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Kara Nortman Was Just Promoted to Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures. Here’s What it All Means

Both Sides of the Table

Today we’re announcing that my partner Kara Nortman is becoming Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to welcome her to her new role. I called an (ex) LP to tell him about her and my goals for her. She took an operating role helping run Citysearch and Urbanspoon.

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

David Teten

My Partners at HOF Capital are younger than I am, which means that we have a half-century horizon for the franchise we are building. I’ve listed them below in *very* roughly descending order of efficiency, measured by increased dollars one can put to work, divided by the operational dollars required to implement each strategy. .

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8 Tips To Get the Most Out of Your Investors and Board

Both Sides of the Table

Understanding where your VC partner sits in their respective fund and where their fund is in the cycle of its investment lifecycle will help you understand your VCs behavior. That role as sparring partner can be useful if for nothing else than to test your resolve. What Rob wrote in his post is right.

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What Do Your Customers Want to Buy?

View from Seed

At first glance, you’d think that all LPs pretty much want to buy the same thing. Every fund pitching an LP is pitching this as a baseline. And yet, LP’s get to “yes” in a few cases and get to “no” in most cases. This tends to be how endowments and large foundations operate, for example. Some LPs are buying unique access.

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Flexible VC, a New Model for Companies Targeting Profitability

David Teten

(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. Similar to the explosion of seed funds in the past decade, we (and some limited partners too ) believe these Flexible VCs are on the forefront of what will become a major segment of the venture ecosystem. Of the Inc. 5000 companies, only 6.5% return cap.

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Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?

Both Sides of the Table

The constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions. Instant growth = huge valuation from follow-on investors = big VC mark-up on our quarterly reports = LP interest. Our partners have invested in more than dozen companies that became worth more than a billion dollars and that has disproportionately drive returns.

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How VCs Spend Their Time. Err, How This VC Spends His Time.

Hunter Walker

The Stage 1 partner escalates an opportunity to Stage 2 when we’ve been able to create a hypothesis as to why this might be a good investment. That partner also generates a set of questions for the other partner to push on in their discussions and data requests. 4) Fund Operations. 5% Fund Operations.