We love what we do, so ClearCreek writes and publishes pieces for a somewhat irregular blog about emerging companies and the capital markets (subscribe: here). 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.
This month, read some very cogent reasons why an entrepreneur turned down $5 million in venture funding, or go the other direction and get Paul Graham’s advice on how to raise money, and if you have already tried, take comfort in some reasons why you can’t raise money…
Read MoreIn entrepreneurial culture, success dominates the airwaves. A brand new company can succeed in many ways: attracting press, landing influential seed investors, winning contests, and through stories of individual users. This culture is so strong, that the second act of an entrepreneur…
Read MoreIn this month’s five best blogs we are going all Venture Capital: start with some great startups whose ideas seemed absurd at the time, then check out six myths about venture capital — which might help, since some people believe there are now fewer than 100 tech VCs still investing,…
Read MoreOur regular feature of the five best recent blogs includes: why it’s better to be a VC than an angel; how Amazon’s same-day delivery strategy will shake up merchants on Main Street, Mark Suster on what you should tell your VC’s during diligence, some thoughts on social proof…
Read MoreThe good news? Venture capital investment equaled $5.9B in Q2 of this year, up considerably from the $2.6B in Q2 of 2011. The bad news? The number of funds raising capital decreased to 38 (from 45 in the same period a year ago, an 18% drop)…
Read More2011 saw a modest recovery, as venture capital firms raised $18.2 billion from their limited partners – up from $13.8 billion the year before. However, most of the money was raised by established funds with very few new entrants and a number of VC’s morphing into the Walking Dead…
Read MoreFunding 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…
Read MoreVenture 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…
Read MoreFor 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…
Read MoreThere 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…
Read MoreLike 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…
Read MoreTop 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…
Read MoreWith 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…
Read MoreIt’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:…
Read MoreAmid 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…
Read MoreExactly 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…
Read MoreThat 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…
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