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Another $800 Million Fund

Posted on Monday, May 12th

Lightspeed Ventures announced the raising of its new $800 Million fund. “It was a robust fundraising environment,” [Chris] Schaepe [General Partner] said. “There continues to be very good appetite within the LP community for early-stage venture capital.” Right. Early stage venture capital with a $800 Million fund. Read: Fund Envy and The Real VCs of

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Forbes Column 08: Bootstrap Yourself

Posted on Friday, Apr 18th

My new Forbes column Bootstrap Yourself highlights Silicon Valley’s hottest new trend, Bootstrapping. Great bootstrapping case studies I have covered are Sridhar Vembu, Frank Levinson and Jerry Rawls, Cree Lawson, and Beatrice Tarka. Sridhar, Frank and Jerry did it almost without any outside money, while Cree and Beatrice have done it with very small rounds

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The Real VCs of Silicon Valley?

Posted on Monday, Apr 7th

Venturebeat reports that Foundation Capital has raised a $750 Million new fund. The firm’s last fund was $525 million, closed two years ago. Goes back to my question: Who are the real VCs of Silicon Valley? How can you practice true venture capital if you have to put so much money to work?

First Time Entrepreneurs?

Posted on Tuesday, Mar 25th

[This discussion is getting really interesting … please chime in, folks …] I am trying to figure out the seriousness of something that I see is going on in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. I need your help to understand the phenomenon, and would appreciate if you engage in this thread and offer your perspective. VCs

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Catching Up On Readings: Media Mania

Posted on Sunday, Mar 23rd

If you have missed these posts from my recent writings, today may be a good time to catch up on some reading: First, in the blogosphere, online media, old and new media, advertising – big changes have taken place. Here is a set of posts from the Deal Radar series that might help you make

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 10)

Posted on Wednesday, Mar 5th

SM: You announced this million dollar challenge for SaaS startups developing on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. What are you seeing in response to that? BJ: We have a great relationship with Salesforce.com, and as you know their big initiative now is their Force.com platform – the ability for a developer to use the SalesForce infrastructure to

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 9)

Posted on Tuesday, Mar 4th

SM: What is in your portfolio in those later two categories? BJ: We mentioned InsideView as an information service. We have a company called Krugle which provides a search engine for software developers. Most software developers start with a base of code, often an OpenSource project they download as the basis for a new project.

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 8)

Posted on Monday, Mar 3rd

SM: An example is when InsideView did the acquisition of True Advantage and laid off 150 people who were doing the same thing manually. I wrote a piece recently called the “Death of Indian Outsourcing” that featured InsideView and I talked about that example. My thesis is the Indian BPO industry is very much at

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