Can professional investors use social media? Or, is social media strictly for teenagers and staying in touch with your friends? Historically, institutional investors kept their investing strategy and their activities very discreet. Today, however, some are aggressively employing social media tools to discuss their strategies, deals in the pipeline, and even their political views...
[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]Reinventing the Office: How to Lose Fat and Increase Productivity at Work
Fitness/life guru Tim Ferriss just posted my guest article on ff Venture Capital’s approach to building a fitness office. (Thanks Tim!) I’ve attached below my original, much more detailed blog post about the details of how we’ve designed our office to help people stay healthy and be as productive as possible. (UPDATE: ff Venture Capital...
[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]FastCompany book excerpt: 10 Steps to Leverage Online Networks
FastCompany has just published an excerpt of our book on the ten basic steps necessary to take full advantage of online networks. The excerpt is called Leveraging Your Links.Years ago, when I interned for Procter & Gamble, we were told to never write a memo longer than one page. This excerpt is our book written...
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