Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 2)

SM: Even so, 2002 was not a great time to start a new fund. BJ: No, it was a horrible time to do that! SM: Tell me more about that experience. BJ: I knew a few VCs who had tried to raise a new fund in 2002, and most of them gave up. They concluded

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Do We Need More Funds in India?

Someone posed this very appropriate question in response to my Incubator Fund series. The answer is No. However, what we need is two things:

Incubator Funds in India: Management Team

This is going to be the last segment for this series on Incubators in India, and it tackles the key to making such incubators work. We have said, that we need concept engineering, engineering management, product marketing, sales, biz dev, legal and financial talent in the incubator management team. I am going to, therefore, propose

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Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 12)

SM: You may have to do some of that equity/liquidity swapping due to the structure of venture funds. JH: One of our funding sources may have to close out their fund, and in that case we will go find someone to help do that. In fact we just recently had a conversation about this amongst

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The VC-Entrepreneur Compensation Disbalance

We started discussing the leadership development problem in my previous post referring to Prof. Khurana’s new book about Business Schools losing sight of their mission of grooming leaders capable of building and running sustainable enterprises by following the money trail. So, what’s happening in the Venture Capital / Private Equity world? The compensation disbalance here

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Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 8)

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company? Seed? Angel? VC? Corporate? JW: I supplied a very small amount of seed capital that basically covered expenses while we secured our first round of venture funding. The $5 million Series A was led by Trinity Ventures and Mayfield Fund in mid-2004. Rustic Canyon

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Financial Media Comparison Chart

I did some digging into the various business and financial media sites last night, and here are some stats. Alexa Ranks: (Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money are not included in this list, because I cannot find Alexa ranks for them.) * CNNMoney.com: 76 * Forbes.com 483 * Marketwatch.com 1,032 * WSJ.com: 1,043 * Businessweek.com 1,310

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Indian Incubator Fund: Specs (Part 2)

We dicussed the “Problem” in the last part. In this one, let’s discuss the “Entrepreneur”. Again, I’ll tell you a story from my own experience. My advisor at MIT, Prof. Anant Agarwal, was (is) also an entrepreneur. So, when I walked into his office one day in 1994, and declared that I wanted to finish

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