I’m a VC and these are the 7 things I look for in founders before investing

As a venture investor, I am frequently asked what I look for in a portfolio company. The answer is simple: technology, product-market fit, and core team. But when you dig into it, only one of those really matters—the core team. See, you either have interesting technology, or you don’t. And finding product-market fit is usually a process. So that leaves just the core team, and it is indeed the key success factor for VC funding and beyond. Here are the “green flags” I look for in startup founders. READ MORE

Private Equity Could Forever Change NFL Landscape

Mara, Rooney, and Jones—what do these surnames have in common? A significant part of their “family business” has involved owning an NFL franchise for decades, with some even approaching a century of ownership. 

For many sports franchises, ownership is passed down through kin. However, NFL liquidity has attracted various investor groups to become more interested and involved in team ownership over time. READ MORE

BlackRock expands its private equity reach

BlackRock and Partners Group on Thursday announced a partnership to offer wealthy individuals a simpler way to access private markets.

Why it matters: The world's largest asset manager keeps pushing deeper into private equity, following its recent acquisitions of both Global Infrastructure Partners and Preqin.

Zoom in: For BlackRock, it's about higher fees. For private equity, it's about new money.

Details: BlackRock and Partners have developed a "model portfolio" that provides diversified private markets exposure via a single investment. READ MORE

Here's Exactly What You Should Include in Your VC Pitch Deck, According to Data

It's a rough time for startups to secure funding. Higher interest rates have made angel investors and venture capitalists a lot more selective about who they choose to back. But a new report from Dropbox/DocSend that examines the pitch decks of 210 pre-seed startups in 2023 and the first half of 2024 could offer some clues on how best to loosen investors' purse strings. READ MORE

VCs Pour More Money Into Self-Pay Healthcare — Consumers Aren’t Celebrating

American consumers are used to products and services getting better. From coffee to car mileage to smartphones, it’s common for the things we consume to get more appealing, efficient and easy to use over time.

One area where this has not occurred, however, is health coverage. Every year, we pay more for health insurance, receive more bills we don’t understand, and shoulder a higher burden of out-of-pocket expenses. READ MORE

Why the Female Founders Fund isn’t betting big on AI

When the Female Founders Fund (FFF), a seed stage venture fund that invests exclusively in female-founded companies, was started in 2014, just 2% of venture capital dollars went towards women-led companies. That number hit a record high last year, with 22.8% of all VC money going to startups with at least one woman cofounder. We sat down with Anu Duggal, a founding partner of FFF at her firm’s annual gathering to learn about the current funding drought, deciding not to invest in AI, and whether things have gotten better for female founders. Read the conversation below or listen to this episode of Most Innovative Companies. READ MORE

Bankrupt hospital chain paid private equity giant $700M dividend despite losses

The country’s largest private, for-profit hospital chain paid out a $790 million dividend — with a big chunk of that money going to its Manhattan-based private equity owner — before it filed for bankruptcy several years later, according to a report.

Steward Health Care System, the Boston-based network of 30 hospitals that operated in rural and low-income areas, made the payout to Cerberus Capital Management in 2016, the same year the chain recorded a net loss of $300 million. READ MORE

Can The Perks Of Early-Stage VC Make A Difference To Founders?

It is widely known that getting the right investors at the right time can be vital to a startup’s success. This truth is always top of mind for founders who are raising venture capital.

While it’s somewhat standard practice to get an idea off the ground with friends and family, then angel investors, things get more complex as startups approach their early stages and begin raising successive rounds. Having investors that provide tangible support beyond money — at just the right points along a startup’s trajectory — can be vital to scaling up past even its expectations. Here’s why. READ MORE

Adam Neumann’s crypto comeback company is reportedly refunding investors

In a development that will surprise few, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann’s climate/crypto/carbon-credit startup Flowcarbon appears to be in the process of curling up to die, Forbes reported today.

Buyers of the outfit’s “Goddess Nature Token,” pitched as the first step in putting carbon credits on the blockchain, have reportedly been contacted about receiving refunds over the last month, but they must first sign a confidentiality agreement and release of claims against Flowcarbon. The company told Forbes this was “well known” that it has been offering refunds, citing carbon credit market conditions for the operational delay. READ MORE

VC firm ends business grant for Black women after discrimination lawsuit

Fearless Fund, the Atlanta-based venture capital firm started by Black women to invest in women of color, has agreed to end a small business grant contest for Black women, putting an end to a yearlong racial discrimination lawsuit that has roiled the larger philanthropic world.

Fearless and the plaintiffs, the conservative nonprofit American Alliance for Equal Rights, filed a joint motion to dismiss the case with prejudice Wednesday morning, meaning the Alliance cannot sue over the specific grant contest again. READ MORE

VC Funds Warehousing Investments: Traps for the Unwary

One of the challenges facing venture capital firms is how to handle investments in portfolio companies prior to the initial close (“Initial Close”) of a new fund (“New Fund”). Typically, the investment advisor (“VC Advisor”), or a person wholly owned or controlled by the VC Advisor, will make such investment, “warehouse” it, and then transfer such investment to the New Fund promptly after the Initial Close. This strategy has been very effective for many fund managers as it enables them to commence the creation of a diversified portfolio of interesting companies for its future limited partners prior to the time of the Initial Close. While this is an effective strategy for fund raising purposes, VC Advisors should be aware of some of the pitfalls with warehousing investments. READ MORE

The AI craze is distorting the VC market

Big Tech has broken into the private market, leaving venture capital (VC) firms stuck outside.

What does this mean?

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia have enough cash to fill more than a few super-powered data centers – and they’re using it to play VC. In writing checks for private AI startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, and CoreWeave, Big Tech is lining the little guys’ coffers so well that they have no reason to even think about a stock market listing. That’s a problem for the real VCs out there. See, they make “exit money” by cashing out when the startups they’ve invested in go public. Without those listings, VC firms are left holding company stakes instead of cold, hard cash. READ MORE

Why VCs Should Use Net Promoter Scores with Founders

Every business is defined by its customers — but it’s not always obvious who an organization’s customers really are. When it comes to VC firms, investors have historically and unsurprisingly viewed their limited partners (LPs) — the source of VCs’ funding — as their customers.

But in recent years, investors have begun to rethink this traditional mindset. In the early 2000s, some VCs began suggesting that the entrepreneurs in whom they invested were their true customers. Today, this narrative has grown increasingly widespread, with more and more VCs claiming that they view their founders (not their LPs) as the customer. READ MORE

The 12 biggest take-private PE acquisitions so far this year in tech

The private equity realm has been pretty active so far in 2024, serving as a powerful “alternative” source of liquidity for technology startups and scale-ups in search of an exit. Just this month, TechCrunch reported that EQT had picked up a majority stake in cybersecurity firm Acronis at a valuation of around $4 billion, following in the footsteps of another exit, in which EQT snapped up enterprise middleware company WSO2 for $600 million. READ MORE