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8/7: The Next Great Entrepreneurial Opportunity: How to Identify Market White Space

The “Thought Leaders in Business” series at the Yale Club of New York is hosting me on August 7 for a presentation on “The Next Great Entrepreneurial Opportunity: How to Identify Market White Space”.  I’ll discuss how investors and entrepreneurs can identify opportunities to build great businesses.  You can see some related presentations I’ve made in the...

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Market Research for Entrepreneurs and Other Cheapskates

I really enjoyed participating in OCE Discovery (Canada’s largest innovation conference). Some of our most exciting companies (500px, Interaxon) are in Canada. I’ve attached below the video and slide deck on Market Research for Entrepreneurs and Other Cheapskates....

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CRM Systems and Private Equity Deal Sourcing

Preqin and LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions just released a report on “CRM Systems and Private Equity Deal Sourcing”, based on a survey of 63 private equity funds. They report that 84% of respondents claim to source over 20% of their opportunities through proprietary deal flow. Based on our research, I think that these respondents are taking...

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Disruptive Companies in Asset Management

We recently hosted an idea dinner on “Disruptive Companies in the Asset Management Industry”. The most attractive industries to disrupt are highly profitable ones, and asset management is traditionally a highly profitable industry. IMHO, the most successful disrupters in this area to date have been Vanguard (who popularized index funds) and the ETF industry. We...

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Conference Notes on Sourcing Deal Flow & Developing New Business for Private Equity

I enjoyed participating in last week’s Capital Roundtable Private Equity Masterclass on “Best Practices for Sourcing Quality Deal Flow & Developing New Business” (May 26th, 2011). Our star intern Adam Kalamchi took detailed notes, below. High Road Capital Partners Deal Sourcing Keynote View more presentations Chairman’s Keynote: How to Win -The Five S’s of Successful...

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Update on our study on deal sourcing

It’s been very exciting to see such a strong response to our recent research study on “Best Practices in Private Equity and Venture Capital Deal Origination”, published in the Winter 2010 Journal of Private Equity. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on this topic; we have not found any other in-depth research...

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On Expert Networks, Compliance, the Drunk and the Lamppost

Expert networks have been in the news a lot for the past few weeks, due to the SEC’s attempt to look for insider trading amongst hedge funds, following on their Galleon investigation (Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon is in the photo shown). The best source of information on this topic is as usual the Integrity Research...

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Institutional Investor publishes summary of our deal sourcing research

Chris Farmer and I have an article in today’s Institutional Investor, summarizing the key findings from our research on deal sourcing: Would you invest in a company that only sold to 1 out of 80 leads? Or a company that typically took one year and 3 professionals just to close a single client? In fact,...

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