I finally did it: I’ve moved my contact database over to the web. After extensive research of different CRM solutions (thanks BestVendor), we’re working with Salesforce.com. We also used Salesforce heavily at one of my prior companies, Circle of Experts. I’ve been a loyal Act user for my personal CRM system since 1996, and have...
[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]Lessons from Facebook on Recruiting Elite Engineers
Following is a guest post from ff Venture Capital winter intern Max Segan, a Colgate senior majoring in computer science, who is starting at Facebook this summer as a software engineer. From our perspective, Facebook is both our friend (training hundreds of talented future entrepreneurs) and enemy (competing with our portfolio companies for top talent...
[Continue Reading]Best Job Boards for Recruiting Startup Engineers
One of our portfolio companies asked me this week, “Do you all have a list of job boards your portfolio companies have had great success with in recruiting high quality engineers?” The unemployment rate for quality computer scientists/engineers in the major cities right now is zero; everyone who’s not pursuing his/her own startup can easily...
[Continue Reading]Startup idea: marketplace for business research and students seeking internships / experience
We’re looking to spend money with a startup business: a marketplace for businesses which want consulting research and students who want jobs, internships and experience. Specifically, we want a website where we can advertise the research topics that are important to us (e.g., best practices of operational improvement among VCs), along with the qualifications (e.g.,...
[Continue Reading]