Angel investors can expect favorable payoffs with only 10 deals, but it takes at least 20 investments to truly be safe.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
Words of wisdom: Your growth always lies on the other side of your discomfort
Your growth always lies on the other side of your discomfort. Whether it’s in the weight room or in career decisions, you’ll never develop yourself by staying in your comfort zone. People don’t become old when they reach a certain birthday; they become old when they decide to live life without crossing that line of discomfort.
After talking to a few people with first-hand knowledge of the deals, here’s what makes DST different.
No board seats
Weaker rights
Term sheets of one or two pages
Deals happen quickly
Cash outs for early employees and founders
Experience scaling and monetizing social networking businesses
Generous valuations
via And Groupon Makes Three. What’s Russian Firm DST’s Secret Sauce? – NYTimes.com.
Source of capital for VC funds in 2009
One of venture capital’s oldest and most reliable partners was hard to find in 2009, according to an annual survey that examines where the private equity asset class receives its capital.
Endowments and foundations saw their share of the overall venture capital pool fall to 3.2% in 2009 from 13.1% in 2008
The cutback partly contributed to the venture capital industry’s fund-raising slump last year. Venture firms raised $13 billion in 2009, down 54.6% from the $28.7 billion raised in 2008.
Where Venture Capital’s Money Came From In 2009 – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ.
Playing Fair – The Economist
Notions of fairness increase steadily as societies achieve greater market integration (see chart). People from better-integrated societies are also more likely to punish those who do not play fair, even when this is costly to themselves.
On Teaching Entrepreneurship
If you look at the entrepreneurship programs at various schools, you can figure out where those programs’ stances are on whether entrepreneurship can be taught. That’s a post for another day. Here’s a blogger who thinks its neither taught nor natural, and I really appreciate his position, although I might not agree completely:
Business schools and conferences have institutionalized entrepreneurialism as an avocation like law or medicine when it is more often a streak of temperament, luck and inspiration. Far from a program taught by somebody else, entrepreneurialism has always been for me my only shot at being myself.
Changes in the economics of film making
In the past, studio executives made deals to include products in films. Now, with the help of people like Mr. Yospe, writers and producers themselves are cutting the deals often before the movie is cast or the script is fully shaped, like “The 28th Amendment,†which Warner Brothers has agreed to distribute.
via Branding Deals Come Early in the Filmmaking Process – NYTimes.com.
VC’s flight to quality
I think it’s pretty clear that there’s been a flight to quality in venture capital
There are two instructively contradictory data points out in venture capital land this morning:
* First-quarter 2010 VC fund-raising was the worst since 1993 (Source)
* Sequoia Capital's new $1-billion fund is oversubscribed by a reported $3-billion (Source)
How can that be?, some might ask. How can one fund be so wildly oversubscribed when the industry is in the worst fund-raising doldrums in modern memory?
via Growthology: VCs are Down! VCs are Up! The Compression of Risk Capital Commitments.
The profit motive- Airline’s improve their food offering
The new offerings are in large part the result of the new economics of in-flight food. Kevin Jackson, managing director of consumer marketing for US Airways, said that when airlines gave away food, “the motivation was to minimize cost.†Now that most airlines are selling food, they have an incentive, he said, to “provide better choice and quality for passengers.â€
via No Longer Free, Airplane Food Tries to Be Tasty – NYTimes.com.
The money made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until today | Royal Pingdom
Revenue over time for Microsoft, Apple and Google
via The money made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until today | Royal Pingdom.