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% [...]
There was a good article in today’s New York Times about business incubators.
Can anybody guess the number of incubators? I was stunned (maybe I shouldn’t have been) that there are over 1200, and they have their own association group.
Incubators often house a large collection of different types of business – small and medium sized businesses [...]
A quick post this morning about building your startup team.
I sit on the board of one of our portfolio companies that is experiencing tremendous growth and they are looking for really good talent to fill several roles. I gave them my experience with recruiting/interviewing/hiring and told them that no matter how well they do, success [...]
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, [...]
This is a topic of passion for me – as a venture capitalist, how do I improve the governance function I perform for the early stage companies for which I serve as a director?
This post was sparked by an article in yesterday’s WSJ by John Brennan entitled, “Improving Corporate Governance: A Memo to The Board” [...]
Unless you are hiring someone with whom you have previous extensive experience (and sometimes even then!), hiring is always a near 50/50 proposition.
In my experience, the best way to succeed in hiring is do a reasonable job screening applicants, but do it incredibly quickly. Screening applicants can be very time consuming, and every additional moment [...]
In the past week, I attended two events where I had to evaluate startup pitches delivered to investors: a boot camp for the upcoming 3RVF conference in Pittsburgh, and the interim demo day at AlphaLab. Both events were dry-run practice sessions so that presenting companies could be more polished when they were actually on the [...]
The good folks over at Project Olympus, where I am an advisor, have asked me to post about a very interesting aspect of the work they are doing: matching potential CEO candidates with faculty/research students who have promising research projects or technologies that are ready to be spun-out into nascent businesses.
They are going to organize [...]
Hey Pittsburgh Ventures readers, I’m Matt Humphrey. I am a Pittsburgh native, an alumnus of CMU Computer Science and Tepper MBA, Y-Combinator 2007, and serial startup guy who did a number of things in Pittsburgh from virtual worlds to content delivery to consumer internet and a lot in between. For the last twelve months I [...]