Angel & VC Financing
If you’re looking to raise some early stage investment for your company, the Angel Forum is a great venue to get in front of local angels. Information below. Note the following key dates: April 23: next screening session. April 30: early registration deadline (save $100) May 18: Angel Forum event. See Bob’s information below: Looking [...]
On April 23, over 20 awesome speakers are going to get together in SF for the Startup Lessons Learned conference. Bootup Entrepreneurial Society has kindly decided to host the simulcast in their Gastown digs. Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS [...]
This year started off with a bang with Deloitte heralding 1Q10 as a “record quarter” in terms of deals done (180 vs the previous high of 165 in 4Q09). But only $35M of the $1.9B raised was by Canadian companies. That’s a shockingly small amount of finance for such a burgeoning sector. With that as [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
(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 [...]
(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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 still have to [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 of [...]
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 [...]
I LOVE this series. And it always kills me when Dogbert wags. Dilbert can be found here.
My friend Boris Mann had some great things to say about Vancouver being an excellent place to join or start a company here in this posting. However, I would add “capital efficiency”, great education system, and an awesome talent pool to to the list of reasons that Vancouver is a great place to build a [...]
Here is an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal about a new pattern in VC investing called “Pre-emptive financing.”(hey WSJ, when did you finally get smart and open up your walled garden??) In English, the definition of pre-emptive financing would be “get our money into the company before a fight breaks out over this [...]
The 19th Annual Angel Forum came to a successful close this afternoon. Thirty-six companies in the software, manufacturing, communications, internet, and medical device sectors presented to 70+ investors over the course of a full day of sessions. Each presenting company was given 10 minutes to pitch their company, market, team, market problem, solution, and investment [...]
In a stroke of brilliance, Yahoo is now buying companies before they are even founded. This definitely wins best parody of the month. Or is it even a parody?
I attended the Ready to Rocket 2006 session this morning, which was sponsored by Rocketbuilders , a Vancouver based market strategy and consulting firm that helps technology companies capitalize on market opportunities. The presentation started with an overview of the successes from 2005. Next, Geoff Hansen presented an IT Outlook for 2006. This was followed by [...]
It’s that time of year again. If you are an investor willing to invest in startups, or an investor seeking between $100,000 and $1 million, registration is now open for the 19th Annual Angel Forum, hosted by Bob Chaworth-Musters. I’ll let speak for himself: Current Angel investor preferences are for both tech and non-tech companies [...]
