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FundersClub

FundersClub

EarlyShares | Crowdfunding Platform dotMN — ‘Less TechCrunch & more reality,’ says local angel investor Nearly two months ago, AMP Partners was introduced to Minnesota’s tech entrepreneurs. Curious to learn more about where things are at, and if AMP is serious about funding local startups, we connected with partner Daren Marhula to hear it from the source: 1) How would you say things are going so far relative to what was anticipated? Overall, our business at AMP is in-line with our original expectations since launch. That being said, we continue to be surprised by the unrealistically high valuation expectations by many entrepreneurs out there, which has prevented us from making more investments. 2) How would you rate both the quantity and quality of dealflow? Since the article initially ran, we have talked with roughly 30 companies. 3) Has AMP made any tech investments? Our first investment was in HomeVisor, which is an online Realtor referral service. There were a couple of other companies we met with that we liked and we would have invested in, had the valuations been more realistic.

38 millions d'euros pour des start-up technologiques Vous venez de créer votre start-up dans les secteurs de l'énergie, de l'environnement, de la santé, de la sécurité, des micro et nanotechnologies, ou encore des technologies pour l'industrie ? Vous cherchez à lever des fonds ? Qu'à cela ne tienne, 38 millions d'euros sont désormais mobilisables pour booster votre démarrage et accompagner votre croissance. CEA Investissement, filiale du CEA, a en effet annoncé le 3 avril, le closing de son fonds Amorçage Technologique Investissement (ATI). Ce fonds multisectoriel a vocation à investir sur l'ensemble du territoire national dans de très jeunes sociétés qui développent et commercialisent des innovations dans les domaines d'activité du CEA, en les accompagnant sur leurs deux premières années d'existence. ATI prévoit de réaliser une vingtaine d'investissements pour des tickets initiaux compris entre 500 000 et 800 000 euros par entreprise.

The Australian Small Scale Offerings Board (ASSOB) All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club May 24, 2011: May 24, 2011: [Follow Me on Twitter] “ Don’t you know that you are a shooting star,And all the world will love you just as long,As long as you are.” – Paul Rodgers, Shooting Star With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both “valuation” and “revenue” and suggest that there is a correlation between the two. What drives true equity value? Because of the difficulty of getting DCF right, investors commonly use a handful of other shortcuts to determine valuations. The following chart highlights 2012 forward price/revenue ratios for 122 global Internet stocks. Before we talk about why there is such disparity, it is important to highlight a few more points. What causes such a wide dispersion of price/revenue multiples? 1. If high price/revenue multiple companies have wide moats or strong barriers to entry, then the opposite is also true. 2.

CEA Investissement E.vc - empreenda.vc Convertible Debt Back in the summer of 2010, I wrote a post outlining why I don't like convertible debt investments. USV does a fair bit of seed investing and we have never done a convertible debt deal (although we have done bridge loans for our existing portfolio companies). My wife, aka Gotham Gal, does a fair bit of seed investing and she has done her share of convertible debt investments, always with a reasonable cap, but she also prefers a priced equity round. Convertible debt is being discussed again, I suspect because valuations are coming down and that is causing some problems, but also because there are folks suggesting improvements on the structure of these deals. My view on this is fairly simple: 1) A priced equity round can be done quickly and inexpensively. 2) When you set the price, both sides know what deal they got. 3) Equity is simple. Mark Suster has a long and winding but very good post on all of this on his blog.

The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die Ben Miners/Getty Images Starting a business is a dangerous thing. A larger competitor might undercut your prices. Someone might sue you for patent infringement. Someone else could sue you because your products doesn’t do what you said it would. Or, well, the market may have no interest in what you’re selling. But Thomas Thurston thinks data science could remove a fair amount of the risk. He says his simulations correctly predicted that Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb would be big—and that they’re now right about 66 percent of the time when predicting that a company will still exist within five years. The simulations have proved so successful, Thurston is now using them to make money for himself. “Most businesses fail, and that’s not good for people,” he says. Thomas Thurston. Growth Science. Thurston isn’t alone in applying Moneyball-style data science to investing. Banishing Intuition “You can’t trust the model until you get all the intuition out of it,” Thurston says. Surprise, Surprise

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