April, 2005

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Go early, go late, or go home

BeyondVC

After having returned from vacation last week, I had the chance to reflect on the current venture and investing market. Yes, one of the big challenges is that there is still way too much money sloshing around in alternative assets. As I think about how to make money in this competitive environment and where to make new investments, I keep coming back to the thought that there is still opportunity very early or very late in a company’s life cycle.

LBO 60
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Venture capital in China

BeyondVC

I recently caught up with my friend Derek Sulger, founder of Linktone (Nasdaq: LTON) and current founder and CFO of Smartpay , a Paypal-like play in China (I really like what Derek is doing with this one-no credit in China, use the mobile phones for debiting from bank accounts). Derek and I are college friends and we certainly have come a long way from college when he finds my email on Google under a heading " Geeking out with Ed Sim " (thanks to Jeff Clavier for this one!

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Welcome GreenPlum and Bizgres

BeyondVC

I have looked at a number of open source projects over the last year and mostly agree with Bill Burnham’s comments that many of these open source plays are "marketing gimmics for startup companies." Many of these companies are trying to start a new project from scratch, hoping to build a community brick by brick. In addition, without the ability to create a community, it is hard to build a real sustainable revenue model.

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Working with partners

BeyondVC

I can’t tell you how many early stage companies I talk to tout their great list of partners. I always step back in amazement at how a small company can support more than one, really large partner in the beginning. In fact, I remember being in a meeting with a strategic partner once and having them tell me that we would break if they put their resources behind our product.

Partner 60
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in