Information for startups
From “Ask the VC: >Do I Need a Team To Raise Venture Capital?
You probably guessed, the answer is “yes, you need a team”. The post expands on three key reasons:
1. No single person can do everything.
2. It’s not a good sign if you can’t get others to get excited about your plan
3. If you don’t have a team, what is the venture capitalist investing in?
Purely for entertainment value, from How to Manage Your Board
The first 3 points (and there are 11 in the post):
1. Meet by phone whenever possible. Most of them will be doing their email or goosing their admin or something and not paying any attention at all. They’ll just vote when you ask’em to.
2. Never distribute anything in advance; they might read it and get themselves all confused. Just present it all: gets you through most of the meeting.
3. Never number the pages of what you are presenting. Lots of time can be used constructively figuring out what page everybody is on. If you email the material (preferably just after the start of the meeting), send lots of separate files. Turkeys’ll never know what to look at. Bonus suggestion: send slightly different copies of files with different pagination to everyone; it’s a lotta work but it’s worth it.
I think I’ve been in meetings like that…
From Fred Wilson’s “A VC” blog: From Messes To Successes. Worth a read. Here’s a sample:
When I look back at my 20+ year history of venture investing, it’s certainly true that the biggest successes have been big messes at some point in their life. …
I am not advocating messmaking with your startup. There have been plenty of buttoned up startups that I’ve been involved in that have been great successes…
But there is something about messes that lead to great successes. I think it often has to do with teams that focus almost exclusively on the product and the market to the exclusion of everything else. They don’t build the rest of the infrastructure that it takes to be a stable well executing business and they suffer a lot because of it. But in the process they get the one thing right that really matters. And the fact that they get the one thing right that really matters makes matters worse because the product takes off and they don’t have the resources in place to deal with their success. And mess ensues.
From Bill Burnham’s “Burnham’s Beat” blog: 4 Things to Do After You Get Your First Term Sheet:
Check out the blog post for some good commentary, but here’s the summary:
From Rick Segal’s “The Post Money Value” blog: The Don’t Do That List (again):
Don’t:
From Venture Hacks: How do we set the valuation for a seed round?:
The above blog post tackles the following questions and provides some food for thought:
From the Silicon Forest blog, Credence troubles persist; Hillsboro site has a new owner Mike Rogoway reports that semiconductor-test company Credence still has 265 employees at their Hillsboro facility and “plans to keep going” in Hillsboro to make it a center for “engineering excellence” — while their last quarterly report says they’ve sold their Hillsboro facility, and leased it back for a mere 2 years (with a 1 year extension option).
From the Silicon Forest blog, VC investment turns down, especially in Oregon:
VC investment in U.S. companies totaled $6.84 billion in the first quarter, according to numbers out today from Dow Jones VentureSource. That’s off 7 percent from the first three months last year.
More worrying is Oregon’s first-quarter haul: Just $8 million. Compare that to a very healthy $47.9 million in the first quarter a year ago.
According to the Raleigh News & Observer,
Requests for H-1B visas reached an all-time high this year, with nearly 163,000 applications received in five days, federal officials said Thursday.
Because of the volume, Citizenship and Immigration Services will conduct a random lottery to award the 65,000 visas allowed by law for highly educated foreign workers. In addition, another 20,000 will be given to foreign citizens with advanced degrees from American universities, under a special exemption.
The government is continuing to do a fine job of limiting immigration of highly educated workers.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that VCs in the Bay area are not at all positive about the current business climate:
The nation’s financial crisis has clobbered the confidence of Silicon Valley venture capitalists for the second straight quarter, according to a survey being released Thursday by a business professor at the University of San Francisco.
Professor Mark Cannice said venture investors ranked the business climate for startups at 3.22 on a scale of 1 to 5 – the lowest level in the 17 quarters since he started the index in January 2004.
That follows the 3.54 rating Cannice recorded at the end of 2007, as VCs began getting nervous about the mortgage crisis. For most of the last four years, the index bounced between 3.8 and 4.4.
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