Financial Infrastructure For Small Venture Funds

Most smaller venture funds are not highly technical finance gurus. Semil Shah shares lessons learned from Haystack’s (unintended) good financial hygiene from the early days, including the importance...

VC Market Dislocation: The Fundamentalists vs The End Marketers

Various go-to-market strategies among VC firms are starting to lead to a bifurcation in the VC market. Here's how "fundamentalists" and "end marketers" approach things....

Constraining The Path

In the context of entrepreneurship and the creative process, I am a big believer in constraints. I fundamentally believe that a shortage of resources, or a specific pain or trauma, or any set of condi...

The Fight For Ownership

I am stating the obvious in this opening sentence, but I need it for the post: In each round of funding for a startup, the founders sell a portion of their equity in exchange for cash....

“Risk-On” And Digital Antibodies

With the arrival of June 2020, it’s almost as if there is no pandemic when it comes to the early-stage investment market in the Bay Area. The early-stage tech formation world and the VCs that suppor...

Talkshow: Semil Shah and Samir Kaji

Raising new VC funds in a pandemic world. What should aspiring & emerging fund managers do now that the world has changed? Samir Kaji from First Republic chats with Semil Shah about it & more....

The LP Perspective on the Current Business Environment

Semil Shah and Beezer Clarkson talk about the LP perspective on current business environment for GPs raising new funds, and more!...

Lazy Sunday Musings On Dilution

One big topic newer fund managers won’t likely appreciate in the early days is the effect dilution can have on an early-stage investment. I know this because I had no clue about it when I started. E...

Late-Night Musings On Portfolio Construction

Without a doubt, the concept of “Portfolio Construction” was the most difficult VC fund management concept for me to get my arms around. To be clear before I write this, and before you read it, by...

The VC Industry Norms Which Changed Over The Past Decade

Having spent time around and then in the world of VC in the Bay Area during the last decade, I’ve been reflecting on how different norms in the industry have changed. At the start of 2010, there was...

Why Seed Funds Have Scaled

For those following this blog and the seed market over the past decade, you may have noticed that every year, we see increases across the board — more investors, newer funds, and funds that get larg...

Checking In With The Market And Rorschach Tests

Hi everyone. I’m at an offsite down in southern California. Yesterday, I briefly tweeted something that was on my mind (during a break at the offsite) just to get it out of my head. I didn’t check...

The Summer Solstice And Seed Stage Squeeze

If you’ve been following my tweets lately, you’ve read some of my quick musings on the state of the seed market this summer. In short, in my 6.5 years of investing in the seed stage, I have neve...

The Truth About Investor Updates

The topic of “investor updates” has been debated frequently. Most folks who are not close to early-stage startups and new company formation would be surprised to discover that a high number of com...

Fund Investing Versus Fund Management

When I started out investing (via a fund — not my money), I was just investing based on a simple schedule: About once a month, invest $25K into one company I liked. Pretty easy. Over the years, that...

Your Portfolio Is Your Path

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You are what you eat. About a year ago, I tracked down a VC who gave a talk I heard about where he referenced the phrase “Your po...

A New VC Crop of Series A Firms

Believe it or not, this will now be the second blog post on this site about a billion-dollar exit for a shaving-related startup. It was just about three years ago when the startup world learned that U...

How To Transform A VC Fund Capital Base From Individuals To Institutional LPs

Lots of people have raised small VC funds. There are more startups, and there’s more LP capital from various sources to meet that demand. After the rise of institutional seed funds in the late 2000�...

Guest Series On StrictlyVC: Q&A With Limited Partners In VC

As longtime readers may recall, for the past few summers (2014, 2015, and 2016) when Connie Loizos from StrictlyVC takes off for a few weeks in the summer to meander around coastal Maine with her kids...