The Rules Of Venture Capital

from the it's-pretty-easy,-really dept

In the past week I've been to three different panels that were comprised of various venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. In general, they're all saying the same thing: they are investing in companies again but (not surprisingly) they're being much more cautious about it. One VC I saw yesterday at the Mobile Tech Forum made a comment about how he wanted to see "real customers", which lead to a joke that 15 years ago if you ever saw a VC say such things about "concentrating on fundamentals that create real value" everyone would have laughed - since it would have seemed obvious. After the past few years, many people seem to have forgotten the obvious. So, along comes Stewart Alsop to remind everyone of the rules of good venture capital. Basically, these are about concentrating on fundamentals, letting the entrepreneurs run the business (and not thinking that just because you're an investor you know how to run a business), and having a strong relationship with the limited partners who now think you've screwed them out of their money.
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  • identicon
    Timaaay!, 4 Apr 2002 @ 1:09pm

    Just todays rules

    I really like it when the venture community tries to pin lousy business models on innovators. No one has contributed more to the shoddy startups of the past few years than get-rich-quick venture people. Now they've decided that the misguided innovators need to know how they should have been running there businesses all along. Cos it's not like VC people give out lousy advice / commandments to the companys "they" (or rather the knuckleheads who invest in them by proxy) invest in.

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