Pattern Recognition is a journal of thoughts and strategies on venture capital investments.
I realize it is already old news, but I had to throw my hat in the ring about Instagram. By any standard Instagram was a typical Silicon Valley start-up, building a user base while it figures out a revenue model. Except this story ended when Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1BN. Instagram is a […]
Whenever I talk to entrepreneurs about corporate governance I get the same response. This topic is right up there with Audit Committee on the list of “10 Most Boring Topics for Early Stage Companies”. However, setting up the right investor base and board at the time of investment is critical for a company’s success. What […]
There are a lot of analogies for starts ups. It is a football game. It is a war. It is a poker match. I have heard all of them in the board room as we advise our portfolio companies. It is the job of CEOs to make decisions with limited information, and start-ups take that […]
Google does many smart things. One of the things I like in particular is that rather than just promote the advertiser that pays the most, Google also factors in the click through rate of the ad when they rank search campaigns. This means that if your advertising copy is good, and you are targeting the […]
Every few weeks the digital media industry lights up with another late stage funding announcement. Fab recently raised $40MM, Pinterest raised $27MM, Klout raised $30MM, Joyent raised $85MM, and DropBox raised $250MM. This is just a small subset of the activity from my news feed last quarter. These mega-rounds are a new trend in the VC business. […]
Around this time every year we look back to the prior year for tips on how to improve our business. I find it is easier to learn from mistakes than from successes, and even though we had a great year in 2011 there were a few companies that didn’t work out. These losses had some […]
This blog post was a collaborative effort by my team. In particular, I want to thank my partners Alan Patricof and Dana Settle for their help. We founded Greycroft on the basis of three observations: 1.) Successful VC firms increase assets under management over time, as each new fund is bigger than the prior fund. […]
Over the holidays I came across an article about Geoffrey West. Geoffrey spent his career as a Physicist at Stanford University, but I was more interested in his retirement project where he developed a set of universal equations to predict everyday life. In the 1990s West published his first retirement paper on biology. The research […]
On Monday night I went to a holiday party for a Boston-based VC firm, which was held in New York, and without warning the managing partner approached me and began promoting the Boston venture capital market. He brought up the recent Endeca acquisition, he pointed out the long legacy of Boston IPOs, and he finished his […]
I had a dream last night that I was trying to escape Europe in the 1930s. It was an improbable situation because the events in my dream happened almost 50 years before I was born, but doors kept closing around me and I woke up before I knew the outcome. I think the dream was […]