I have been giving a lot of thought lately to what makes for success in venture capital. I am more convinced than ever that picking the right startups is 90% of what a good venture capital firm is expected to do. That doesn’t mean that strategic guidance and mentoring is worth nothing (hey, there’s 10% [...]
I can still remember sitting at my desk in the dorm in 1989, studying my latest chemistry textbook and believing that we only had 75 more years of fossil fuels before we would run out (what next?) and that man was causing global warming with all the CO2 we were generating.
This won’t be a rigorously [...]
If you see me in the next couple of days and hear a strange buzzing noise, that isn’t my new massaging socks I got for Christmas – that is the blood pressure monitor strapped across my arm, or the activity sensor on my wrist, or the PDA that is attached to my hip that is [...]
During my year-long journey through the books in 2010, I was able to read many books that had been bought years earlier never to be read. I tend to be a bit of a book hoarder – I like to own them and always have the best intentions of getting to them, but it often [...]
One of my friends wrote a very thoughtful post the other day , The Problem With Charitable Giving. Actually, I think he should have entitled it The Solution to Charitable Giving, because he presents as many solutions as problems in his post.
I want to expand more on the largest point he makes – the notion [...]
I saw a question posted on Quora the other day asking about how to best educate your kids to prepare them for a startup life. This is a question I have been thinking about for some time, and I posted Part 1 of this thought yesterday.
To sum up to this point:
1) Do the best you [...]
I saw a question posted on Quora the other day asking about how to best educate your kids to prepare them for a startup life. This is a question I have been thinking about for some time.
I have two older kids who are 14 (girl) and 12 (boy) years old, and then two younger kids, [...]
Yesterday, I ranted a bit about how closed Amazon is with their Kindle platform. Now I am going to compliment them on their customer service – every time I have ordered from them, the experience has been fast, fair-priced, and full service.
Contrast that against my experience this weekend at one of the old big-box retailers [...]
I have had more than a couple friends ask me the difference between venture capital and private equity.
Venture capital (VC) is on one end of a spectrum of investments that are broadly known as private equity (PE). Breaking down the term “private equity”, these are EQUITY investments (stock ownership in companies), not debt or other [...]
I had a good friend recommend that I start an “Ask The VC” series of posts on Pittsburgh Ventures, modeled after the very successful, but somewhat retired, Ask The VC blog run by the guys from the Foundry Group out in Boulder, CO. So I am going to give it a shot.
I have been in [...]