Almost two years ago, I met a founding team during Y Combinator batch. It was in a field I haven’t invested in before, but I have spent time in during a previous life and career. We met for coffee on the Embarcadero, and while my... Read More

About a year ago, thanks to an investor friend who, in this particular case, shall remain nameless (but you know who you are, and thank you!) was kind enough to tip me off about a great team he met on the east coast but one... Read More

As my Podcast 2017 Tour continues, Nick Moran from Chicago’s The Full Ratchet was kind enough to have me on his show again a second time. Two years ago, I was a guest on The Full Ratchet discussing the intricacies of how seed-stage companies graduate... Read More

About a year and a half ago, I had my first experience on as a guest on Harry Stebbings‘ famous podcast, The 20 Minute VC. In that older episode, we mainly covered the importance of individual and firm branding in today’s ecosystem. Fast-forward to today,... Read More

I have been emailing Haystack founders a bit more often with some stream-of-conscious thoughts, and many of them have encouraged me to publish them publicly. Below, I was thinking about how relatively easy it is (in the Bay Area) to raise a seed round versus... Read More

Yesterday, I attended my fourth Cendana Micro VC Summit in San Francisco. As I’ve done in years past, I wanted to briefly summarize how I perceived the mood of both LPs (the money source) and GPs (those who allocate to founders) in today’s current environment.... Read More

Lots of people have raised small VC funds. There are more startups, and there’s more LP capital from various sources to meet that demand. After the rise of institutional seed funds in the late 2000’s, we’ve obviously witnessed a pure explosion of new (mostly seed)... Read More

If you’re a new or relatively-new VC, you simply must download or stream this new 20 Minute VC interview of Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal (download here). Harry Stebbings does a great job with this one. There are two key reasons to spend the time... Read More

When a founding team is raising institutional money — either an institutional seed or Series A/B round — those founding teams may have a slide in their pitch deck which shows the competition in their market or sector. This is often referred to as “the... Read More

Earlier this week, it was reported that Bay Area coffee roaster and coffee icon Blue Bottle received a massive investment from Nestle Corporation, giving it a majority stake in the company and, by some accounts, valuing it at or even above $700M (reports differ here... Read More

About a decade ago, when I was finishing grad school and picking up various consulting engagements to keep afloat, I was reminded recently of one of those engagements. In the pursuit of as many leads as I could find, I accepted a statistical modeling assignment... Read More

Earlier this week (on Monday the 11th), I wrote the following note to every CEO/founder I’ve invested in. I didn’t intend to write to write for it public consumption, but a bunch of them said it should be made public. So, I cleaned it up... Read More

I’ve written here quite often — perhaps too much — about what early-stage founders need to think about when graduating from seed stage to institutional Series A stage. I won’t go into that here, but another aspect of this journey has been highlighted in my... Read More

These days, it’s easy to start a company — and it’s hard to build one. And, we know 90% of new ventures don’t ultimately work out. We all focus on the growth and momentum, the outliers and the high-fliers, and for good reason — those... Read More

Sometimes, picking a company to invest in is just easy. The hard part is getting in. About two years ago now, I met Jason Boehmig of Ironclad during YC’s Summer 2015 batch (before Demo Day). One of my founders who was in YC singled out... Read More

About a year ago, a few ex-Box friends mentioned one of their colleagues “Ted” was starting a new company. That was enough for me to swing into action. I googled around and targeted “Ted Blosser,” found we had a few close friends in common, and... Read More

As I began to raise my first fund back in early 2013, I reached out to my friend Satya to see if he’d like to make a small LP investment. We met up in The Mission and I walked him through what I was trying,... Read More

Back in Q1 of 2016, when the technology sector went through a sizable (but apparently now forgotten) correction fueled by sharp hits to public tech stocks, I was happily investing into the very early-stage ecosystem, and in particular, deeper technology opportunities. It was at that... Read More

It’s that time of year, when Connie Loizos of StrictlyVC takes off in search of east coast summers and long walks on the beach — leaving StrictlyVC’s readership without its veritable columnist and correspondent for a few weeks. While Connie’s work and voice cannot be... Read More

Almost three years ago now (summer of 2014), a friend said I should spend some extra time looking at a new small company that had formed out of Stanford. I remembered seeing the company at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in August 2014. The presentation was... Read More