I have been an angel investor for about 7 months and am eager to learn more about angel investing, so that I can do it better. Sadly, I found that this book was severely out of date, and most of what I read in it was the same old stuff I’ve read elsewhere. I don’t yet have an alternative book to recommend.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book provides a good reference guide for investors and entrepreneurs alike. While expert angel investor or experienced entrepreneurs may find the information in here a bit obvious, for relative newbies this book is quite useful and an intuitive read. The entrepreneurs can benefit from learning what the investor would care about, what types of investor to look for, and where to look for them. For investors, the books provides a simple reference of the type of due diligence to do to get comfortable with a startup. With the venture capital firms growing up in size and getting out of early stage ventures, angel investors have grown all the more important. Highly recommended.
Rating: 4 / 5
Okay, first up, to state my allegiances, I LOVE THIS BOOK!
I’m an aspiring entrepreneur, holed up in an incubator center, I think I know my technology, my market and my cash flows, but I’ve been getting the hot flushes at the prospect of entering the arcane world of VC.
Will I do something dumb and give away my company to some VC who’s smarter than me, will I ever raise money, how do I get impartial advice (in the VC world where everyone seems to have a vested interest)…..
What I like about this book is that it gives a structured, and methodical roadmap, it’s not burdened down by jargon, and I’m actually able to follow the approach and take real actions based on the guidance Berkery gives.
I’ve been able to set out the stepping stones for my company, and yes, we’re starting to hit them.
I went back over our business plan having read the book, and made a few “minor adjustments”, particularly based on the risk dynamics discussed in the book.
Clearly, this guy has been around the block in the VC world, and he’s been pretty good about sharing the insider info with us.
Will we raise funding after following the advice in the book? Dunno, but I definitely feel like I’m in control of our process now, and am better armed to face the VC dragon.
I’ve been boring the other guys in the incubator alongside me about this book, they’ve pretty much all now got a copy and have been converted into Berkery disciples
Okay, that’s the good bit, what’s there not to like about the book?
Not a whole lot to tell the truth.
The title is a bit geeky, don’t let it put you off.
……..and, that picture of the author just gives me the shivers!!
He looks just like the type of guy who’d mercilessly take you apart each and every month over not hitting your targets!!!
I’ve noticed same comment made (almost word by word) to the previous book of Gladstone (Venture Capital Handbook) meaning that they’re not reviews at all but sheer PR or advertisement to sell books. I didn’t buy both of them.
Rating: 1 / 5
The book contains a lot of very valuable information. It is geared primarily towards the investor who wants to explore angel investing, i.e. private investmentment in early-stage enterprises. The book does a good job in explaining the risks, necessary time commitment and potential benefits of angel investing. Thankfully, it is not of the ‘how to get rich easy’ kind. On the negative side, the book repeats some of its points ad nauseam and is not a stylistic masterwork.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a fantastic book to read. Simple and comprehensive with lots of good examples and discussions, good for novices as well as finance professionals.
Rating: 5 / 5
Certainly not exhaustive, but, if you are starting to go down the investor road, this book can help with getting the terminology and process in your mind before tackling the task in hand.
5 out of 5 for readability and basic understanding of the investor process.
This book is a thorough, practical guide to the nitty-gritty of venture capital investing. This comprehensive, well-organized instruction manual summarizes the homework you should do before you make a venture capital investment, the paperwork needed to carry out the investment and the ongoing work you will have to undertake to have a prayer of seeing your investment pay off. If it is a little plodding, you can understand why. It covers a lot of ground. The authors compare venture capital investing to a partnership at one point, to a marriage at another. They don’t attempt to sell you on venture investing. In fact, by telling you how difficult and labor intensive it is, they may even drive you away. We believe this book definitely belongs in the library of anyone who has ever taken a serious interest in venture investing. It will also help entrepreneurs who need venture capital financing by showing them how to evaluate their companies according to the criteria that serious investors are apt to use.
Rating: 4 / 5
Gerald A. Benjamin and Joel Margulis tell the current or prospective angel or early-stage investor how to best judge pre-IPO investments. They emphasize matching investors with the right entrepreneurs to create an effective team in which the investor not only provides the seed or early-stage capital but also contributes good advice and contacts. Besides discussing effective strategies, the book includes an extensive directory of top venture forums, angel organizations, publications and Web sites. In addition, any investor will benefit from the thorough rundown of due-diligence points that the authors recommend. While the book is targeted at prospective investors, we [...] encourage entrepreneurs with start-up companies to use it as a productive guide to making more effective funding pitches, although the companion book for entrepreneurs would probably be more helpful. One caveat: Some ideas are repeated – even with similar wording – from chapter to chapter. But overall this is a solid book, even though the free flows of money it evokes have been arrested somewhat lately.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a must for every VC aspiree. I have pointed every student who has aspired to join the venture capital industry to this book, and they both cover the depth of the technical knowledge required and also the scope of industrial sectors. There is nothing better for this price. 99 Inside Secrets on Startup Finance (Gingko Publishing House Guide e-books, Volume 4)
Rating: 5 / 5
The next best thing to having “The Planning Shop & Joseph R. Bell” in your back pocket. This amazing book answered 99.5% of all my questions re: Angel Investor’s. Very user friendly, easy read, just simply awesome.
