categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
venture capital
Story of an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Raj Vaswani (Part 10)
Raj continues to discuss his criteria for evaluating EIR opportunities. SM: How about the experience level of the partners – I imagine having the opportunity to learn from them was rather important in your decision to join Foundation? RV: I found it very useful to be able to talk under the same roof, first about
Story of an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Raj Vaswani (Part 9)
While Raj did not make much effort in the way of formally analyzing his acceptance of an EIR position, he does share with us what his criteria should have been. In essence, we are benefiting from a “hindsight is 20/20”. Raj goes into detail regarding what he feels is important in an EIR arrangement. SM:
Microfranchise: Financing Growth
By David Stoker, Guest Author The main issue with MicroFranchising is always scale and growth. Up to this point most successful models have been a side operation of a successful parent company that lends technical and financing expertise in the same field: * Norway’s Telenor with Grameen’s Village Phone, * Danone with Grameen on small
Some Wise Words for Entrepreneurs
By Cal McElroy, Guest Author A friend and advisor of our company, Sean Wise just published a new book… “Wise Words – Lessons in Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital.” You can download or buy the printed book [here] I have known Sean for many years and used his counsel on many occasions. He has been successful
Wize up on what to buy (Part 3)
[Part 1] [Part 2] I asked Tom for a TAM analysis, as I ask all entrepreneurs. The analysis is not as crisp as what Shiva presented, and I suggest you tighten it up, Tom. I think, the segmentation also needs finetuning. Nonetheless, here it is. SM: How big is the market for what you have
A New Wave of Founders in Germany
by Jörg Überla, Guest Author Walking past a German newsstand these days may bring up memories of the early days of the New Economy. “The new German wave of founders” – such was a headline in leading economic weekly WirtschaftsWoche around Easter; at the same time, the Financial Times German edition (FTD) had launched its
Micro-Franchise For Venture Investment
For those of you who have read my discussion with Prof. Raj Reddy at Carnegie Mellon, you are familiar with our debate over MicroFinance, MicroEquity and MicroFranchise. We continued drilling down on this topic last weekend, following Sequoia’s investment in Micro-Finance company, SKS. I also wrote a piece referring back to some ideas from 2
Salesforce.com Playing VC
I wrote a piece earlier called Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy Again? In that, I made the point that given where the Internet is today, bootstrapping companies has suddenly become very easy, and gobs of venture capital are no longer required to build the vast majority of businesses. Now, many of the larger companies are actually
