the ecommerce company gained fauxmentum by raising artificially high amounts of venture capital and spent lavishly on customer acquisition despite long payback periods and questionable LTV” __. I’m not saying you shouldn’t grow engineering or do PR. We live in heady times. limit your fixed costs.

Balance Sheet 150

Balance Sheet eCommerce Venture Capital Acquisition 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2011

Yesterday I wrote Part 1 of the series on the changes to the software industry over the past decade that has led to changes in the venture capital industry itself. Not to mention providing the capital for growth. Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90%.

Venture Capital 296

Venture Capital LP Software Early Stage 296

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

I recently sat down with Troy Carter to talk about what he does and why he believes it is applicable to venture capital. And his venture capital philosophy of CrossCulture VC , “You have a huge demographic shift that’s happening in America. ” “Mattel stepped up and changed the face of Barbie.

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles West Virginia Venture Capital Silicon Valley 150

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JUNE 11, 2015

We brought on Nanea Reeves as President to shore up quality on the product, engineering and ops side. He’s been working in one of the top firms in venture capital in the Valley for many years and with that comes an enviable Rolodex. She made an immediate positive impact on our culture, quality and overall product.

Silicon Valley 150

Silicon Valley Los Angeles San Francisco Architecture 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2010

Often when startups who have raised venture capital need another round of financing they will turn to their existing investors to give them money before raising from outsiders. They might not replace an engineer or two that quits. Tags: Entrepreneur Advice Raising Venture Capital Start-up Advice Startup Advice.

Startup 290

Startup Burn Rate Warrant Bankruptcy 290

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APRIL 17, 2012

A market leader in content, music, entertainment, textiles, engineering, aerospace and trade. Think about venture capital. But if you were going to start a venture capital fund today, you’d want to stand out. An innovator in technology, especially monetization. Some Other Thoughts on Branding / Positioning.

Community 304

Community Los Angeles Startup Silicon Valley 304

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FEBRUARY 15, 2017

See we have JPL that designed the rockets that put men on the moon in the first place and Caltech, one of the two most prestigious engineering universities in the country. And I constantly have to remind people that the largest tech startup employer in LA is actually SpaceX and that, yes, Elon Musk does live in LA.

Los Angeles 321

Los Angeles Portfolio Hosting Engineer 321

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2017

It’s hard to remember that in 2012 it was still hard for LA VCs to persuade investors into funds that LA was a viable market for great venture capital funds or convince many VCs that LA was a market worth investing dollars into startups.

IPO 191

IPO Los Angeles South Korea Armenia 191

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2019

Reasons to Have a Broad Group of Management Present From a non-exec perspective there are some obvious reason board members want to hear from the heads of sales, market, product, HR, engineering, finance and support. It is definitely a good idea to have your executive team at some board meetings and for some of the time of a board meeting.

Management 161

Management Early Stage Finance Conversion 161

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JULY 1, 2010

Spread through word-of-mouth as the company has no sales team, all engineers. Current round: $90mm led by The Founders Fund, including Youniversity Ventures, Glynn Capital, Ulu Ventures, Jeremy Stoppleman, Ben Ling, +. Tags: This Week in Venture Capital. Total raised: $125mm See: TechCrunch.

San Francisco 248

San Francisco Venture Capital Analytics Government 248

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AUGUST 29, 2012

We sat down for an hour to talk about why what GaiKai built was able to overcome its much better funded rival and to dispel the myth that great engineering teams don’t exist in Southern California. GaiKai had 50 such engineers, which was a large part of its success. Nate, tell us a bit about Rustic Canyon Venture Partners.

Southern California 279

Southern California Detroit Los Angeles California 279

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OCTOBER 15, 2009

This is a story of one of the risks of venture capital. But some companies have entrepreneurs that seem talented on paper, are in a space that seems interesting to investors and are able to raise venture capital early in the company’s existence. True story.) 2 weeks later and we may never have raised any more VC.

Founder 299

Founder Technical Review Startup Venture Capital 299

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

We’re a national venture capital investment firm but with our roots firmly in Los Angeles. But putting no time into anchoring your beliefs because you’re too busy executing sales, marketing, support, product & engineering is an easy recipe for leadership drift. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Conviction.

Leadership 150

Leadership Southern California Hiring San Diego 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

While this post is written about raising venture capital (which I always remind entrepreneurs IS a sales process) the lessons can be applied to any sale or biz dev deal. The process for raising money from a VC is a sales process and as such much of what is taught in enterprise sales can be applied.

Partner 308

Partner Term Sheet Sales Portfolio 308

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 17, 2010

Funding is different – In Silicon Valley you have mega venture capital funds and many of them. You don’t have a pool of thousands of Google engineers to hire when they’re ready to leave the mother ship. But we have a great city for building technology companies. You can find very talented technology executives.

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Los Angeles Technology Southern California 290

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2014

Changes in the Software World & in Venture Capital. But notably you had the following changes: Horizontally scalable computing & storage systems, which meant you required less capital up front for hardware. Venture Capital. And then the world changed. Changes in the Startup Ecosystem. We have invested $17.3

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Kansas City Startup Venture Capital 390

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I came across this blog post about getting a computer science degree as the best degree for getting into venture capital or working at a VC-backed start up. It pays for all of our great engineers. He writes with a great perspective and is well worth reading. I had to laugh a bit reading it. It’s how we move products.

NPV 337

NPV Chicago Balance Sheet Database 337

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NOVEMBER 15, 2014

That’s our great gain as Snapchat has also raised a lot of money at a monster valuation ($10 billion reported) and has been scooping up talented Stanford engineers and relocating them to LA. Luckily since then we elected Mayor Eric Garcetti who understands the importance of startups and of technology and venture capital on job creation.

Community 369

Community Silicon Valley Chicago Boston 369

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MAY 15, 2010

Next Wednesday we’ll have Dana Settle of Greycroft Partners, a New York / LA early-stage venture capital fund. We’re staring to get the hang of how to divide the show up into talking about deals but also talking about issues for entrepreneurs during funding. I first discovered it from Dharmesh Shah’s blog OnStartups.

Stealth 285

Stealth SEC Advertising Accredited Investor 285

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

So why would raising venture capital be any different. And the great monetization engines of the Internet were built in LA – Overture (AdWords) & Applied Semantics (AdSense). I call it “ marketing heroes” and I wrote about it here.

Developer 366

Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. If you are talented, of course, you can get funded in any region with enough venture capital and obviously in markets outside of the Valley it is easier to get noticed and get access.

Silicon Valley 313

Silicon Valley Southern California Los Angeles Semantic 313