Lots of venture capitalists claim to add value to the companies in which they invest. But how do they do it? And does it really produce better returns for their investors? My coauthors and I just published in the Journal of Private Equity the first-ever research study on best practices of venture capitalists...
[Continue Reading]3 Ways Proven Executives Get Paid To Work With Early-Stage Companies
Drew Hansen recently posted in Forbes a summary of my presentation (included below) on Career Opportunities with Private Equity and Venture Capital Portfolio Companies. His article is here....
[Continue Reading]How VCs Deploy Operating Talent To Build Better Companies
Drew Hansen just posted a very interesting piece on Forbes on, “How VCs Deploy Operating Talent To Build Better Startups”. He draws on the research study my coauthors and I are about to publish on best practices in how venture capitalists increase the odds of company success through operational assistance. We are using just about...
[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]Valuing Startup Employee Options
This is the third of three blog posts on financial modeling for startups. The first was on best practices in building financial models, and the second was a template financial model for a startup. I’ve often found it helpful to have on hand a simple model showing the impact of each financing stages on all...
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