Blog: The Ripple
We love what we do, so ClearCreek writes and publishes pieces for a somewhat irregular blog about emerging companies and the capital markets. Or we did for a while anyway, then we did less, and apparently we stopped entirely. But we kept the old posts below. Any errors are ours exclusively while the occasional sharp insight is probably borrowed. We hope you find them of interest, and we always welcome feedback.
Five Best Blogs: April 2011
This month’s list of the best blogs includes: What happens after Yahoo acquires you; Mark Suster’s advice to focus on basecamp, not on the summit; the Economist briefly noting the correlation between a country’s debt and men who still live with their parents;…
Reading List: The Sidney Awards
The political commentator and writer David Books gives out annual Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays. All are wonderful, but three bear particularly interest for entrepreneurs and others with an interest in the capital markets…
Five Best Blogs: January 2011
his month’s list includes: The Early Failures of Famous Entrepreneurs, Rob Go on Startup Takeaways from 2010, a WSJ piece on What Is That VC Really Thinking During Your Pitch,…
States of Invention
Research from the Kaufman Foundation looks for the areas of innovation across the US while publishing abroad New Economy Index. From the 2010 edition come a number of detailed statistics…
Entrepreneurs as tax dodgers
It’s a little early for April Fools, and perhaps it is just my long exposure to entrepreneurs, but there is actually an argument circulating which labels entrepreneurs as tax cheats. This is because entrepreneurs…
Venture Twits
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…
The Muddled Middle
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…
Five Best Blogs: December 2010
Actually six of the best blogs I’ve come across recently: Esther Dyson on not everybody can be Bill Gates, Gary Ardnt on 20 things I’ve learned from traveling around the world for three years, Jason Goldberg on 57 things I’ve learned from founding 3 tech companies;…
The State of Venture Capital
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…
When Being a Man Hurts…
One of the keen observations of Mad Men is that the show’s women – even constrained as they are by 1960’s social roles and the lack of professional opportunities – are generally more capable than the men. A recent study by the mutual fund company Vanguard…
Five Best Blogs: October 2010
Five of the best blogs I’ve come across recently: Chris Dixon on the ladies night strategy; Shaival Shah on Sell-Side vs. Buy-Side Business Development; Greg Gretsch on why Venture Capitalist’s rarely say “No”; Ron Conway’s guide to technology megatrends,…
Venture Capital Duality
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:…
Lessons from Start-Up School
As the incubator model spreads and both virtual and real communities of start-ups proliferate, entrepreneurs learning from entrepreneurs is becoming more of an every-day event. Several groups are institutionalizing these lessons…
Failure’s Lessons
I’ve always been a keen believer that the lessons of failure are often more instructive than those of success. One tends to take personal credit for good outcomes regardless of their origin, and assign bad outcomes to some outside event…
Five Best Blogs: September 2010
A new feature for this blog — with a hat tip to FiveBooks — are a quick list of five of the best blogs since, um, the last newsletter. This round features: Paul Graham on The Top Idea In Your Mind and The Future of Startup Funding; Brad Feld on Serious Questions for Super Angels;…
Reading List: The Strategy of Your Life
On the topic of measuring one’s life, Clayton Christensen (a HBS professor best known for his work on innovation) noticed, over the years, something troubling about his students. Their analytical ability to dissect industries and plot their careers was phenomenal, yet…
Get A Data-Driven Life
One of the most fascinating and dynamic sectors is pure information. Technological advances now enable immense databases, which in turn provide new insights on both simple and complex correlations, and the ability to spot (or debunk) trends…
Electric Car Policy — Stop Go Stop
The cleantech industry has been considered both highly promising for investors and a hopeful area of growth to counter the economic contraction of other industries. But one of the peculiarities of cleantech is the intersection between federal dollars…