2X Entrepreneur Turned Venture Capitalist

One of the interesting things about being a VC is that you often see companies in transition. If you’re an early investor like I am that often means writing the first $2-3 million check into a business that previously had either survived on fumes or on a $500,000 angel round. I also see companies as they move from having taken $1-5 million from me to their next round where they raise $8-15 million from Series B investors and sometimes I lead at this round (we’re stage agnostic but 80% of our deals are seed & A). Moving from a company that had less resources (and presumably by the time they’re raising depleted resources) to a company with newfound resources can be telling. I have seen many companies raise their first $3 million and still act like a company that has no resources at all. And while this might sound to the inexperienced person like a sensible idea – it is not.

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Créer une entreprise : quels frais les premières années ? - idee projet creation entreprise Attention, cette liste et les montants indiqués sont donnés uniquement à titre indicatif. Les besoins peuvent varier de manière importante selon votre situation personnelle. Les frais au moment de la création Jean-David Chamboredon : "François Hollande n'est ni anti-entrepreneur, ni anti-business" L’actualité récente est dense pour les entrepreneurs. A l’occasion des Assises de l’entrepreneuriat, François Hollande a annoncé un grand nombre de mesures en direction des entrepreneurs. Que faut-il en penser ? Pour aborder cette question, nous recevons une figure de l’entrepreneuriat qui, par ses prises de position et sa capacité à fédérer, a réussi à infléchir la position du gouvernement sur la taxation des plus values de cession. Il est Président Exécutif du fonds d’investissement ISAI, il est administrateur chez France Digitale, et est également la figure de proue du mouvement des Pigeons, qui a enflammé la toile il y a quelques mois. Il, c’est Jean-David Chamboredon et il était avec nous pour 30 minutes dans votre émission, Entrepreneurs, le Live !

Vimeo Founder Says Never Sell Your Company. Really? “An acquisition is the end of a dream.” The quote above is the title of Inc writer Issie Lapowsky’s interview with Jake Lodwick, co-founder of video sharing site Vimeo. To paraphrase Lodwick, he believes selling a business is akin to giving up - failure. Creating your ideal client persona Content marketing, like traditional marketing, is most effective when you have a target audience. But it takes more than jotting down a few demographic data points to develop content that attracts and engages your perfect client. The “anyone with a heartbeat” content marketing approach doesn’t work either. It’s tough influencing the masses with cookie-cutter content.

Rude VC: The misplaced pride of no marketing I heard it again just the other day during a startup’s pitch. “We’ve done no marketing, and look how much we’ve accomplished,” boasted the founders of the venture for which they were trying to raise money. Imagine what we could do if we spent money on marketing, was the intended implication of what they were saying. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon refrain in early-stage pitches, and I cringe every time I hear it. How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work You have to admire the insipid, dogged and naive devotion people have to believing they are going to get this huge list of things done. Even when presented with releases that slip by weeks and months, objectives and projects that slip by quarters, commitments that never materialize as brutal sacrifices are made on the altar of underestimation and overconfidence — even then, they will cheerily present their plans and strategies, dripping with ambitious and doomed optimism. Why do we keep believing we’re going to get so much done? Each day is given only 24 hours. Even with the bare minimum of coordination costs, cut down by your tools and your processes and your homegrown blend of agile, whole hours of that day are lost to meetings, status updates, course correction, revision, company chatter, building consensus, setting and measuring, iterating and reporting. Life decimates your team with unerring and unrelenting creativity.

Do Things that Don't Scale July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. The Ups & Downs: How Startup Life is Like a Rollercoaster This guest post is written by Mark Fabian Henkel (@mrkhnkl) Co-founder and CEO of Paymill, a young startup that offers the fastest and easiest way to integrate credit and debit card payments in websites and mobile applications. I sometimes wonder why Start-up CEOs or other entrepreneurs are not committing suicide more often. Just kidding!