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]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]Venture Capitalists and the Upside-Down Pyramid
In response to my post on VC’s increasing use of operationally focused team members, HBS professor Noam Wasserman sent me an excerpt of his dissertation on ‘The Venture Capitalist as Entrepreneur: The Characteristics and Dynamics Within VC Firms’. A key point he makes in this paper is that, “Most strikingly, a large percentage of the...
[Continue Reading]Venture Capital and Private Equity Funds’ Use of CRM
Paul Greenberg just posted a summary I wrote of how private equity and venture funds are using CRM at his blog. I’ve cross-posted it here: Paul asked me to write a brief summary of the findings of my research on Best Practices in Private Equity and Venture Capital Deal Origination....
[Continue Reading]Asset Managers and How They Power Their Businesses with Salesforce CRM
For our research project on VC/private equity deal origination, Renny Monaghan of Salesforce pointed me to a 2008 Dreamforce panel on Asset Managers and How They Power Their Businesses with Salesforce CRM. The video and Powerpoint are downloadable here. My notes follow. I think the most interesting point came from Erik Yewell, who said, “We...
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