This whole Spitzer hullabaloo has me thinking about legacy.  The New York Times put up an interactive timeline, “Milestones in an Ambitious Career,” that curtly sums the New York Governor’s key career moments into a few pictures and captions.  Here’s the headlining snippet:
“Eliot Spitzer’s journey from Harvard Law School to […]

In the vein of napkin-drawn business plans, enjoy this index card argument for exercising your inner child, courtesy of Jessica Hagy:

An analysis: Heaps of imagination at a startup yields heaps of money. Or is it heaps of imagination and heaps of money yield a startup?
Presumably the latter, under the assumption […]

“So you want to be a venture capitalist?”*
A number of my colleagues have posted discussions of how to find such work. It’s worth perusing the thoughts of: Charlie O’Donnell, Seth Levine (reprinted at Ask The VC), Vineet Buch, Fred Wilson, and Praveen Sahay.
But with friends tackling the search and PE […]

There’s an old college admissions question that goes something like this: “Is it better for my kid to get a B in the advanced math class or an A in the standard track?” Well, it’s better to get an A in the advanced math class, the admissions officer will tell […]

At DrJays, I remember feeling surprised when mainstream publications printed material that demonstrated blatant misunderstanding of the industry. More seasoned folks in the room shrugged. We were relatively “under the radar” anyway, and quietly benefiting from some decent market trends. (Lesson: misunderstanding breeds opportunity.)
So when, in the unfortunately named pop […]

In recent weeks, I’ve been chatting a bunch with peers that are looking to raise money for their businesses. It’s been an instructive experience in many ways, but first and foremost it’s driven home the need for talking points. We’d all like to think that we can walk into a […]

Understandably, my entrepreneur friends have been abuzz over the rumored founders buyout at Automattic, the company which runs the popular open source blogging platform Wordpress.com. After supposedly turning down a $200 million acquisition, the company is rumored to have accepted a large new follow-on investment led by existing investor Polaris […]

You’ll sometimes hear venture investing described as an apprenticeship business. Five to ten years of playing in the thick of it qualify one as capable.  Occasionally, someone will put the point in monetary terms: “You’ll lose $X million before you really get the hang of things.”
These notions get at (1) […]

Today’s VentureWire includes an important piece by Russell Garland summarizing insights from the Dow Jones Venture Capital Deal Terms Report, a survey of startup financing terms from the July 2006 through June 2007 year.  Interestingly, I noted in a September post that a certain number of bootstrapping entrepreneurs receive liquidity […]

New media investor Alan Patricof on the late-stage component of private equity:
It’s a different kind of business now…These are spreadsheet people. [source]
I’m drawn to the notion that late stage private equity personality types and modes of operation have shifted significantly in recent years. Are there implications for the early-stage side […]