Most private equity funds (and the equipment finance industry) are well behind the VC industry with regard to their use of social media. Jeff Bussgang, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners, calculates that of the approximately 1,000 venture capitalists in the US actively seeking deals, 10-15% blog. Sarah Tavel, Senior Associate, Bessemer Venture Partners, calls this...
[Continue Reading]Congratulations to Chris Farmer on joining General Catalyst!
Congratulations to my coauthor, Chris Farmer, on joining General Catalyst Partners! I’m sure Chris will use many of the ideas that we discussed in our research paper on deal origination to help create / identify some exciting companies on General Catalyst’s behalf....
[Continue Reading]Buying private companies on marketplaces of primary and secondary interests
Congratulations to the team at AxialMarket on raising $2m from First Round Capital and Windcrest Investments. I take this as a sign that they’re starting to gain traction among corporations and private equity funds, despite the fact they’re threatening the lunch of lower-tier business brokers and others who benefit from the currently highly inefficient, fragmented...
[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,...
[Continue Reading]Goodbye Expert Networks, Hello Private Equity: Coverage from Integrity Research
Integrity Research wrote a nice blog post about the new startup I’m working on: "As more research providers emerge to analyze the public markets (there are now over 3,500 research providers in our database), one gap in the market are research providers for the private markets. David Teten, founder of the expert network Evalueserve Circle...
[Continue Reading]Our new Harvard Business Review article: Time for Investors to Get Social
I’m excited to report that we’ve started to release the results from our first-ever study on best practices in private equity and venture capital deal origination. My coauthor Chris Farmer (formerly Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners) and I published a summary in the current issue of Harvard Business Review. Evalueserve, a global research firm and...
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