Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

I was on This Week in Venture Capital today with Jason Calacanis talking about the big VC deals at the moment and talking about the VC industry. Also in the video: - Is it a good idea for VC’s to pay stratospheric prices? - My blog and what it’s done for my deal flow. - IPO market is back.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 18, 2017

Union Square Ventures (USV) has been one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past 10–15 years and continues to be a leader in our industry. Lindel is no stranger to thorny venture capital issues — he was arguably amongst the most successful LPs of his generation. Maybe that’s USV, too.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 27, 2011

By definition, you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? People often ask me why I started blogging. GRP Partners last fund is the single best performing VC fund in the US (prequin data) for its vintage year). Absofuckinglutely. accessibility.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 27, 2013

6 or 7 years ago when TechCrunch was at its peak market share (they are still strong but many more tech blogs have also popped up) there was a term for getting covered there called “the TechCrunch bounce.” that they probably read the main tech blogs. Frankly, every VC’s, too. Perception = reality.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series about Raising Venture Capital. This posting was inspired by an email from Rajat Suri who wrote me an email in response to Chris Dixon’s blog post (link below) from August, which recently re-ran on Business Insider and has generated much Twitter chatter. I was an early cynic. What gives?

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Xconomy

OCTOBER 9, 2018

Once considered a passing phase, the concentration of capital into fewer, larger venture capital deals appears to be the new normal. based venture-backed companies as of the end of the third quarter hit a decade high, and is on pace to pass the $100 billion mark by year’s end. That’s more.

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Venture Capital Capital Invest Report 81

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2010

This is part of my ongoing series on Understanding Venture Capital. I recently wrote a blog post on understanding how the size and age of a venture capital fund might affect you when you’re raising money. I believe these VC funds have suffered some amount of reputation fall out. Let me explain: 1.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 25, 2011

tl;dr version: If you’re an entrepreneur or VC or will be working in this industry - buy this. When I first started as a startup CEO in 1999 there were no guides on raising venture capital. 3) VCs are anal about things like voting thresholds, seniority of their stock, protective provisions, etc. Drag along rights?

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Venture Capital Entrepreneur Guide Blogging 304

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 21, 2010

Finally, a lot of people asking me about typos on my blog. Investors: Khosla Ventures (lead), RRE Ventures (lead), Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, First Round Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco. Blogging has gone through many iterations. Tumblr – “Microblogging platform&#.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 3, 2016

In the VC insider baseball world a discussion has gone on about “VC platforms” over the past 5 or so years. While firms define platforms differently, let’s just say they are the services that a VC offers outside of investment capital and partner time on boards or providing intros. Partner Leverage.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2010

They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm. I often tell people that raising venture capital is more difficult than getting married. Not so in venture capital. You’re tied at the hip to your VC. But what was the VC like when the chips were down?

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 15, 2010

We started this week’s show with a Q&A session where I answered viewer questions about fund raising and the VC industry. If you enjoy this blog I think you’ll enjoy watching the first 14 minutes of this video (just click on the image of me below). What advice do you have for people who want to get into venture capital?

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2011

If you want a very quick primer on all the stuff nobody ever tells you about raising venture capital check out this video where Mark Jeffrey & I break it down on This Week in VC. All of this is covered in more detail on the TWiVC video above (and much of it is covered in text on this blog on the “ Raising VC &# tab).

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2010

One of the questions I’m most often asked is, “what’s it like being a VC?&# I’ve been a VC for nearly 3 years now. Since I answer this all the time anyway I thought it might make an interesting blog post. But let’s face it, as a VC you spend time with whichever companies you want.

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Venture Capital Technical Review Startup Entrepreneur 312

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2011

I recently filmed a show for This Week in Venture Capital in which I talked about how to prepare for a VC meeting: whom you’ll meet, who should attend from your side, what materials you should bring and how you should run the meeting. I wrote the summary notes in this blog post. But take prompts from the VC.

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socalTECH

FEBRUARY 4, 2011

Suster, who has been one of the most visible and active venture capital bloggers in Southern California, beat such VCs as John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital in the listing.

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Venture Capital GRP Partners Southern California Technical Review 145

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

What Can You Do if a VC Pulls Their Term Sheet? This isn’t Dave McClure secretly taking over Mark’s blog. Finally, know that the VC & entrepreneurial worlds are very, very small. I have spoken with many VCs in the past about which VCs pull out of deals. Sorry for using f**k two posts in a row.

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InfoChachkie

MAY 22, 2012

The steps outlined below represent an ideal approach to raising capital from sophisticated investors. You might be at Step 2 with one VC and Step 3 with another. VCs collude all the time, it is only fair that entrepreneurs compare notes every now and again as well.”. Subscribe to their blog. The keyword here is authentic.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2010

I’m often asked by people, “how do I get into VC?&# Well, I know 3-4 VC jobs that are publicly available. Every time I do recruiting I get somebody who says, “I’m willing to take a step back in my career to work in VC.&# This isn’t likely to appeal to us. Tags: VC Industry. Yesterday.

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Venture Capital Technical Review GRP Partners Email 290

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 8, 2010

I recently wrote a piece for Mashable on how to create a company blog. Since it’s already written (and since I promised not to republish on my blog other than a summary) if you’re interested please have a read over there. Summary notes and then I’ll extend: Should you blog? What should you blog about?

