Funding options and pathways for early-stage companies are changing – more rapidly now than at any time in the past quarter century.  We’ve detailed many of the changes individually…

Venture deals in 1Q of 2011 were big money… but they were also small volume: PwC’s MoneyTree report shows 736 deals (a decrease of 6.5% from 1Q 2010) with a value of almost…

For the vast majority of its history (as captured in this 2007 article), music service Pandora was on the brink of shutting its doors.  Sheer perseverance, a tapdance in business models, the easing of regulatory and litigation risk…

There were two companion pieces recently published by venture capitalists: why VC returns are going up (WSJ) and investing at the bottom of the VC cycle (NYT).  Both of these pieces look at the amount of money committed to venture firms in 2010…

Like many people, I am now getting more and more news and information through twitter. I’ve always thought that facebook is socially familiar —  because it is permission-based and…

Top tweeter Fred Wilson has two interesting posts that echo the same theme: venture investing should be much more complicated than simply finding the Next Big Thing. First, he talks about the fallacy of bimodal returns – that the two most likely outcomes for an early-stage investment are either…

With summer and labor day fading into memory, let’s get back to business.  While it’s still early to draw conclusions from Q3 data, as of late August, venture capitalists had already invested $2.44 billion into 263 companies…

It’s a theme as old as Dickens and reflects both a central tenet of biology and the basic economic belief that as an industry matures, it divides.  Fred Wilson sees the venture capital industry increasingly split into two parts:…

Amid financial and regulatory oil slicks is an ongoing debate about carried interest, which Warren Buffet once characterized by asking why his receptionist was paying a higher tax rate than he was. She did so because investment funds…

Exactly a year ago we saw media reports on venture fundraising that contorted themselves, depending if the half they saw was empty or full.  So here we go again, but now it’s not even clear how much water the glass holds.  The WSJ uses data…

After venture-backed IPOs went MIA in 2009, VentureBeat notes the oddly imprecise appearance of 15-17 IPOs in Q2 alone, close to 2007 levels.  But even VentureBeat sounds a cautious note, since post-IPO performance has been poor,…

That the venture capital industry is dominated by men is hardly new news, and a new VCJ story (gated – so here is a recent article and a historical study) notes that just 5% of partners at the 50 most active venture firms are women…

t has long been a repeated truism that one can’t raise venture capital over the summer.  Last year a VC actually looked at the data and finds both that an equal proportion of deals close in the summer months, and that his own firm’s busiest closing month…

Among the odd juxtapositions in the venture world, I would add Ben Horowitz, half of VC firm du jour AndressenHorwitz quoting rap artist Dr. Dre, in this post trashing many of his fellow VCs for their bad behavior towards entrepreneurs…

Last month we looked at the external factors partly responsible for the consolidation of the venture industry.  What also bears consideration is the internal economics of the industry itself.  As the industry grew and…

The first quarter exit numbers were overwhelmingly positive, as the NVCA reported the highest quarterly transaction total for VC-backed acquisitions ever, with 111 deals representing almost $6 billion in value. Likewise, the public markets…

There has been considerable press on the impact of venture industry consolidation for early-stage companies.  Less attention has been paid to the shifting dynamics between venture firms and their limited partners, and within venture syndicates…

With the traditional venture model under assault, there is an increased focus on seed-stage funding. Back in September we noted the attempt to create a standardized Series A term sheet. Now there is similar stakeholder interest…