The Practising Law Institute hosted Dror Futter of SorinRand and me for a webinar last week on “Before Series A – Convertible Note and Series Seed Funding for Startups”. I’ve embedded the slide deck below, and you can listen to the webinar ($129) here. (Dror is a lawyer and I’m not, so you can imagine...
[Continue Reading]Why are venture capitalists (76% white men) ignoring the future?
Why do so many venture capitalists ignore the single best predictor of the future: demographics? Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, observes, “Many suspect that venture capital firms are biased against female founders. This would be easy to detect: among their portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperform those without? A couple months ago,...
[Continue Reading]Helping women and minorities raise angel capital
In early 2012, my HBS Alumni Angels colleagues and I launched the Venture Capital Access Program (VCAP), an initiative to help women and minority-led businesses to raise capital from the Harvard alumni angel community. This is a partnership between HBS Alumni Angels of Greater NY (HBSAANY) and the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC), the...
[Continue Reading]How to Judge an Investment Proposal (especially at Pitch Contests)
I periodically serve as a judge at pitch events for companies raising funding. In every case, I’m assessing each company against our standard criteria for investing. You can see a video of a recent pitch contest where I served as a judge here. For some of the new employees at our firm, I put together...
[Continue Reading]How an Indiana Accelerator Helps Its Companies to Succeed
I met some time ago with Brad Wisler, co-Founder of SproutBox, and shared with him our research on portfolio value creation by venture capitalists. He wrote a thoughtful note, which I’ve shared below, with permission: David, Thanks for sharing this paper with me. I love the title, which almost perfectly sums up our philosophy. What follows...
[Continue Reading]High Returns On A Small Fund Challenge Low Returns On A Big Fund
I previously posted this on Techcrunch. Let’s say you decide to invest in a VC fund. Congratulations: you’re now supporting the least unpopular part of the investing industry. That said, how do you avoid suffering the poor median returns the industry is known for? Assuming you have a large amount of capital to invest, the...
[Continue Reading]A Closer Look At The Quality Of Angel Returns Data
I previously published this at Techcrunch. The good news for Techcrunch readers: Every major study conducted to date has placed angel investors’ IRR between 18 and 54 percent, as summarized by my Partner John Frankel and Professor Robert Wiltbank in prior Techcrunch articles. The bad news: the data on angel returns has historically been...
[Continue Reading]October 18, CT: HBS Panel on VC in Connecticut
I’ll be a panelist at a HBS Club of Connecticut/HBS Angels Venture Capital in Connecticut Panel Discussion and Cocktail Reception on October 18. The event will be held at the recently-established Stamford Innovation Center, of which fellow panelist Barry Schwimmer is Founder and Managing Partner. The Center occupies a beautiful historic building and is now home to...
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