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{ Category Archives } Venture Capital

Pentalum: Turning sniper rifles into better turbines

Pentalum, an innovative Israeli wind power company, just closed a $9M venture financing round from Cedar Fund, Evergreen Venture Partners, and an as-yet unnamed US fund. Pentalum is interesting both because it’s a great company with a really interesting technology and offering, and because it’s an interesting reminder that great VC cleantech opportunities can exist [...]

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Trench-vision: the downside of bootstrapping

Trench-vision is my term for the negative effects of a very positive thing. As someone who spends most of my waking hours meeting entrepreneurs, I can say there are few things as impressive as a company that has bootstrapped its way from idea to revenues. Companies that are able to bootstrap benefit from a number [...]

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Three iron-clad rules for pitching your start-up to a VC

As a VC blogger, I have tried to avoid the inevitable blog post on “how to pitch.”  First off, there have already been many wonderful posts on the topic including this one by my good friend Eric Wiesen over at RRE and this one by the always insightful Chris Dixon. Some of these were even [...]

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Online advertising moves into the end game

Recently, I’ve found myself in a series of meetings in both the Silicon Valley and in Israel with technologists, media people, and venture capitalists – all of whom seem to be equally despondent about the state of the online advertising start-up. The online advertising industry is in the final stages of consolidation, they argue, technology [...]

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Gary Vaynerchuk and the Era of Almost Free Digital Distribution

A few days ago, a video from the always-entertaining Gary Vaynerchuk caught my eye. The video is of a talk Vaynerchuk gave back in October at The Booksmith, a San Francisco bookshop. The entire hour-long talk is worth watching, but the first twenty minutes are enough to get the point across. Vaynerchuk rose to fame [...]

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Lessons for Venture Capital from Andreessen Horowitz

In July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced the launch of a new $300M venture capital fund, Andreessen Horowitz (AH). Between them, Andreessen and Horowitz are the guys behind NetScape, Opsware, Ning, and many other smaller but no less notable ventures. Anything they decide to do together is big news – and when that project [...]

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Beware of the collapsing meta-problem: Ray Ozzie and Mad Max

Yesterday, I attended the Microsoft ThinkNext event in Tel Aviv, key-noted by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Technology Architect. Today, I am at a very well-organized micro-conference on mobile advertising, hosted by the Israel Mobile Association. Though they took place only a few kilometers apart, they could have been on two different planets, and that got [...]

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Ten financing mistakes that kill great start-ups

One of the most painful aspects of working in the VC world is witnessing great start-ups with great teams struggle to raise capital. Sometimes, decisions made two or three years previously can come back to haunt a start-up as it tries to raise additional capital – and, all too often, those mistakes have to do [...]

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Putting Twitter in context (in over 140 characters)

I woke up this morning to a post on TechCrunch about an impending Google acquisition of Twitter. Jeff Pulver, a Twitter investor, offered his perspective on his blog, and Ouriel Ohayon wrote it up as well. It’s become very clear that Twitter is a runaway success. There are lots of reasons for this, but I [...]

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TimeBridge rises again

A friend of mine sent me this blog post by Rafe Needleman about TimeBridge, an Israeli start-up backed by Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners. TimeBridge offers a solution for meeting scheduling that integrates nicely with Outlook and Google Calendar. It allows users to share calendar information with each other and easily schedule meetings. I’ve downloaded, [...]

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