Angel & VC Financing
I was asked recently what I had learned from my informal survey of the local BC cleantech sector. This was my response and I was encouraged to share it more widely. I’d love your own thoughts on the following.
Dear (Friend):
You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time to survey [...]
Boris Mann and the team over at Bootup Labs are stealing a great idea from some of our U.S. counterparts – the Startup Visa. In short, they (and I) want to see a visa category created by the government that makes it easier for a founding entrerpreneur to get a visa to be in the [...]
Via TechCrunch: Not Playing Around. EA Buys Playfish For $300 Million, Plus a $100 Million Earnout. I knew this was coming soon. The growth rates on Playfish and Zynga were too high not to get the attention of the majors. I love the quote about “killing EA” and then EA acquiring the team. That follows [...]
(This was originally posted at http://www.undertheradar.com and I’m cross-posting it here as well.)
Frank Gillett and his team over at Forrester have released “The State Of Emerging Enterprise/SMB Hardware Trends: 2008 To 2009″ reports. You can find them here (Enterprise / SMB). The summary is below with my thoughts added at the bottom:
x86 server virtualization [...]
Under the Radar Round 2 Calls!
As many of you know, I am extremely fortunate to be assisting the Dealmaker Media team as co-chair of the upcoming Under the Radar event on April 24, 2009 in San Francisco. This is round 2 of our call for companies in the cloud computing, virtualization, software as a service, [...]
(This was originally posted on http://www.undertheradar.com and is being cross-posted here.)
“Are companies getting funded?” The answer still appears to be yes. As long as the market opportunity is solid, the company has an “A” team (or is close to achieving that), and they’re solving real pains for known, addressable customers, the funding still seems to [...]
(This post is being cross-posted here but the original post is at http://www.undertheradar.com/blog)
This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big media [...]
In the Trenches: Cutting Costs in a Tight Economy
January 21, 2009 | 6:30 – 8:30PM
Moderator:
Mark Sherman, General Partner, Battery Ventures
Speakers:
Seth Sternberg, CEO, Meebo
Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf
Eric Ries, KPCB and former CTO, IMVU
Munjal Shah, CEO, Like.com
Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO, Echosign
NOTES:
Jason Lemkin
He built:
Babycenter:
Nanotech co: 100 meetings to get funded
Echosign: Founded in 2005; 18 people, 10,000 customer, [...]
Hey all,
I’m at Startonomics today, put on by Dealmaker Media. I’ll be posting updates to this over the course of the day.
Live stream is here:
My notes and editorial comments are in [square brackets.]
These are DRAFT NOTES. Better versions coming after the conference, complete with images.
MORNING SESSION:
Dave McClure, 500 hats
Metrics
ultimately, lead through to sale [...]
Javier, thank you for recognizing businesses like Mr. Gianforte’s that are “return leaders“. It is too easy these days to continue to buy the “traffic first, monetization second” crap that continues to be perpetuated (and which is really only applicable to about 0.0001% of the businesses out there.)
Greg, I’m glad to see that you [...]
Here are two interesting articles: one from Glenn Kelman, and a follow on from Guy Kawasaki on why serial entrepreneurs might not in fact be the best bet for funders. Interesting perspectives and I recognize some of Guy’s cautions from my own experience.
Worth reading both articles.
This post at VC Confidential contains some fantastic quotes. I have excerpted a few of my favourites.
“The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who [...]
I have to duplicate this entire post here. It’s brilliant. Thanks Seth for the post. I filed this under Business AND Life Lessons.
The best time to start is when you’ve got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies.
The best time to start is when the competition is far behind in technology, sophistication and [...]
Many of you know that I was on the selection committee for “Why Office 2.0 Matters” – a one day conference being organized by the Dealmaker Media team in SF. The one day session will look at 32 of the most promising companies emerging in the Office-productivity-on-the-web category.
As part of the run-up to the conference, [...]
On Monday, March 26th, 2007, Bob Chaworth-Musters and his team will once again be offering their Investor Ready 101 course, a fantastic day of coaching for young companies to learn how to prepare their investor pitches. This is a lead-in to the Angel Forum that will be held on April 24th, 2007.
At the Angel forum, [...]
This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at [...]
Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:
[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]
Disruption Opportunity: Venture Capital: Roger McNamee (private equity) and Ram Shiram (seed investing)
Shiram: I DO believe that it’s cheap to start a company; it is hard to find talent though.
Content companies are very hard [...]
This is without a doubt the best business movie of the year for its content. And it is probably one of my favourite movies of the year for its film quality as well. This movie is BRILLIANT.
It is the true story of a men’s brogue shoe factory in Northamptonshire, England that in order to [...]
This was a fun week. I’m involved in the Telus New Ventures program which is a business plan competition sponsored by Telus each year. Up to 60 teams of entrepreneurs submit business plans and go through rounds of mentoring and judging, mentoring and judging, until one plan is chosen as the winner of $60,000 [...]
There has been a lot of talk about how Web 2.0 doesn’t need VCs. The general outline of the discussion is thus:
Web 2.0 companies are capital efficient and don’t need a lot of money
they should start small and grow efficiently
VCs have certain size thresholds below which they won’t fund because the overhead involved [...]
