(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]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...
[Continue Reading]FinTech Innovation Lab Launch Event – June 2, 2011
The new FinTech Innovation Lab, an annual program run by the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture, had their launch event on Thursday night. It attracted a very high quality crowd of senior executives from major investment banks and members of the innovation community — two groups that don’t normally mingle. One peculiar note:...
[Continue Reading]Update on our study on deal sourcing
It’s been very exciting to see such a strong response to our recent research study on “Best Practices in Private Equity and Venture Capital Deal Origination”, published in the Winter 2010 Journal of Private Equity. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on this topic; we have not found any other in-depth research...
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