Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2012

Tracy DiNunzio isn’t your typical Silicon Valley startup founder. She did her first tech startup after the age of 30. And she didn’t start her company in Northern California. She hasn’t raised any venture capital. She leveraged herself and even sold many of her possessions to get started.

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AUGUST 30, 2014

Everybody has a blog these days and there is much advice to be had. Many startups now go through accelerators and have mentors passing through each day with advice – usually it’s conflicting. There are bootcamps, startup classes, video interviews – the sources are now endless. Improving startup productivity ?

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NOVEMBER 18, 2012

But for some strange reason they make you file your progress on fund raising, which is the widely picked up by the press. And why I woke up at 4.50am. As a startup founder you rarely have much money in your bank accounts. I recently had coffee with a young friend who just finished his first startup. But he learned.

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JULY 29, 2010

We received so much positive feedback from our This Week in Venture Capital show walking through valuation calculations & term sheets that we decided to do a Q&A show this week to address topics that entrepreneurs want to learn about. In fact, far better if you haven’t raised venture capital. This is minutes 8-11.

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OCTOBER 14, 2011

” Everybody knows that when you raise money at a startup your ownership percentage of the company goes down. The goal is to have the value of the startup go up by enough that you own a smaller percentage of a much larger business and therefore your total personal value goes up. million at a $7.5

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

This is part of my ongoing series on startup advice but also filed under my sales & marketing posts. No advice I give will ever apply to 100% of companies, 100% of startups or even 100% of tech startups. By all means light up my comments sections with any cases you believe where this advice doesn’t apply.

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SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

I was reading Danielle Morrill’s blog post today on whether one’s “ Startup Burn Rate is Normal. I love how transparently Danielle lives her startup (& encourages other to join in) because it provides much needed transparency to other startups. Let’s set up a framework.

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JUNE 27, 2011

I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. I worked with an entrepreneur who was to appear at a startup networking event where he was to talk about his company’s plans.

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MARCH 31, 2012

I got an email recently from my friend & fellow VC, Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston. Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. And that leads me to today’s post.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2011

If you read this blog often you'll know that I'm a huge fan of First Round Capital. One example is that they introduced a program where their founders can pool together shares from their company and exchange them for a small portfolio of other First Round Capital companies. I'm a huge fan of this innovation. and Half.com.

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AUGUST 10, 2013

As I’ve said before, all startups need to realize that every other company still has to see itself naked in the mirror in the morning. In my interview I talked about the biggest stress that really comes from startups – dealing with all the other people with whom you work. They are only one aspect of the startup experience.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 17, 2012

We’ve grown accustomed to a professionalism where we know when a work issue comes up we can count on each other for a quick Sunday call between family time. And that person has almost certainly chosen specifically to be a startup lawyer over serving other types of customers because he or she enjoys working with entrepreneurs.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 4, 2013

I recommend you read Fred Wilson’s recent blog post about the need for a well articulated business strategy before pushing a particular business model. I found myself in violent agreement with Fred’s blog post(s). I see many companies these days just race to raise capital. My take on his argument is this: 1.

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APRIL 17, 2012

Brad wrote up his answer here – you should read it because it’s very instructive for how I believe communities ought to think about naming conventions. In his blog he says, “I responded that I thought it was stupid. This is the list I would start with. Think about venture capital. LA should be LA.”

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TechEmpower

JULY 31, 2023

When talking to startup founders or other innovators, we always ask questions to better understand their business as a core. Start by building just enough of your product to get early CAC and CLV signals (they won’t be perfect). If your numbers work out, then scaling becomes a question of capital. What does the business do?

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 1, 2011

I think that’s the beauty of both capitalism and innovation. This is a theme that comes up in one the most influential business books for me of the past decade, The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb where he talks about the role that luck plays in business success. If you’re a tech startup person I know you know what I mean.

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JULY 13, 2013

One of my favorite events last year was attending Startup Grind where I got to interview Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. ” We talked about my influences as a younger person and what got me started in technology and entrepreneurship. And of course we talked about many of my views of building startups.

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OCTOBER 3, 2011

On my blog I’ve been hesitant to take the topic head on. But last week I noticed a blog post by a woman, Tara Tiger Brown, that asked the question, “ Why Aren’t More Women Commenting on VC Blog Posts? In it she observes that only 3% of the comments on this blog are from women. In colleges. Back to women.

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MAY 9, 2011

I spoke at Stanford last year about starting a tech company. They really cleverly chopped the video up into small bite-sized segments. Here is a quick summary of my POV: When you start a company a 50/50 partnership seems obvious. One person gets married or has kids and starts to de-prioritize the business.

