When an investment doesn't work out, the first attempt to salvage the deal is typically to look for a buyer. When that doesn't pan out, the next move is often to look for a company to merge with. Usually its...
November 2005 Archives
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We are very happy about the success of our new website. It has become a vibrant hub for thoughtful exchange and we hope we can facilitate even more dialogue that our audience finds interesting. This would not be possible if...
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This is not a cliche but a great line that I heard several weeks ago that I have been using since (so it may become a cliche): If you must forecast, do it often. Forecasting is always a difficult proposition...
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For years, we have been fascinated by the fact that many of the very best startup companies come out of "side projects". They are accidents really. eBay, Google, and Yahoo! are all examples of this mode of starting companies. Delicious...
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Our sessions event happened almost a month ago and it is starting to fade into my memory. But there is at least one phrase that came out of Sessions that we are still using with regularlity at Union Square Ventures....
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Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition; in finding good opportunities, in managing them, and in exiting them. So when I say, "I've seen this movie before", something I've apparently said quite a few times on my personal weblog...
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There was a lot of discussion about the relationship between web service providers and consumers. This relationship is obviously especially important in services where the consumers are also the producers of the service. One thread of this discussion was about...
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Many of the people we know in the venture capital business think their customers are the LPs (the investors in venture capital funds). We've always thought that was wrong. The entrepreneur is the customer and the LP is the shareholder....
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There was a lot of talk at Sessions about trust. The word appears 33 times in the transcript. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it 11 times himself. Here, Jeff makes the point that value is shifting from content to trust. “And so...
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This one's not really a cliche, but the "king of the cliche", Bliss McCrum, used to say it all the time and I love it and am going to use it anyway. Bliss, who had a large family, used to...
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One of the insights from our Sessions event was from Yochai Benkler who said the following about peer production: we do have very good research on how adding money undermines social motivations depending on contents I am not sure...
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I posted on my personal weblog about Windows Live and the threats that it may or may not pose to startups working in the web services market the other day. It fostered some good discussion in the comments section of...
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Here are some more of the insights that we gained from our Sessions discussion... Michael Parekh makes the point that all peers are not created equal… “Another thing, the term peer to peer, one of the things that's implicit, unfortunately,...
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Every week I do a VC Cliche of the Week on my personal blog. This week's cliche is The Devil You Know Is Better Than The Devil You Don't Know. Here's a link to the post....
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Umair Haque said something (or actually quoted someone) at our Sessions event that has been rattling around my brain for the past week. Umair said: Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information...