BLOG STARTUPS, VENTURE AND THE TECH BUSINESS
Posts Tagged ‘Entrepreneurs’
May 2 2011
by Scott Johnson
Waste = Opportunity
Waste is something I abhor. Waste of time, waste of resource, I love funding businesses that help others be more efficient and stop waste. Time wasters are fertile ground for new business ideas. If anyone is wasting your time, think about how that happened and create a solution for it. Resource wasters are also ...
April 27 2011
by Scott Johnson
Color, Valuations, and the Winner’s Curse
My friend Kevin Lewis is a professor at Duke Business school and he sends out a feed of interesting abstracts describing recent research that I sift through every day or so. Today I found this one: The Bidder’s Curse Ulrike Malmendier & Young Han Lee, American Economic Review, April 2011, Pages 749-787 Abstract: We employ ...
January 30 2011
by Todd Hixon
The Hidden Truth About The Rich
Unless you are a media hermit, you have surely heard that: The distribution of wealth has become much more unequal in the last 20 years. Relatively few rich people control most of the world’s wealth, and this threatens to undermine democratic societies. “Rich” people means bankers, hedge fund managers, private equity managers, corporate CEOs, and ...
January 18 2011
by Scott Johnson
Mobile Monetization 2.0
Mobile monetization 2.0 is going to happen in 2011. Marketing budgets against mobile are showing up in the hundreds of millions, some new monetization schemes (CPL and CPD) are paying good eCPMs, 4G is coming, and this is all really great news for entrepreneurs and mobile app publishers as everyone everywhere taps into mobile apps. ...
December 3 2010
by Scott Johnson
“Do Not Track” – Some Predictions to Guide Investment
Congress has proposed an opt-out capability for user tracking. Much has been written about Do Not Track, and I won’t rehash all of that. I will simply say I think it is a good idea, and in general expecting that any industry will effectively police itself is naive. What has not been widely discussed is: ...
October 20 2010
by Thanasis Delistathis
5 checklist items to raising money
I know this is a somewhat mandane subject, but yesterday someone sent me a one-pager “executive summary” of a business, and after reading it I couldn’t really tell what they do. So I read it again, and still couldn’t figure it out. The summary was fully buzzword-compliant: you know!, it had all those fancy words ...
October 18 2010
by Todd Hixon
Europe Lags In Mobile
I’m just back from 12 days in Europe, visiting Positano and Rome, Italy and Munich and Frankfurt, Germany. I’m struck by how much Europe lags the U.S. in mobile. This is a small arbitrary sample: 3 major cities and an upscale beach resort in 2 countries. But, the visible difference is stark. 1. The data ...
October 12 2010
by Scott Johnson
Why I Invested in Fashion Playtes (Again)
Fashion Playtes recently announced an oversubscribed up round led by our friends at Fairhaven Capital. The company has a platform enabling custom clothing design by tween girls (ages 6-12). It is a simple concept really. Girls can go on the web and choose different embellishments to be sewn onto dresses, shirts, pants, bags, etc. ...
July 14 2010
by Scott Johnson
The Six Step Venture Capital Investment Process
Every venture firm has pretty much the same six step process. It is not hard to understand, and every firm puts their own spin on it. But you can pretty much count on these six steps occurring in sequence before you will see any cash in your bank account.
June 11 2010
by Todd Hixon
The View From The Dark Side #2: Participating Preferred
Entrepreneurs often dislike participating preferred stock. It can be a contentious term at investment time, and I often sense resentment at exit time when investors “get $XX million off the top”. “Participating preferred” refers to convertible preferred stock with a special liquidation right: preferred stock holders receive return of their investment, and then they share ...
