Harvard Business School is featuring an article about the Venture Capital Access Program on the website of the U.S. Competitiveness project. In the article, I discuss why we think that smart early-stage investors should target women and diverse entrepreneurs, and why we think HBS Alumni Angels in particular is well positioned to be very successful....
[Continue Reading]Venture Capital Access Program launches to aid women and diverse entrepreneurs
We are in the midst of two great disruptions to American business: the internet’s ongoing disruption of most traditional industries: finance, healthcare, retail, finance, fashion, etc. the shift of America to a majority minority country by 2050. Any company that aspires to maintain a leadership position needs to position itself to exploit these two macro...
[Continue Reading]How Venture Capitalists Can Accelerate Portfolio Company Returns
(This post co-written with Koen Bremer, Gyorgy Buslig, and Adham Hussein. Koen, Gyorgy, and Adham are all Columbia Business School MBA 2012 students and former consultants with McKinsey and BCG. I’ve also posted this at Betabeat.) Even the best VCs and entrepreneurs have a painfully high failure rate. Lowering that failure rate would be highly...
[Continue Reading]How to Scale Early-Stage Investing
Before making the decision to join ff Venture Capital, I did some research on early-stage tech investing as an asset class and how it’s evolving. What was striking was what an attractive asset class it was. Although any given early-stage company is quite risky, when aggregated across a large portfolio, returns are very attractive. There...
[Continue Reading]How Venture Capitalists and Government Can Promote Entrepreneurship
I’ve recently met with several universities, nonprofits, and government employees who’ve all asked the same question: how can we promote entrepreneurship? Just like me, they’re distressed about the poor economy and jobs situation. By contrast, as a venture capitalist, I can report that almost all of our portfolio companies are desperate to hire talent, and...
[Continue Reading]Valuing Startup Employee Options
This is the third of three blog posts on financial modeling for startups. The first was on best practices in building financial models, and the second was a template financial model for a startup. I’ve often found it helpful to have on hand a simple model showing the impact of each financing stages on all...
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