From Seeing Both Sides Why "Flat Is The New Up" and VC Funds Are Under-Reserved, an insightful look at how the current financial situation affects how a venture capital firm looks at how much money they need to hold in reserve for each new investment. As explained in the post, when VCs invest in a company, they reserve additional funds for the expect future rounds of follow-on investment. Today, it’s harder to find new VC partners to share in that future investment, and closing the investment will likely take longer than it has in the past. And that adds up to a need to reserve more follow-on funds for each investment, which has implications for how many investments a vc firm can make.
Monthly Archive for November, 2008
From Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog, the post Tips on A:B testing links to a paper and presentation on how to do it right. As summarized in the post:
1. Agree on evaluation criteria UP FRONT (vs after the fact analysis)
2. Ensure sample size is sufficiently large to have high confidence in results (with small samples, testing a version against itself can show wide ranges in performance)
3. Be truly random, and consistent when allocating users to groups
4. Ramp experiments from 1% of users to [50%] of users to get results fast [subject to day of week variations]. Auto abort if the new version is significantly worse.
5. Account for: robots skewing results, ‘newness’ effect, time of day, day of week
6. Understand why as well as what (e.g. is lower performance caused by slower load time? incompatible browser types or screen sizes? etc. If fixable, fix and retest.)
7. Integrate constant testing into culture and systems
8. Test all the time.
From Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog How bad is it for startups seeking financing?, one perspective on the current climate.
In a post on the Open Forum blog, Guy Kawasaki lists some ideas for the art of bootstrapping, like “focus on cash flow, not profitability”.
From OEN Blog:Companies seeking funding – Don’t miss the chance to apply to present. Deadlines coming up in December.
PAN Submission – Companies interested in applying to present at the January 22 PAN/OAF meeting must do so by Friday, December 4th by 5:00 p.m. Learn more about PAN.
OEN Angel Oregon 2009 – Early bird deadline to apply to present is Friday, December 12. OEN Angel Oregon 2009 will be held at the Governor Hotel in Portland on March 12th.
Round 3 OEN Seed Oregon Pubtalk – Deadline to apply to present is Wednesday, December 17. Round 3 will take place on Thursday, January 15, 2009 at Bridgeport Brewpub.
Key Dates
Nov 24, MIT Enterprise Forum: The Future of Wireless Communication
Nov 24, West Side Proggers
Nov 25, OTBC Open House
Dec 01, Alliance of Angels 10 Minute Pitch Clinic
Dec 04, OEN Webinar: Advisory Boards
Dec 08, Northwest Environmental Conference
Mar 12, Angel Oregon
May 20, Webvisions
Monthly events
first Tuesday: Portland Ruby Brigade
first Wednesday: Wiki Wednesday
first Wednesday: PDX Web Innovators
last Wednesday: Personal Telco
second Monday: PDXFunc user group meeting
second Monday: PMUG
second Tuesday: Portland PHP User Group
second Tuesday: Portland Python user group
second Wednesday: Drupal User Group
second Wednesday: Portland Werewolf
third Friday: PMI Roundtable West
third Thursday: PDX PostgreSQL user group
third Tuesday: Portland Java User Group
third Wednesday: PMI Downtown Roundtable
third Wednesday: Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs
Monday, Nov 24 2008
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meeting: Legal
4:00 PM, MIT Enterprise Forum: The Future of Wireless Communication
4:30 PM, BEC Corvallis After Hours
7:00 PM, Dorkbot PDX
7:00 PM, West Side Proggers
Tuesday, Nov 25 2008
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meetings: IT
3:00 PM, OTBC Open House
6:00 PM, OCCA monthly meeting
Wednesday, Nov 26 2008
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meeting: Finance/Operations
Friday, Nov 28 2008
3:00 PM, Beer and Blog
Monday, Dec 01 2008
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meeting: Legal
12:30 PM, Hillsboro/Beaverton TweetUp
1:30 PM, Alliance of Angels 10 Minute Pitch Clinic
4:30 PM, BEC Corvallis After Hours
Tuesday, Dec 02 2008
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meetings: IT
12:00 PM, OTBC: An Introduction to Venture Capital
Wednesday, Dec 03 2008
7:30 AM, PBA: A Morning with Congressman Blumenauer
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meeting: Finance/Operations
12:00 PM, Open Source Software in China
7:00 PM, State of Portland Tech – Web Innovators
Thursday, Dec 04 2008
7:30 AM, PNDC Breakfast with Congressman Blumenauer
7:30 AM, PBA: Closing the books on 2008
7:30 AM, AeA CFO Forum: Controlling Costs in a Slowdown
9:00 AM, CubeSpace Morning Meetings: HR
10:00 AM, OEN Webinar: Advisory Boards
Friday, Dec 05 2008
9:00 AM, Cubespace morning meeting: Marketing
3:00 PM, Beer and Blog
6:00 PM, Calagator Code Sprint
Saturday, Dec 06 2008
9:00 AM, Cyborg Camp
From Dogster Inc. Company: Blog 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Business. A very sensible list. Here’s a sample:
- If being a business person is not your goal find a business partner immediately.
- Consult anyone you know that has run a earnings-based business
- Spend your money when it’s in the bank, not when the deal is agreed to.
- Spend at least 50% of your time selling.
Read the other 6 (and more discussion of these four) at the above post.
From “A VC”, Do You Ever Do Any Real Work?, Fred Wilson notes that making regular blog entries does take time – but he sees a definite benefit for his VC firm. The above post gives one example relating to his new portfolio company Boxee.
As Fred notes:
… the time and energy I’ve put into this blog for the past five years has built a unique and very sophisticated audience. You are connectors and hubs of influence.
I know that one person out of the 100 I invited this morning will be incredibly impactful for boxee. It could be five people, it could be ten. Who knows?
But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference.
Unfortunately, according to EE Times, Ambric has shut down after not being able to close a $15 million series C round of venture capital. Apparently the technology worked and the company was getting design wins, but the current financial situation made it impossible to raise a round of funding, and they ran out of cash. I’m no expert on the technology, but from what I understand, Ambric was a fabless chip company whose products provided massively parallel processing for compute-intensive applications such as video processing.
The Portland Business Journal covered the Ambric news last Tuesday. Read their story at this link.
When I mention Twitter to someone over the age of 40, I often get one of the following reactions:
- What’s that?
- Why would I possibly want to do that?
- I don’t get it…
More than 3 million people are using Twitter. If you’re wondering what it is (or if you know what it is but are wondering whether it might be relevant to your business) O’Reilly has published a free video about Twitter for Business. It’s a good introduction to Twitter basics, and provides a number of examples of how Twitter can be used in business.
After viewing the video, you may or may not start “tweeting”, but at least you’ll probably be able to say “I get it” (maybe…).
