Startup death is a fact of startup life; most of us don’t need to hum Circle of Life to understand that it’s not all unicorns, roses and IPOs at the end. Indeed, the startup obituary has almost become its own literary genre, with lots of founders baring their souls about the individual circumstances of their company’s demise…

If there is an industry that thrives on upsetting unconventional wisdom, it’s tech. Don’t talk to strangers? How about hailing a ride — or renting a room — from someone you have never met. People will never buy things if they can’t hold them first. That sort of stuff…

An insightful and numbers-full piece in, of all places, Pensions and Investments, discusses the traffic jam developing in Venture Capital. As with any other backup, there is an excess at the beginning and less near than the end: as total capital invested continues to rise… 

We facilitate acquisitions. So it’s good for us if M&A activity pays off for everyone involved. But too often it does not. The Economist has an excellent post on the difficulty with many M&A deals, focusing on a new study on acquisitions by public companies…

We’ve been lucky enough to have heard Gil Penchina opine a lot. Unfortunately, most of this was well before he became known for angel investing and his Angel List syndicate, and was usually about his failed romantic exploits. Whatever — truth is we usually didn’t listen anyway…

We’re big fans of behavioral economics, so the idea that you can make better decisions by flipping a coin naturally caught our eye. The author of a working paper that makes this claim is none other than Steven Levitt, of Freakonomist fame…

Looking at venture capital investment during the first half of 2016, Redpoint’s Tomasz Tunguz has a nice piece (and several graphs) on the flux in the fundraising market — early stage deals (Series A) have nosedived by a whopping one-third…

One of many interesting changes in venture capital in the past few years has been the emergence of mutual fund companies investing in very late rounds. In many ways this makes sense — technology companies are delaying IPOs, and a late-stage investment gets a mutual fund pre-IPO equity at a slightly better price…

When you’re in a boom, it’s always hard to see if a down quarter is a welcome correction or the beginning of a slump. For venture capital, Q3 could be either.  Based on data from Pitchbook, the number of Q3 financing were down significantly…

ClearCreek has published a semi-regular blog and newsletter since July of 2009.  However, when we applied for (update: and received) our broker-dealer license for ClearCreek Securities, there was an unfortunate consequence:… 

News junkies everywhere know that it is the best of times, as news is presented in various forms through a multitude of channels, often in real time — but fear the worst of times, as the implosion of the former monolith of print news threatens the existence of journalism as a profession…

Do venture capitalists get paid very well to lose other people’s money? That is the thesis of a piece by Diane Mulchay, director of private equity at the Kaufmann Foundation. Along with misaligned fee structures and the limited downside risk, the core of her critique is particularly brutal…

Quick – to aptly recognize Labor Day, everyone go update their LinkedIn profiles. You won’t be alone: LinkedIn membership has tripled in the past three years and now stands at about 315 million professionals, of whom two-thirds live outside the United States…

As comfortable as an Uber ride is, it sure seems to cause a lot of distress. Recently protests against Uber rolled Europe, even as the company was flexing its muscle with an $1.2 billion capital raise at a valuation in excess of $18 billion. Uber’s international expansion has been remarkable…

The ceaseless flow of information and data running through most businesses now has made it easier to spot big trends, but also threatens to wash over smaller pieces of critical information. But increasingly, it is these small snippets of data that carry important insights…

The tension of social media is its increasing influence combined with its sheer difficulty to manage. The proliferation of information makes it harder and harder to hone in on a person or topic for signals both weak and strong.  We were fans of the former Gist and, since its demise…

2013 in a word? According to at least one economist it was: Bitcoin – a secure peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency created in 2009. New Bitcoins are mined by software programmers, and although users can remain anonymous, central to the system is a public database and sequential record of all transactions,,,

Wearables — electronic devices attached to the body in some way — are generating some serious buzz, capturing imaginations with visions of science fiction coming to life.  Although wearables have been on the market in some form or another since a complex and miniature  abacus was attached to a ring in the Qing dynasty…