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]How Private Equity and Venture Capital Funds Grow the Value of Portfolio Companies
One of the major themes of the evolution of the private equity industry for the past decade has been the growth of internal groups focused on enhancing the value of portfolio companies. Twenty years ago, the great majority of the people working in private equity came out of investment banking, i.e., a deal background. Today,...
[Continue Reading]Seeking template project plan for a startup business
(jurvetson image via Flickr) I’m currently advising two startup businesses, and on their behalf my colleague Corentin Roux dit Buisson and I set out looking for a detailed template project plan for starting a new company. However, we haven’t yet succeeded. Do any readers have ideas? Whilst the ideas and business models differ wildly, most...
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