Marc
Venture & Seed Capital
Investor Index: Discover the Most Popular VC & Angel Blogs. Four Things to Get Right When Starting a Company - Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery. By Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery | 9:14 AM May 9, 2012 Most VCs and entrepreneurs believe start-ups are inherently iterative, that a string of mistakes doesn’t prevent success, but may even be the path to it. Generally, that view is correct, but there are a few choices made early on that have implications so deep as to be functionally irreversible, with profound implications for outcomes. Product and business models are evolutionary by nature, but we see four things a young company must get right: The founding teamThe core valuesWhere the company is locatedThe initial investors (and their terms) A good company usually begins with co-founders: the notion of a lone Edison willing a giant company into existence is rarely correct.
It’s also important to cultivate a balanced team from the start. Geography is another important factor; pets, spouses, and houses scale with each hire, and just as with culture, each new employee makes things more permanent. A list of top 50 Venture Capital blogs by Blog Rank. Financing Options: Convertible Debt. MBA Mondays are back after a one week hiatus. Today we are going to talk about convertible debt. Convertible debt can also be called convertible loans or convertible notes.
For the purposes of this post, these three terms will be interchangeable. Convertible debt is when a company borrows money from an investor or a group of investors and the intention of both the investors and the company is to convert the debt to equity at some later date. Typically the way the debt will be converted into equity is specified at the time the loan is made. There are a number of reasons why the investors and/or the company would prefer to issue debt instead of equity and convert the debt to equity at a later date.
For investors, the preference for debt vs equity is less clear. Friends and family rounds, which we discussed earlier in this series, are often done via convertible debt. The typical forms of compensation for making a convertible loan are warrants or a discount. Technology - US venture capitalists prowl Europe’s techs. The buzz around the stratospheric private market valuations of US technology groups such as Facebook, Groupon and Living Social is spreading to Europe, as investors seek to make the most of growth opportunities in internet companies. Recent months have seen a stream of venture capitalists, private equity groups and trade buyers make moves in the region. Spotify is close to receiving a fresh round of funding led by Russia’s DST that values the Anglo-Swedish digital jukebox service at about $1bn.
Wonga.com, a UK-based online loans company, in February raised £73m ($120m) from a group of funds, while Amazon recently paid about £200m to acquire Lovefilm, the UK-based web-based DVD rental service that had received early venture backing. “We’ve been very busy in the last year but since the fourth quarter there’s been a lot more activity,” says Ben Holmes, a partner at venture capital firm Index Ventures. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014. London Lures U.S. Technology Investors Seeking Cheaper LinkedIn. Laurel Bowden, a partner at Facebook Inc. investor Greylock Partners, has been working out of London from a rented desk for more than two years. Fresh from an initial public offering of LinkedIn Corp. that valued its stake at $1.3 billion, the Menlo Park, California-based venture firm last month raised its first fund focusing on Europe and Israel. Greylock and Insight Venture Partners, an early backer of Lovefilm and Flipboard, are among American investors considering opening offices in London to take advantage of a burgeoning number of technology startups.
U.S. venture capitalists, later-stage technology investors and software companies are paying more attention to targets in London, Paris, and Munich, upping investments in and exposure to a region some had all but written off. For them, Europe offers a chance at finding hidden gems in unlikely places -- and perhaps billion-dollar success stories such as Skype Technologies SA, Spotify Ltd., and Yandex NV. TweetDeck, Wooga Sarkozy, Schmidt. Flash Capital Riesgo ESADE Guíame. Spreadsheet programs. Mergers & Acquisitions.
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