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All successful companies start off as a great idea, scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin during a late-night meeting of the minds or gleaned from a fleeting inspiration that leaves you with a feeling of “I could do that better.”
For most, that’s as far as entrepreneurship ever goes, because, unfortunately, a great idea can’t raise money, develop a product or disrupt an industry. READ MORE
While the major real estate industry players have been making headlines with a new SPAC announcement seemingly every other day, you may have missed that some of them have their own internal venture capital firms to invest in early-stage proptech companies. READ MORE
Will SPACs replace traditional IPOs? I think to a degree, they already have -- at least for now. Longer-term, however, I think that traditional investment banking will survive, and that there will always be room for both methods of going public. READ MORE
In the beginning of February 2020, COVID-19 seemed to have little to no impact on venture capital investing in the United States. Fast forward a few weeks later: concerns quickly spread over the entire industry about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on venture investing, its impact on startup companies and the U.S. economy in general. Emerging growth companies instantly went into “conserve cash mode” and applied for PPP loans. READ MORE
Venture capitalist Theresia Gouw has trailblazing in her blood. When she was 3, her family left Indonesia to escape persecution under the Suharto dictatorship and start a new life in the U.S.
"When I think about the risks my parents took and how much they gave up so my sister and I could have the opportunities we have, that's what really drives me," Gouw says. READ MORE
Venture capital interest in U.S. pet-focused companies, from nutrition to travel to health care, grew 29.5 percent from 2019 and 2020 as pets received more attention from owners being home for the past year.
“Last year, we saw a macro trend of humanization of pets, where people were treating pets as members of the family, and therefore, spending more money on food, grooming, treats and walking,” Nick Stocks, general partner of White Star Capital, told Crunchbase News. READ MORE
In addition to being the CEO of ThirdLove, I am also an active angel investor--predominantly in consumer-focused women-led startups. As an angel investor, I am always receiving inbound pitches from founders looking to raise their pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds.
Despite what the pandemic has done to businesses, the economy, and society as a whole, there has been no slowdown in deal flow for early-stage investors. If anything, the general consensus in the entrepreneurship community is that now is a terrific time to start a company--because there are an abundance of problems still to be solved in the world. READ MORE
2020 was the year of the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) IPO -- and 2021 is probably going to be even better.
According to SPACInsider.com, no fewer than 248 SPACs filed for IPO last year, going public with the sole intent of finding a hot private company to buy and bring public in a reverse merger. Not even one full quarter into 2021, we've already seen nearly as many SPAC IPOs this year as last year.
Why are SPAC IPOs so popular? READ MORE
More than a year ago now, I left the Bay Area for Austin, Texas. It wasn't an easy decision. I've spent three-plus decades embedded in Silicon Valley, investing in some of the region's top tech companies. With its entrepreneurial culture, top-tier academic institutions and countless tech success stories, there wasn't a better place in the world than the Bay Area to be an investor. READ MORE
Before the SPAC boom, there were a number of proptech companies in the IPO pipeline. As more SPACs, which are also known as special purpose acquisition companies or blank check companies, have hit the market, this pipeline is emptying.
“That could have taken quite some time to clear itself out because there is just a huge backlog of companies that were doing an IPO, irrespective of whether they were proptech or not,” says Zak Schwarzman, a partner at MetaProp. READ MORE
The SPAC market is so hot that this year's fundraising haul has already surpassed all of 2020's. And it's not even April. Understandably, the world's largest asset manager worries the SPAC boom is overdone.
"If you look at the SPAC market, there's some really attractive new companies and new technologies coming to the market that are financing effectively," BlackRock executive Rick Rieder told CNN Business. "And then there are some that make no sense." READ MORE
Most startups fail. Some fail because they get outcompeted. Should competition be your main worry when you come up with a brand new startup idea?
According to CB Insights, competition is the fourth most common reason for the failure of a startup. Competition was the main cause of failure for 19 out of 101 analyzed startups in their dataset. The most common reason, however, was lack of market need – the cause of failure fор 42% of the companies. READ MORE
The global venture capital ecosystem is inequitable. In the United States’ mature venture capital market, an entrepreneur’s race, gender and age help determine who has access to capital.
But there are other limiting factors: geography, for example. While it has been encouraging in recent years to cover what has felt like a boom in Latin American and European fintechs, or a general rise in VC activity in a host of Asian countries, the landscape remains imbalanced. READ MORE
2020 was a year of promises from several venture capitalists to address diversity at their firms and portfolio companies by making more concerted efforts to support equitable representation across the ecosystem. READ MORE
Amid heightened efforts to promote increasingly diverse, equitable and inclusive workforces over the past year, venture capital (VC) firms are taking note of their social and corporate responsibility in achieving greater gender, racial and ethnic diversity. READ MORE
You have just 170 seconds. Weeks or even months of working on your pitch deck could come down to the 170 seconds (on average) that investors spend looking at it.
“Investors see a lot of pitches,” VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman noted. “In a single year, the classic general partner in a venture firm is exposed to around 5,000 pitches … and ends up doing between zero and two deals.” READ MORE
Startups are a significant driver of the U.S. economy. Each year, thousands of entrepreneurs launch new businesses that create jobs and spur innovation and efficiency across the market. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 420,000 startups accounted for 2.2 million new jobs in 2018.
Unfortunately, entrepreneurship in the U.S. has been declining for decades. In the late 1970s, the startup formation rate in the U.S.—defined as the number of new firms in a given year divided by the total number of firms—was nearly 14 percent. Four decades later, the rate was just above 8 percent READ MORE
The dominance of megafunds is unlikely to abate any time soon in venture capital, concentrating more buying power in the hands of a few. Global investors increasingly want exposure to private technology companies, and many have growing pools of capital dedicated to buying stakes in them.
Endowments, sovereign wealth funds, family offices and pension funds often dedicate a target percentage of their assets to venture capital. Since their total assets have been growing because of a booming stock market, the dollar amount they can devote to venture capital has risen as well. READ MORE
For many startup employees, it often seems like the only options for liquidating their shares and receiving a payout for their equity in a company is to wait for it to go public or be acquired.
An IPO or an acquisition are the traditional exit options for venture-backed companies. But in recent years more options have emerged for startup employees and other shareholders to liquidate their shares in the private market, including Nasdaq Private Market and CartaX. READ MORE
Late last year, we wrote about David Kostin's equity strategy team at Goldman Sachs declaring 2020 the year of the SPAC.
In the few months since this report, the trend has only accelerated.
Kostin's team on Monday published their latest update on the space and the torrid pace with which these vehicles are coming to market. READ MORE