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Blogging Startup Writing Summary 286

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 18, 2012

As I’ve written about before, You’d Have to be a Big Baby to Complain about Being a VC. Think about it – most entrepreneurs who manage to raise seed money or venture capital usually raise enough money for 12-18 months maximum. And I’m happy as a VC. And why I woke up at 4.50am. And yet you have to.

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Blogging Press Entrepreneur Venture Capital 420

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

My 1,000th Post on This Blog - Tim Berry's Blog - Planning Startups Stories , July 21, 2010 HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback - Niall Kennedy's Weblog , February 8, 2010 Your Product Needs a Soul - ArcticStartup , February 12, 2010 Product Friday: Monetizing Content is a Product Problem - This is going to be BIG.

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Startup Venture Capital Blogging CTO Coach 378

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 1, 2009

In the first post in this three part series I described why I believe the VC market froze between September 2008 – April 2009. I’m not a doomsday guy, but just believe that we won’t see a V shaped recovery, which could make VC funding more difficult for tech start-ups (don’t shoot the messenger!).

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2015

I don’t know Ezra yet but since he’s taking the time to blog (which I hugesly respect) and share thoughts I thought I’d take him up on his challenge and also spill the beans on my secrets. On blogging I blog because I love it. Mostly I’m Blogging for the Hell of It, Not Blogging to Stay Relevant.

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Blogging Writing Startup Email 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 18, 2010

I’ve been using Chartbeat for over a month now to track performance of my blog and I find myself looking at Google Analytics much less these days. The next users after that is reading a blog post that I wrote nearly 9 months ago. I tend to agree with them but I think that numbers are important in VC meetings.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2010

One of things I’ve loved the most about doing now 11 weeks of This Week in VC is a chance to have an hour-long recorded conversation with investors. And in my interviews with many VCs I feel that people can watch these and get to know the VC’s as human beings a bit better. So how did Mike get into VC?

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Venture Capital Blogging Startup Fandango 230

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2009

This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC.&#. I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. The following are some tips for the debate style VC meeting.

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socalTECH

JANUARY 21, 2011

According to the list, put together by Larry Cheng and based on Compete traffic numbers, Suster was ranked number 3, with 53,655 monthly unique visitors to his blog, Both Sides of the Table. The venture capital blog ranking was the fourth annual ranking of 149 venture capital, microVC/seed, and growth equity blogs.

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Venture Capital GRP Partners Southern California Blogging 145

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 25, 2009

Beware of VC Seagulls, who shit on you and then fly away (or worse yet leave you with Red Herrings). I write this post as a warning to pick your VC’s carefully. I like to say to first-time entrepreneurs, picking a VC is more permanent than marriage. I guarantee this is a bad VC. Let me explain.

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Venture Capital Startup Technical Review Entrepreneur 297

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2010

To see the video of This Week in VC click on this link. What a pleasure that I got to spend an hour talking with both Om Malik (whom I’ve always respected his views) and Paul Jozefak , a venture capital partner at Neuhaus Partners in Germany (and formerly the head of Europe for SAP Ventures).

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Xconomy

JULY 10, 2019

More than a third of the companies that went public in the first half of this year were backed by venture capital. That, plus robust merger and acquisition activity, set a record for venture-backed exit value—$165.2 That, plus robust merger and acquisition activity, set a record for venture-backed exit value—$165.2

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Venture Capital Invest Startup Activity 86

Xconomy

APRIL 8, 2019

If you’ve been following venture capital trends, what you expected to happen in the first quarter of 2019 did: More money is being invested in fewer deals, and women founders still are getting less of it than men. Venture firms sent $32.6 Venture firms sent $32.6 Companies raised only $9.66 billion through 1,648 deals.

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Venture Capital Capital Invest Startup 109

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2015

If you want to understand the software trend that drove the creation of the seed-stage VC phenomenon I wrote about it that linked blog post but in short: cloud computing drove down the cost to create startups enabling a new category of investor. Some quick highlights include: The Role of a Seed Stage VC. Startup Lessons'

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Venture Capital Startup Invest Cloud Computing 150

Xconomy

MAY 8, 2017

Austin —Dell Technologies is publicly unveiling a venture capital investment arm that has been quietly investing in startups since the operation was run by EMC, the data storage giant that Dell agreed to acquire for $67 billion in 2015.

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Venture Capital Capital Technology News 77

Xconomy

OCTOBER 10, 2017

In mid-October, eleven college students will be flying to California for an opportunity that would be the envy of any Ivy League MBA candidate—they’ll meet the venture capital firm partners who will personally mentor them throughout the school year. Read more » Reprints | Share: UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

And for a select few entrepreneurs, they are able to go out and raise the venture capital they need and make their dreams a reality. So, what it is about these select few entrepreneurs, and what do they do that makes them successful in raising venture capital? And then go back to venture capitalists later.

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Xconomy

OCTOBER 5, 2016

Venture capital activity is gradually easing from last year’s peak, according to a new quarterly report put together by Seattle-based PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. VC firms invested $14.99 VC firms invested $14.99 Venture capital firms also are having no trouble raising funds.

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