BLOG STARTUPS, VENTURE AND THE TECH BUSINESS
Posts Tagged ‘Venture Capital’
November 19 2009
by Todd Hixon
The Death of B2B Venture Capital?
At the October 21 Xconomy “Global Vision for Venture Capital …” forum, Terry McGuire remarked that Polaris has stopped taking risk on commercial/industrial technology start-ups, as the recent experience has not been good. That’s a consequential thing. “Commercial/industrial technology” encompasses enterprise software, most of telecom and datacom, and large parts of clean tech. Note that ...
November 10 2009
by Thanasis Delistathis
5 things to know about creating a financial model for your business
When pitching your business to venture investors, sharing a well designed financial model is very important! Why? Because how a financial model is designed helps investors learn some things about you and your business: it provides insights into how you think about your business, helps clarify what are the main assumptions that drive it and ...
November 3 2009
by Tim Rowe
MIT $100K Elevator Pitch Competition
This past Thursday was the Grand Finale of the MIT $100K Competition’s precursor competition, known as the EPC or Elevator Pitch Competition. Over 350 entrants had made their 60-second pitches over the past several days to persevering judges. The resulting twelve finalists did not yet know who they were, however everyone who was in the ...
November 3 2009
by Todd Hixon
How We Survived 2009
The CEO of one of my portfolio companies, which I will call “Ajax” (not the real name), wrote this as part of his regular report to the senior team, board, and investors. It’s pretty typical of what it’s been like out there this year, and what CEOs, management teams, and boards did to manage through. ...
October 27 2009
by Todd Hixon
Notes from the October 21 Xconomy Forum
The title of the forum was “A Global Vision of Venture Capital and Private Equity”. This grandiose-sounding title was chosen, I suspect, to honor one of the panelists, Peter Brooke, who is indeed a pioneer of Global VC and PE. The other panelist was Terry McGuire, a long-time and successful Boston VC who is a ...
October 20 2009
by Thanasis Delistathis
Opportunity knocks: Yellow Pages move online
A number of industries are undergoing a kind of dislocation as the internet becomes a dominant medium for finding information and entertainment. One of those industries is the yellow pages industry. It is currently a $26BN global industry; $14BN in the US. The Kelsey Group projects that the portion of that market that is online ...
October 16 2009
by Scott Johnson
Well Spaced Bread Crumbs
In the story of Hansel and Gretel, Hansel drops breadcrumbs as he is carted away with Gretel, leaving a trail to follow for any would-be rescuer. This was a good strategy except that bread crumbs are edible. But that is aside from the point of this post, which is that investors need an easy trail ...
September 21 2009
by Scott Johnson
“Tranched” Investments
We occasionally do investments in stages or “tranches” where we put an initial amount of money into a company, with the option to put more in later when certain milestones are met. Some investors like to do this, and some are philosophically opposed. The opposing view is that contingent cash based on uncertain milestones adds ...
September 15 2009
by Todd Hixon
Tips For A Good First Pitch
You are setting out to raise the first financing round for your start-up business. You sit down to draft a pitch. What should it say? [We’re early stage investors, so these ideas are geared to the companies we see, which are typically raising their first round of investment from professional (“institutional”) investors.] Let’s start with ...
August 31 2009
by Scott Johnson
The imperfect VC process
Picking companies to invest in is not that different from running the admissions process at Princeton. The likelihood is high that you will admit some problem students and deny admission to the next Michael Dell. This is how the process was described to me by an unnamed college admissions professional: There is a set of ...
