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What Makes an Entrepreneur? Cojones (7/11)

Both Sides of the Table

A caller dialed in to ask us questions about his startup. He was from South America but living in Switzerland and had launched a startup while holding down a day job at a consulting firm (McKinsey if memory serves). He wanted to raise angel money. I was recently on TWiST with Jason Calacanis. I told him to quit his job first.

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A Year in Review: 2016

Version One Ventures

At the same time, seed money is still abundant due to the proliferation of micro VC over the past few years. Mattermark (a portfolio company) looked at the matriculation rates for a class of startups. Mattermark found that, on average, around 31 of the initial startups raised a Series A. Quantum Computing.

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How the Seed-Stage VC Trend Began, The Downsides of Unicorns & Much More

Both Sides of the Table

I was out to raise my first seed money in my second startup of $500,000. Neither did Y Combinator, 500 Startups, TechStars, Amplify, Mucker and countless others. By fund II (2007) he was able to raise $15 million (if you watch the video you’ll hear an interesting story of how he did this) and he had a proper fund.

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This Week in VC with @VCMike Hirshland of Polaris Ventures

Both Sides of the Table

This includes seed funding Automattic (who produce WordPress, the blog I use for this website) and investing in formspring.me, stickybits, Thing Labs (producer of Brizzly), KissMetrics and many others including Quantcast. So how is Mike able to do this at a time where others have warned against taking seed money from VC funds?

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Should Founders Be Allowed to Take Money off the Table?

Both Sides of the Table

I raised $500k in seed money to start the company. By then I was still on the board of my first company but it hadn’t yet sold (it ended up selling in 2007 to a publicly traded French company). Tags: Pitching VCs Start-up Advice VC Industry startup technology vc venture capital. Many term sheets ensued.

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The Future of Web Startups

www.paulgraham.com

October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. Plus in a startup you could make much more money.

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