Private Equity
3 min read · 10 August 2010
4 min read · 30 July 2010
Alignment. You hear this word thrown out frequently in business conversations. It is a wonderful thing to aspire to, but very hard to achieve. Perhaps even harder to achieve in entrepreneurial settings between the venture capitalist and the entrepreneur, where the stakes are so high and the ever-present risk of dysfunctional behavior leading to a Start-Up Soap Opera. Ever since I began the research for my book, I have been spending time thinking about why VC-entrepreneur alignment is so elusive. And so when the Kauffman Foundation asked me to give a presentation to their recent class of young VCs, I decided to take the opportunity to develop a few thoughts that teed up the key issues.
2 min read · 28 July 2010
2 min read · 28 July 2010
5 min read · 27 July 2010
3 min read · 26 July 2010
3 min read · 22 July 2010
General partners in private equity funds claim that a variety of global regulations -- Basel III, Solvency II, the "Volcker rule" and the European Alternative Investments Fund Manager Directive -- will severely restrict available fund capital, thus decreasing the amount of financing available to non-listed businesses. Not a good thing for economic growth, particularly when small businesses already are having trouble securing bank loans. However, the situation is not as obvious as general partners describe it. First, funds are the emerged part of the iceberg in terms of private equity: Family offices, corporations (listed or not), sovereign wealth funds, individuals... a significant group of economic actors are indeed doing non-listed investments. This does not necessarily get into the figures reported by the professional associations (such as the NVCA, EVCA and others). In fact, they only gather statistics from their members, who are general partners in private equity funds.
4 min read · 22 July 2010
I and a couple other ad agency people attended the AOL Ventures and Betaworks-sponsored VC Demo Day last night, where prominent VCs had four minutes to communicate/market their respective companies. It was intriguing to benchmark another industry and experience VC community interaction. None of the agency people could imagine an advertiser coalition coming together to pitch advertising agencies to potentially work with one another. But that's exactly what the spirit of this event intended and succeeded in doing. What struck us is that no matter what the industry, there tend to be core fundamentals that yield more engaging, positive presentations that go a long way in winning over a target audience:
4 min read · 21 July 2010
Let’s focus on the word “Conscious” to continue our exploration of Conscious Capitalism. My ego originally found the word vaguely threatening. It made me feel uncomfortable. Because I didn’t understand what it meant, my ignorance created resistance. I feared there was an implied value judgment directed at me. Did this mean that I was not conscious? Did this imply that there were others who were more conscious than me? Determining whether or not there was a “there” there in Conscious Capitalism required me to get comfortable with this word.
5 min read · 20 July 2010
