Category: Investment
In today's tough economy sometimes your best investment is in yourself.
John Chen is CEO of Dublin, California based Sybase. A world leader in information technology. But early in his engineering career at another company, Chen was told he would never get promoted, primarily because he was Asian and had trouble speaking English. So he shelled out $2,000, his entire monthly salary at that time, to hire a husband and wife broadcasting team to teach him presentation and public speaking skills.Continue
Ever wondered what goes on inside the brain of a venture capitalist? What kinds of companies do they look for? What most impresses them about entrepreneurs? Where do they see the industry heading? Certainly these are all things that any early stage startup or first time entrepreneur would find value in knowing from a VC - especially one with several years of experience in a particular industry. Today I had the opportunity to pick the brain of Matt Fates, a partner at Boston's Ascent Venture Partners, a firm focusing on early stage investments.Continue
Facebook’s in-house business incubator and mini financier, fbFund, appears to be mothballed. After two years of funding companies building on Facebook’s developer platform, the program’s success has been dwarfed by the massive new social gaming market, and by the growing ecosystem of marketing service companies around its performance advertising and Page products.Continue
Throughout the spring, we covered the financial reform legislation as it wound its way through committee and Congress. The final version - Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act - was signed into effect by President Obama on July 21.Continue
The financial markets plummeted last year. So we had a choice: tell the world how horrible is was or tell them what to do next. We decided to take the constructive approach. Investors like SPDR ETFs because they’re more precise than other investments.Continue
More universities have begun to establish investment vehicles using endowments and donations, and the University of Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation released a report recently on some of the university student-led venture capital funds. The report, based on a survey of 13 VC funds in which students manage, administer, and make investment decisions, aims to provide an overview of the student-led venture investing community - its goals as well as its returns. Continue
Angel investors help bridge the gap between early funding generated from friends and family and from the venture capital you hope to secure down the road. Although angel investing is arguably more informal than professional venture capital, angel investors still look for startups that can give them a return on what is a high-risk investment.
For first-time entrepreneurs, then, seeking and securing angel funding is likely their first foray into the investment process. As such, there can be lots of questions about how to find, approach, and pitch to angels. And so we've rounded up some advice from other angels and entrepreneurs on how to proceed: Continue
The electric car startup Tesla Motors made history this morning: the first IPO for an American car company since Ford in the 1950s.
Eyes are on the company for a number of reasons: questions about the profitability of the green tech industry, the applicability of the VC investment model to the auto industry, the continuation of the post-Paypal success streak, and the possible reprise of the once-great technology IPO.Continue
When angel investor Chris Sacca announced the launch of his new investment firm Lowercase Capital on Friday, he positioned the news with a lengthy essay - the firm's "creed" - titled "Venture Capital is Broken."
In it, Sacca observes that ten years ago, it cost over a million dollars for a tech business to launch, with steep hardware, software, office, and Internet costs, not to mention the "lavish parties so print media would write about their pipe dreams." Continue
