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...
[Continue Reading]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....
[Continue Reading]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...
[Continue Reading]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...
[Continue Reading]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...
[Continue Reading]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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