Once upon a time, Venture Capitalists used to have all the fun. They still can- but they have to learn the new rules of the game.   Identifying small, niche business opportunities with massive potential for growth and long-term success was the game winning strategy.

Give an ear to what the successful founder turned VC, Naval Ravikant has to say about entrepreneurship and investing. Straight talk about what it takes to be successful and what an investor is really looking for when making the big decision. Thanks Gigaom for a great interview.

I was recently told of a Spanish saying which states that ‘money hides’. Never has this been more real. Last week we wrote an article on  ‘Banks Battle Entrepreneurs’ which got a flurry of entrepreneurs contacting me with their particular war stories. Shocking. The reality is things are even worse than I thought. You see, [...]

Startup entrepreneurs need angel investors more than ever before. Not just for the advice and guidance that they can increasingly find online and at college – but for your money! Don’t get us wrong, your advice and guidance is really nice – but writing a cheque is even more important right now. The banks have [...]

There are a ton of phony angel investors out there just waiting to waste your time. They’ll use the veneer of being an angel investor to try and win your business as an ‘introducer’ or worse. They’ll promise to help you raise money, make intro’s blah de blah in exchange for 5% of your company [...]

The venture capital industry as we know it is going the way of the Dodo. There are 3 key reasons for this: 1. As startups, technologies and innovation become more global the ‘Silicon Valley’ ecosystem is sidelined. And VC’s outside the Valley have poor track records and weak managers. Startups abroad happily build businesses without [...]

I’ve been reading a bunch of interesting articles on how investment dollars are flowing back to startups and on how to raise money. It got me thinking. I can remember when I was running my second startup, called CMI, which was a digital publishing company when digital meant floppy discs. We needed to raise money [...]

Raising money from angel investors or VC’s is a stressful and complicated process – particularly in this climate. It needs to be done at the right time and in the right way. Try and raise money too early or without the right tools or docs and you’re guaranteed to crash and burn. And raising money [...]

TechCrunch recently put out a list of the top 100 ‘networked’ venture capitalists – following some interesting research. They defined ‘networked’ by the number of co-investors that they had in deals and rated firms by the number of exits they had achieved. The top 10 lists most of the usual suspects. Which got me thinking [...]

I was spoilt. Two companies ago I was introduced to Bill Draper III – a legend in Silicon Valley and reputedly the West Coasts king of early stage venture capital. He invested in the company I ran at the time and sat on its board. He was a legend for a good reason – he [...]