In the past week or so I’ve been asked by a couple up-and-coming VC fund managers what investors really want to know before they’ll invest in a fund. Without much concentration, I think it’s easy to say that most investors want to know about current and past performance. But if you think about this question from a different angle, I believe investors also want to … Continue reading Measuring Investment Performance by Measuring Deal Flow
Over the last week or so, I have seen quite a few pitch decks from VC fund managers who are either raising a new or follow-on fund investment fund. One of the interesting things about the majority of these meetings is not going page by page through the firm’s pitch deck in its entirety. It’s a small observation, but meaningful in a lot of ways. … Continue reading The “Un-Pitch Deck”
As soon as I wrote the title of this blog post I jokingly thought to myself, “Wait, is there a such thing as a non-difficult entrepreneur?” The obvious answer to that question is yes, but for anyone who consistently works with entrepreneurs, it seems the really difficult entrepreneurs are the ones that are most memorable (and not in a good way). When you examine the … Continue reading Dealing With Difficult Entrepreneurs
I’m not big on clichés, but there are a few mottoes I live by that I believe have helped me quite a bit in life. I won’t list all of them here, but here are two I believe are worthy of sharing publicly. Motto #1: Incremental Progress Incremental progress is a methodology I adopted when I started learning Spanish 3 years ago. In short, incremental … Continue reading Incremental Progress + Purposeful Preparation = Positive Outcomes
In any given week I might have meetings with 5 to 10 different companies. Most of these companies are early-stage in nature and are often seeking one of two things: Advice and/or capital. If I had to guess, I’d say 10% are seeking advice, 85% are seeking capital, and just 5% are seeking both. For the overwhelming majority of those that are just seeking capital I … Continue reading The Importance of Validating Your Assumptions
I have spent this entire week writing an investment report about one of our portfolio companies we are in the process of investing in. Obviously, I like writing because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be spending my Sunday afternoon writing about report writing. Leisurely writing is different from writing an investment report that will eventually be distributed to an investment committee and subsequently to investors. … Continue reading I Love Writing About Startups
I had the opportunity to travel to Austin recently to check out the city and get a feel for the entrepreneurial landscape there. I had never been to Austin before and it just so happened that the weekend I was there was during South by Southwest (SXSW). I always knew SXSW was a big event, but I had no idea it had grown so large … Continue reading My Recent Trip to Silicon Valley…..I mean Austin, Texas.
My first job out of college was in the field of engineering (Structural Engineering, to be precise). I wanted to build buildings and work on complex job sites where I would wear a hard hat and boss people around. For some strange reason I thought this was what engineers did……..right out of college. After college, when I sat down at my desk for the first … Continue reading Can You Be a Good Investor If You’ve Never Been an Entrepreneur?
TheJCurve 