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When I first started out as a VC nearly 9 years ago, most early stage company valuations were expressed as pre-money valuations. That is, the valuation of the company prior to the investment of new capital. Most term sheets talked about the valuation in these terms, and you added the dollars invested to get a post-money […]

Raising money is often challenging, and a lot has been written about how to optimize the process to get the most attractive deal with the right investors. But relatively little has been written about actually selecting the “right” investor. When VC’s evaluate a founder or team, they rely heavily on references in their due diligence. […]

Sometimes, I hear people talk about early stage investing in terms of “placing bets”. It’s something that has rubbed me the wrong way for a while. In my first year as a VC, an old colleague of mine remarked that we shouldn’t talk about VC’s “doing deals” but instead, talk about “making investments”. Similarly, I think […]

VC’s are notorious for slowing down their activity during the summer. Raising capital in August is a definite no-no, but overall pace and engagement sometimes starts to slide well before that. This year, I’m guessing that the summer slowdown will be the most pronounced than we’ve seen in a while. The soft first quarter VC […]

Contrary to what one might think, the biggest problem for VCs isn’t making an investment in a company that fails.  All VC’s invest in lots of companies that don’t work out.  It’s a known risk, and the main one everyone thinks about. But this is not typically where VCs really get into trouble. The much […]

I’ve been thinking a little about non-recurring revenue businesses.  Particularly, businesses where transactions are large, but infrequent. I’m coming to the belief that these are under-appreciated categories of investment, especially since the gospel of recurring revenue, subscription commerce, and SaaS has been preached in recent years. The basic downsides of these sorts of businesses vs. […]

I’ve been thinking about our lifespan recently. That sounds grim, but it’s actually not. One thing that spurred this thinking is that my wife’s great aunt just turned 100. She is essentially my wife’s grandmother figure and they are very close. I first met her over 10 years ago when she was turning 90, and […]

In honor of the NBA Playoffs, I thought I’d sprinkle a little basketball lingo into this post I’ve been thinking about for a while. I think the most dangerous place to be for an early stage, venture funded company to be is where things are “sort-of-working”. When things are totally working, it’s clearly better. When […]

Earlier this week, we got the inevitable news that support for the Sunrise Calendar was coming to an end. This was very bittersweet for the team there, and for me since I was a very avid user and early investor and board member of the company. I’m particularly sad however because I must now say […]

When we started NextView 6 years ago, most seed rounds were relatively small. If a company raised $1M in a seed, that was pretty substantial. Our average round size in our first fund was about $1.2M. Actually, the average in the first half of the fund was quite a bit lower, but during this period […]