Venture Capital

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On Startups by Dharmesh Shah

1. Business plans are energy-depleting exercises. When I went to MIT Sloan for business school, I took what was (and is) one of the “definitive” classes for entrepreneurs “New Enterprises”. The class was oriented around coming up with ideas, forging a team of classmates around that idea (you had to actually sell them) and then having that team write a business plan during the course of the course. All of this was intermingled with some presentations and some guest lectures. All around, I loved the class but hated the writing of the business plan.

Thoughts

My dad is one of my best friends. His birthday is on Saint Patrick’s Day and it has been a bright green celebration for as long as I can remember. He turned 74 today and we had dinner tonight at Oak at Fourteenth with Amy , my mom Cecelia , my sister-in-law Laura , my brother Daniel , and their daughter Sabrina.

Master of 500 Hats

(ok folks, i've gotta take the kids to basketball practice in a few hours, so will try to power through this -- that means limited crazy fonts, profanity, wild pix... sorry little monsters, next time ;) 3 major points i plan to cover in this post: 1) Angel List Fucking Rocks. Period . it's the single greatest innovation in our industry in the last 5 years (aside from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, & Quora) and it's great for almost all participants. and while social proof can be abused / misused, so can gasoline... doesn't mean you shouldn't fill up your gas tank and go back to riding horses. if you want to effect change, either Engage Fully, or Compete. inaction/boycotts are rarely useful & should be largely be ignored.

The unemployment rate in America is hovering around 9%. But if you are a competent engineer, sales executive, online marketer or general manager in Silicon Valley, NYC, Boston or other start-up hotspots, the unemployment rate is 0%. The talent market has gotten as competitive and aggressive as I have ever seen in the last 20 years. CNN recently reported that 40% of the 130,000 job openings in Silicon Valley are for software engineers. Senior executives have never been harder to secure.

Seeing Both Sides

Cracking The Code

I attended yesterday the 10th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends organized by the Churchill Club at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. This year, the panel included Steve Jurveston from DFJ, Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital, Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners and Joe Schoendorf from Accel. The panel was moderated by Tony Perkins, the Editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn. Unfortunately, John Doeer was not in the panel this year, but Tony said he could not believe anymore in John's forecasts after his support of Hillary's presidential campaign...

For Entrepreneurs is a blog for startups and entrepreneurs, written by David Skok, a five time serial entrepreneur turned VC (now at Matrix. Partners). It aims to address the key issues they will face in getting started, getting funded, and building a successful company. Although applicable to most startups, there is strong focus on SaaS businesses , and building a sales and marketing machine .

Blog of David Skok, Matrix Partners | For Entrepreneurs

Posted on February 23, 2012 . Filed under: android , Apple , Internet , iphone , Mobile , Uncategorized , Venture Capital , Web/Tech | Tags: cloud , dropbox , sync , synch | Back in October, Techcrunch announced that Dropbox had raised $250mm at a seemingly absurd valuation. Many firms, including my firm Benchmark Capital, participated. When this happened, many people asked us why this was a special company that would cause us to break our standard investment paradigm.

abovethecrowd.com

“Every time the other party says ‘I want’ in a negotiation, you should hear the pleasant sound of a weight dropping on your side of the leverage scales.” After weeks of fund-raising, you find a brave investor who says “Yes, I want to invest.” He says he will give you an offer soon. You’re excited.

Venture Hacks - Good advice for startups.

We couldn’t live without them. But when misused, overused or abused they can diminish your personal brand, consume your valuable time and waste time of the relationships you value the most. I would like to make the case for being judicious with your introductions.