(co-written with Stephane Nasser, co-founder of OpenVC, an open-source initiative to collect and analyze all VC theses.) VCs love to talk investment theses: on Twitter, Medium, Clubhouse, at conferences. And yet, when you take a closer look, theses are often meaningless and/or misleading. OpenVC is a new, open-source initiative to collect and analyze all publicly...
[Continue Reading]The iconic VC-Backed founders are all White & Asian men. So why invest in diversity?
(co-written with Katherine Boe Heuck, a MBA candidate at MIT Sloan (class of 2022) and a past intern at Versatile VC, Metaprop NYC, and InQTel.) What can we learn from the best venture capital investments of all time? Well, we learn to invest exclusively in men, preferably white or Asian. A year ago, we reviewed...
[Continue Reading]15 Steps to Fundraising for Your New Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund
Launching is easy; fundraising is harder. I’ve been fortunate to be a Partner at two different VC firms over the past 9 years, and we’ve grown AUM 10X both times. If you take the fifteen steps below, you’ll have the core of a high-performing fundraising and investor relations function. Build the firm as much as...
[Continue Reading]Flexible VCs With Structures Between Equity and Revenue-Based Investing
(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. His work on VC and small communities is at greatercolorado.vc/blog. ) This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Finance: a new option for founders who care about control II: Who are the major Revenue-Based Finance VCs? III: Why are...
[Continue Reading]Flexible VC, a New Model for Companies Targeting Profitability
(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. His work on VC and small communities can be found at greatercolorado.vc/blog. ) This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Finance: a new option for founders who care about control II: Who are the major Revenue-Based Finance VCs? III:...
[Continue Reading]Venture capitalists eating our own dog food: Using technology and analytics to make better investments
(To see the video above, please click the image, and then click on the Play button.) Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. When I was single, I registered for (a lot of) dating websites. When I met my...
[Continue Reading]Free money for your impact tech startup
Congratulations! You’ve decided to launch a technology-enabled startup with a positive social impact! Nearly every major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm has now invested in a B Corp; maybe you will be one of them! Now the bad news: some venture capitalists have a bias against startups with an explicit positive social impact, on the grounds...
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