TOPICAL - The 411 On Startups (tm)

Angel No More: Why One of Silicon Valley’s Savviest Investors Has Shut His Wallet

May

2012

Kevin Hartz is sitting this one out. Sure, Hartz is busy with his day-job as CEO of online ticketing startup Eventbrite, but it’s not a time management thing that keeps him from his usual angel-investing habit. It’s more a money management thing. Hartz doesn’t like to invest his when there is so much sloshing around ...

Want to Raise Money With Crowdfunding? Consider These Tips To Avoid Some Headaches

Apr

2012

Crowdfunding promises to give some startups access to capital they wouldn’t have had otherwise, but it could set up unwary entrepreneurs for a headache. Crowdfunding is a way of raising capital that involves getting small amounts of money from a large number of investors. A new law, called the JOBS Act, changes the formerly donate-to-my-cause-for-a-tote-bag ...

Angel Investors and Startups — A VC Perspective

Oct

2011

The Wall Street Journal has a story out today that says “Web Startups Hit Cash Crunch.” There has been a fair bit of reaction in the tech blogs and I thought I’d toss into the discussion some things we are seeing: 1) There are so many startups out there raising money. I don’t think this ...

Fertile Ground for Startups – BusinessWeek

Nov

2009

History shows that great companies are often built during bad times. In 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, two engineers started Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in a garage in Northern California. Silicon Valley itself was largely created during the nasty recession of the mid-1970s. During that decade, entrepreneurs laid the groundwork for the boom ...

Start-ups finding ignition trouble – Los Angeles Times

Feb

2009

The brutal economy has slowed venture funding to a tortoise’s pace, and start-ups looking for money are finding themselves out of luck. For some companies, the answer had been to turn to angels — individual investors who might be able to cough up a few thousand dollars to keep your doors open. But now it ...

Will the economic downturn affect start-up funding? — Milton Chang, Incubic Venture Fund

Feb

2009

The reasons for not aggressively investing are different for private and professional investors. Because of the drop in the stock market and real estate property values, private investors have less money to invest and they have other attractive investment options. Investing in start-up companies has not fared well for most investors in recent years, and ...

Startup valuations come back down to earth – BusinessWeek

Jan

2009

It’s no surprise that the value of tech startups is falling. With the deepening recession, even the stocks of highfliers such as Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) have tumbled more than 50%. Still, this is a sharp reversal for a generation of companies that seemed poised to inherit the mantle of leadership in the tech ...

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy — Paul Graham

Dec

2008

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I’m not claiming it’s a particularly good time ...

Startups – Sweating Through An IPO Drought – BusinessWeek

Nov

2008

Gajus Worthington has seen the effect of the financial meltdown on U.S. startups, and it’s not a pretty picture. The chief executive of Silicon Valley’s Fluidigm set out to take his chipmaker public about a month ago. On Sept. 5, the first day of the company’s road show, Worthington gave a standing-room-only presentation to blue-chip ...

Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation Of Doom

Oct

2008

Techcrunch was able to track down the presentation that Sequoia Capital gave to its portfolio company CEO’s earlier this week (and so did VentureBeat). It’s a long, 56 slide Powerpoint message of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley that Techcrunch covered recently along with an email that angel investor Ron Conway sent to his 130 ...