Blogposts
How Family Businesses and VC Backed Startups Face Similar Boardroom Challenges
Family businesses have a lot in common with venture capital (VC) backed companies. First, they are led by passionate, inspired individuals, their founders, who are determined to challenge the low odds of success for their new venture in order to realize their vision …
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Equilibrium and Harmony – Words Seldom Heard in Startup Boardrooms
Equilibrium and Harmony. These two words should accurately describe the core objectives driving relationships between entrepreneurs and their investors. Sadly, they remain elusive goals for many companies …
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… Is No Indication of Future Returns
About 25 years ago, not long after I started my first venture fund, I had a memorable dinner with the very patrician founder of one of the most successful venture franchises in the world.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett’s 1949 two act French-language play, En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), defines the Theater of the Absurd. In this existentialist play with no beginning or end, two vagabonds wait endlessly for Godot, who never comes and about whom nothing is or ever will be known.
Are You Still as Motivated Now as You Were Then?
I remember with regret seeing the decline and fall of a senior partner from a Silicon Valley firm that I co-invested with often between 1997 and 2004. That firm elected to dissolve itself because the partners concluded that they had reached the end of their run—and they had extraordinary performance over the three decades+ that they were active. This was a rare act of introspection by an extraordinary partnership.
Read more … Are You Still as Motivated Now as You Were Then?
How Friends & Family Investors in Venture Capital Become Sacrificial Lambs
Ironically, two investor groups that often suffer at the hands of inexperienced or unscrupulous entrepreneurs are Friends and Family & and Angels.
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