Congratulations to my coauthor, Chris Farmer, on joining General Catalyst Partners! I’m sure Chris will use many of the ideas that we discussed in our research paper on deal origination to help create / identify some exciting companies on General Catalyst’s behalf....
[Continue Reading]Buying private companies on marketplaces of primary and secondary interests
Congratulations to the team at AxialMarket on raising $2m from First Round Capital and Windcrest Investments. I take this as a sign that they’re starting to gain traction among corporations and private equity funds, despite the fact they’re threatening the lunch of lower-tier business brokers and others who benefit from the currently highly inefficient, fragmented...
[Continue Reading]Panel on Super-Seed Funds at Harvard Business School Club of NY
I took some notes on last week’s Harvard Business School Club of New York panel on "Super-Seed Funds — Back to the Future." Eugene Radin of Concept Clinic edited the notes and merged in his own. Incidentally, congratulations to Doug Atkin, Tony Berkman, Steve Miller and the rest of the Majestic Research team on their...
[Continue Reading]Institutional Investor publishes summary of our deal sourcing research
Chris Farmer and I have an article in today’s Institutional Investor, summarizing the key findings from our research on deal sourcing: Would you invest in a company that only sold to 1 out of 80 leads? Or a company that typically took one year and 3 professionals just to close a single client? In fact,...
[Continue Reading]Our new Harvard Business Review article: Time for Investors to Get Social
I’m excited to report that we’ve started to release the results from our first-ever study on best practices in private equity and venture capital deal origination. My coauthor Chris Farmer (formerly Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners) and I published a summary in the current issue of Harvard Business Review. Evalueserve, a global research firm and...
[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...
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