Almost all of the seed stage founders I work with pay themselves a very meager salary post seed round.  It’s rarely a discussion – there are limited resources, a lot of pressure to hit meaningful milestones, and the founders usually […]

One of the strongest factors credited for Ebay’s return to form is continued strong growth in mobile commerce.  Fred Wilson talked a bit about this in his most recent post and there was a nice article in the NYT about it […]

The founder and CEO of one of my portfolio companies recently caught up with the VC partner who led his latest round and was the newest member on his board. The company had recently raised a series A round, and […]

As few weeks ago, I wrote a tweet noting that many of the most remarkable scaling startups today were not “Lean Startups” by the traditional sense. What many of the insights around Customer Development have been really impactful to my […]

When we were fundraising for NextView I, a successful entrepreneur we were seeking advice from asked our team about what our “favorite future” was for our fund. We really liked that phrase – it gets you thinking aspirationally about the […]

Ownership is a relatively puzzling concept in venture capital.  It seems like almost all institutional investors have an ownership target, and many stick to that number pretty religiously.  But why and where does that come from?  I remember when I […]

I’m really excited to announce our recent investment in Directr. We met Max and Eli earlier this year through an entrepreneur that we love (ps: this is probably the best way to get an intro to a VC). They were […]

A lot of ink has been spilled about the challenges of building large scale consumer internet companies in Boston. Here’s a recent example that is quite thoughtful although misses the mark IMHO. To me, the biggest challenge of consumer web companies […]

I just left TechStars NYC Demo Day.  It was a lot of fun – excellent founders, exciting companies making a lot of progress, lots of energy. But my favorite part of the demo day was that they did something that […]

In a previous post, I listed my major hesitations that I often share with founders these days who ask me about starting businesses. Ultimately, I really believe that founding a business isn’t for everyone.  It probably is a good fit […]