I’ve recently met with several universities, nonprofits, and government employees who’ve all asked the same question: how can we promote entrepreneurship? Just like me, they’re distressed about the poor economy and jobs situation. By contrast, as a venture capitalist, I can report that almost all of our portfolio companies are desperate to hire talent, and...
[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...
[Continue Reading]Corporations speak: How I think about buying your startup
I’m kicking off a new series on this blog: detailed notes on events of interest to the investing and technology community. Conrad Wadowski, Business Development at Xamtech, is initiating with his detailed notes on the inaugural panel of the new Enterprise Tech Meetup. Livestream video here. —————————– In startup land, consumer internet startups have gotten...
[Continue Reading]Tax Credits for Startups in New York State
As our federal and state government continue to worry about job creation, they’re trying their best to promote entrepreneurship. Our CFO Alex Katz just sent out a memo to our portfolio, attached below, about 2 tax credits available to companies that do business in New York State. For background, we rarely see a CPA come to...
[Continue Reading]How Startups Should Report Financial Results
I asked Rick Eaton, CFO of Hashable, to write for you a sanitized version of some of the detailed reports that Hashable provides to its investors (which includes us). He’s provided below a template for both the cover email and the detailed report. Rick was previously CFO of ffVC portfolio company Quigo, sold to AOL for...
[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...
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