Rob Shurtleff – a VC in Seattle with Divergent Ventures – whom I’ve gotten to know over the past year, dropped me a note with some ideas about a few posts in the Board of Directors series that Jim Lejeal and I have started writing. The first topic Rob suggested has evolved into the a […]

Jim Lejeal and I have worked together for almost a decade – I was one of the investors in his last company – Raindance Communications (now part of West Corp) and am an investor in his new company, Oxlo Systems. Jim also has a lot of experience as an angel investor and a board member […]

Thankfully I no longer get fedexed binders of board packages from my portfolio companies in advance of a board meeting.  Through the modern miracle of email, the board packages show up in my inbox – hopefully a few days (rather than a few hours – or even minutes) before the board meeting.  The board packages […]

Earlier this week I was enjoying myself at an Oxlo board meeting (the food was “ok” – at least there was food) and I realized that a number of people in the room were folks that I had met randomly. I’ve had a long standing “random meeting” policy – I try to set aside time […]

Several months ago, I posted about Pascal Levensohn’s great white paper titled “After the Term Sheet: How Venture Boards Influence the Success or Failure of Technology Companies.” This is a must read for any entrepreneur who is raising or has raised venture capital, as well as every VC. Pascal is now working on a new […]

Fred Wilson has a great weekly series called VC Cliche of the Week – this week’s post is on meeting the numbers.  It’s worth a slow and thoughtful read. I have one constructive thought to add.  I’ve been involved in over 100 startups at this point and have seen many more.  I can only remember […]

In our series of posts on Term Sheets, Jason and I thought we’d take on a relatively easy one today.  In our previous posts on Price and Liquidation Preferences, we discussed the key economic terms that VCs care about.  In this post, we tackle one of the two primary “control terms” that matter to VCs. VCs […]

I wrote the following article for The Kauffman Foundation’s Entreworld web site some time in the late 1990’s. Someone reminded me of it the other day and I looked it up. It’s especially relevant today after all the major public company scandals of the past few years, the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, and the renewed attempts […]

Since Matt Levine is so effectively covering anything interesting in the world of the Twitter deal (and all kinds of bizarre, random, and complicated crypto, fraud, debt, and other financial stuff), I think I’ll stick with book reviews for the time being. Andy Dunn, who I only know indirectly, wrote an important book titled Burn […]