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Launching a Portfolio Acceleration Platform at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund

David Teten

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies. This typically includes: Relationships with relevant service providers in your vertical, often with pre-negotiated discounts: coaches, lawyers, accountants, common software vendors, consultants.

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

David Teten

Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund and mutual fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. The extreme example of this are algorithmic investors in the public markets, who design algorithms which trade on the designer’s behalf, as opposed to making trading decisions directly.

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Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

Cofounder 229
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Who are the Major Revenue-Based Investing VCs?

David Teten

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching new business models in venture capital. RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance.

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). We hired a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Duke who had worked on helicopter design. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Engineer 221
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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) He had spent 12 years at DEC , first as a hardware engineer designing part of the PDP-16 , then as the marketing manager for the LSI-11 and then into sales.

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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

Unlike Intel chips, MIPS chip architecture also made it possible to plug in a math co-processor. Some of the other founders had sold minicomputers to scientists and engineers, but no one knew or understood the unique class of applications and customers of supercomputers. A few days later Gordon became a founder.