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It’s Morning in Venture Capital
Many observers of the venture capital industry have questioned whether its best days are behind it. They are frustrated by the past decade of subpar returns for the sector. The most recent report to weigh in on the troubles of the industry was produced by the esteemed Kauffman Foundation. There are obvious reasons the industry has had less-than-desirable returns, including: massive over-funding of the sector, huge increases in inexperienced venture capitalists that took a decade to peter out, and the massive correction in the value of the public stock markets that closed many exit opportunities for half a decade. I can’t help feel a bit of rear-view mirror analysis in all of “VC model is broken” bears in our industry. I have been close to the tech & startup sectors for more than 20 years and I can’t think of a period in which I felt more optimistic about the innovation and value creation I see in front of us.
Summary : Pitches usually fail because they answer the wrong questions. The right questions depend on the stage of your business—for example, some businesses are just getting started with an idea, while others are printing money.
Why startup pitches fail (and how to fix them)
On a rainy day in March 2011, Ciarán O’Leary and two colleagues crammed into a Berlin taxi and raced for the station to catch a train back to Hamburg. While snaking through the city streets, it hit him: Leaving Berlin was a bad idea. “We looked at each other and knew in that moment that we’d be crazy not to move here,” says O’Leary, a partner at the German venture capital firm Earlybird.
Berlin Cracks the Startup Code - Businessweek
I was listening to Patrick McKenzie’s podcast (with Amy Hoy as a guest), and they touched on something that I had heard before: when you offer multiple plans for a service, the cheapest plan’s customers tends to require the most support. Now at first this seems counter-intuitive. You’d expect the opposite: that the people who pay the most feel more entitled to support, and thus ask for more of it.
Why Cheap Customers Cost More
In the startup industry we call this “runway,” and you’ll frequently hear management teams discuss how much runway they have in terms of months. Another name for the capital you have in the bank is “dry powder,” as in dry gunpowder your soldiers can use to kill and maim your enemies -- and win the war. For example, when I started Mahalo.com we were burning around $500K a month. With $20M in the bank, that means we had a whopping 40 months of runway. This is not typical.
How Much Money Should a Startup Have in the Bank? - LAUNCH -
(Editor’s note: Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, PLLC, a law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) For the past few months, I’ve been exploring some of the more confusing terminology in VC term sheets.
Demystifying the VC term sheet: Redemption rights | VentureBeat
Startup life and culture is super sexy and all sorts of founders are appearing in their jeans and t-shirts and boyish/girlish grins on the covers of magazines and newspapers across North America. Seems that millions of dollars of money is being thrown left right and center at anyone with a dream and the gumption to pursue it. There has been no better time to quit your day job and pursue this. It costs next to nothing to build stuff on the web, right?
So you want to do a startup, eh?
Cash is King: 8 tips for Optimizing your Startup Financing Strategy | For Entrepreneurs
Introduction This post aims to help startup CEOs optimize their funding strategy by examining how investors value startups, and explaining how to avoid the common cash management pitfalls. (Note: The concepts in this post will likely be obvious to experienced CEOs and entrepreneurs.Je donnais il y a pile une semaine une conférence chez Microsoft sur la Lean Startup , et j’avais la lourde tâche d’entamer la journée pour dire, en gros, de quoi il s’agit et surtout pourquoi un parterre d’entrepreneurs avait intérêt à en prendre de la graine…
Lean Startup : ma présentation sur le sujet… | Création d'entreprise ! | Guilhem Bertholet
Construire une DreamTeam ! | Création d'entreprise ! | Guilhem Bertholet
Voilà un sujet qui fait débat (en tout cas dans ma petite tête) : lorsque l’on monte sa boîte, de qui faut-il s’entourer ? Faut-il aller chercher du nombre, au détriment de la qualité, ou faut-il être, au contraire, super rigoureux sur le fait de ne prendre que des « top profiles » ? Dilemme… Pas facile de choisir, et dans la réalité, c’est super dur pour une startup d’attirer du monde, et d’avoir les coudée franches financièrement pour débourser de gros salaires.(crédit image : Ph. Pélissier) Tout un chacun s’est un jour posé (ou se posera) la question : « Comment puis-je devenir riche ? »
La Valeur Actuelle Nette ou comment choisir rationnellement d’investir dans une startup | Le Blog de Jean-Noël Chaintreuil
Over the past few months, entrepreneurs from all over Europe have been submitting their companies to the Telegraph's Start-Up 100. Our panel of expert judges have worked through the applications and we are delighted to present you with the final list. These are the companies that made our top 100, listed by category. The Start-Up 100, in conjunction with TechCrunch Europe, is supported by Orrick, Silicon Valley Bank and Microsoft BizSpark. Commissioning editor: Milo Yiannopoulos.
Start-Up 100: the final list by category - Telegraph
#LEWINNING: Meet 12 Startups You'll Need To Reckon With
Le Camping is an accelerator program for Paris startups modeled after Y Combinator. The first crop started three months ago and Le Camping held its first Investor Day yesterday to present the startups to the public. We weren't invited but managed to crash anyway.Updated: Lendle, an ebook-sharing service that allows users to find and trade Kindle books, sounds like a great idea — except that it doesn’t work anymore, because Amazon pulled the plug on the site by blocking access to the Amazon API . According to Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft, there was no warning from the online retailer, only a cryptically worded email. So Lendle becomes the latest poster child for a simple maxim: Building your service on top of someone else’s API, no matter how “open” the API is supposed to be, is a very dangerous road. Update: Lendle has posted an update on its blog to say that it has modified its service as requested by Amazon (removing a feature that allowed Lendle users to synchronize their books with their Kindle account) and API access has been restored. However, the company also said that as a result of the incident it had “come to realize we need to work towards a Lendle product that does not rely on APIs provided by Amazon or any other third party.”