Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 11)

SM: I was reading an article about how a lot of startups are using credit cards to finance their early days. American Express is a very common way of financing startups, and I have used it myself. JH: Rene used to use that as well. It was a big day when he got his name

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State of Venture Capital

Siva Kumar emailed me a great article on the state of Venture Capital in Silicon Valley, in response to my VC-Entrepreneur Compensation Disbalance piece. I suggest you read the article, but here are some sharp excerpts: :: It’s not that venture firms are destitute. They’ve got plenty of base hits. But the home runs are

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Web 3.0 & NYT (Part 4)

Acquisition Targets NYT has been making small investments and acquisitions in the online space for the past few years, tipping its toes into the online waters. The Company’s biggest acquisition in this space has been About.com in March 2005, which has been paying off handsomely. The Company has partnered with Monster which now powers the

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Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search (Part 1)

Someone asked me earlier about Kosmix in one of the discussions on this blog, and I had said that I hadn’t looked at the company yet. Well, now I have, and I am happy to bring you a conversation with Venky Harinarayan on the genesis and direction of vertical search startup, Kosmix. SM: Please describe

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Web 3.0 & McClatchy (Part 4)

Acquisition Targets McClatchy’s strongest asset is CareerBuilder. Though CareerBuilder is the number one job site in the US it lacks community features and McClatchy along with its partners could consider acquiring professional networkin sites like LinkedIn, Xing, etc., which have very good community features to enhance CareerBuilder. Sequoia Capital, Greylock, the European Founders Fund, and

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Bootstrapping is One Answer

The VC-Entrepreneur Compensation Disbalance post has generated great discussion. In it, a theme that emerges over and again, is Bootstrapping. You have read a few of my prior writings on Bootstrapping [Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy and Again? and Protect Your Dilution]. There is no doubt at all anymore that bootstrapping is, indeed, becoming sexy again.

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VC Compensation & Returns

As part of the VC-Entrepreneur Compensation disbalance discussion, my friend Sunil Bhargava of Tandem Entrepreneurs (check out what they do) sent me the following chart, showing some concrete data on VC compensation, and Private Equity industry performance: VC Compensations: Rising

Israel – Deals of the Month (September 2007)

By Danny Cohen, Guest Author How time flies… It seemed to me that I just finished complied the August deals in Israel, and September just flew by. As expected, the investment activity in Israel during September did not slow down. Benchmark announced their investment in Broadlight, and Partech lead a round in PowerID, a spinoff

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