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JUNE 8, 2010

Greycroft is Alan’s venture capital firm that recently raised its second fund ($130 million) with offices in both New York and LA. I’m going to save that for a future blog post. Get your product/market fit working before you ramp up your costs (or raise too much money). And market your brand, not your personality.

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JULY 27, 2013

Last year I wrote a blog post on entrepreneurs with a chip on their shoulders. My friend Seth Levine covered this well in his blog post on “ Handling Rejection ” which you should also read. They often come from the experience of being kicked, rejected, shunned, beat up. I think it’s an important read.

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SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons”. Tonight I was reading a good blog post ( here ) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch 50. I’ll talk about all that in a future post. We closed a $16.5

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NOVEMBER 11, 2013

I often advise startup companies not to try and pin all of your brand equity into an announcement. It’s something you must earn over time by living up to the name you define. We are trying hard to live up to the guidelines we laid out for our investors, our portfolio companies and our community. It would be out of sync.

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JUNE 27, 2013

Let’s start with the fund. Santa Monica is the place where the highest concentration of early-stage startups are created if you consider also the contiguous geography of Venice Beach. What’s up with that? Well, the venture capital industry has changed a lot in the past 20 years … and we have too.

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InfoChachkie

JUNE 3, 2013

Upon graduation from Wharton, John and Kyle launched a startup based upon a simple, pedestrian product: a computer mouse shaped like the head of a golf driver. However, a number of them wanted to vicariously experience the startup world through John and Kyle''s venture. It''s gonna highlight our emotions, our ups and our downs.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 10, 2021

If you want to get in better shape and haven’t read that you might start there. I started advice with the premise that no amount of exercise or food eating plan would help with long-term fitness or weight goals unless you first had a mental plan and a set of measurements to track your progress. I want to share with you how I did this.

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APRIL 13, 2011

Huge thank you to Steve De Long for the write up. Brad on blogging. How did you start blogging? “My In 2004 / 2005 I was starting to get intrigued with user-generated content. In 2004 / 2005 I was starting to get intrigued with user-generated content. was starting. Brad’s start in Venture Capital.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 22, 2010

File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. Oh, and Demo charges the startups $18,000. It got me thinking, which for me is always the sign of a good blog post. Too many startup execs place too much emphasis on the big stage launch. I’ve heard many startup CEO’s (and VCs!)

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Most experienced VCs won’t push you to give up founder control at this stage of the business nor should they. As You Start to Mature. In the Early Days.

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L.A. Business Journal

APRIL 26, 2017

Prominent seed-stage startup investor Chris Sacca announced in a blog post titled “Hanging up my spurs” on Wednesday that he has retired from venture capital investing.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 3, 2013

Let me start by saying that Clayton is one of the most influential people on my thoughts about markets that led to both the concept behind my first startup and my main theses in investing. Startup Grind was a truly awesome conference and Derek the consumate host. He spoke about ROCE (return on capital employed).

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JUNE 29, 2014

Fred Wilson wrote a Tweetstorm and then did a blog post on the topic. I never asked Marc why he stopped blogging but I presume it is some combo of having started a venture capital firm (which you might guess takes a bit of time) and also allowing some air time for his then-less-well-known compadre. Engagement.

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

Fred Wilson wrote a blog post yesterday called “Real Names” in which he talked about a commenter on his blog who preferred not to comment because he didn’t want to use his real name. As I did a deeper dive reflection on the topic I started thinking I wanted: Anonymity + Authority. It’s a powerful concept.

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InfoChachkie

OCTOBER 3, 2011

So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. Everything Is A Remix – Including Your Startup. Nobody starts out original. Like music, movies and blog entries, startups are a remix of that which came before. emphasis added).

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MARCH 30, 2011

I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement&# as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. Nobody really knows whether or not the idea is yet going to be big, so I believe in not over capitalizing too early. I believe that over capitalizing companies too early often favors the VC. You have a hunch.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

I grew up believing that human behavior was 20% nature, 80% nurture. Fred Wilson said as much on his blog also. That is true of all my blog posts. It is what I love the most about debates and one of the things I love most about blogging. of all data is made up. OK, not literally made up.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 6, 2016

I even prefer to fund entrepreneurs who have experience some level of set-backs in their careers or startups because I think it brings a humility to decision-making that I find healthy. In London when founders failed they were ostracized in the press and culturally I believe it became harder to raise capital.

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