I now feel I have the neccessary tools, to present my Business Plan to anyone with excellence and with confidence!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
Much updated from previous editions, David Gladstone’s useful text provides a very cursory survey of deal and investment techniques, albeit for slightly later than “sexy” stage deals. However, as this book is designed for the novice, and as Lipper’s text has fallen out of print, this sadly remains the only general text on VC investing for the inexperienced, and is useful in context of the level which it is designed to educate. While the many checklists may be somewhat annoying to seasoned VCs, they are probably indispensable to the novice investor, since they provide a summary framework when working through deal and business terms. And while the book is designed more for later stage (through certainly not LATE stage, as some have alluded to) deals, the book is, again, designed to educate the novice venture investor, who really shouldn’t be doing high tech start-ups anyway. Irrespective of that, anyone who presumes to write a text on investing in high tech start ups would likely find his text applicable only for the next few months after printing. Ours is an industry that evolves very quickly, and changes rapidly in accordance to the latest trends. No one can teach you how to pick the winners in the trend that hasn’t happened yet. Getting the basics from a text like Gladstone’s, however, can give you the fundamentals on which to build that “knack”.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is a wonderful introduction to the VC world. It is useful for people looking for funding and for people interested in getting into the field.
The book is clear and direct; it is not “VC for Dummies” but it is easy to understand, with helpful examples and illustrations.
After reading this book, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of how the VC world works and an appreciation for how VC executives think.
Rating: 5 / 5
Just finished the book. Very good understanding of how the VC game is played. This book will help entrepreneurs formulate a targeted biz plan with a better chance of funding.
Well written and easy to understand…highly recommend!
This is a good book if you want to learn the basics on what angel investing really means, how to find an angel investor(s), and the steps you may need to take for additional venture capital down the road.
Rating: 4 / 5
At first glance when I pulled this book off the bookstore shelf a few days ago I figured it was going to be a 4-star book. The text is kind of thin at 150 pages, and the individual pages have a lot of white in the top and bottom margins. But when I read the book this afternoon I really liked the topic that was covered and the content that was included. I highly recommend this book to any wanta-be entrepreneur or small business owner that is in need of capital for her business that a new partner, new co-owner, or angel investor could provide. Two thumbs up!
I read this book a little out of order since I am somewhat familiar with its topic. I started with the Glossary at the end of the book. Knowing the definitions of the terms included in the Glossary will definitely help the reader better comprehend the front part of the book. I then read the section entitled “The Experts Talk” and enjoyed those short dialogs. And then I skimmed the Sample Term Sheet included.
Lastly I read through chapters 1-9 which make up the body of the book. My favorite chapter was Chapter 5 entitled Valuation. Putting a value on a startup is tough to do in practice, but I think the author did a great job covering the subject. I think it could have been done better, but it was definitely done well.
I’m a SCORE volunteer counselor and I read books like the instant one in order to determine if I should recommend it to my SCORE clients for reading. Many of my SCORE clients have had questions about angel investors and venture capital firms as sources of raising funds for their startups. And I tell many of my SCORE clients that if they really need capital and they don’t want to sell out in 2-5 years, then they should think in terms of getting a partner who can infuse capital into the business. Up until reading the instant book I have not had a book to recommend to these clients. I’ve had to explain it verbally during our face-to-face counseling sessions. This book includes what I tell those clients AND THEN SOME. 5 stars!
Rating: 5 / 5
I did, so I bought five books. I will review them from worst to best.
“Finding an Angel Investor In a Day,” by The Planning Shop (2007), told me nothing I didn’t know, and I didn’t know anything about business plans or angel investors. The title is ludicrous and the advice is obvious, e.g., “Your business plan should be concise, compelling, and irresistible to investors.” 1 star.
“The ABC’s of Writing Winning Business Plans,” by Garrett Sutton (2005), walks you through writing business plans for a lawn mowing business and buying a pizza restaurant. If your business is more complicated, this is not the book for you. 1 star.
“The Ernst & Young Business Plan Guide,” by Brian Ford, Jay Boorstein, and Patrick Pruitt (2007), is a good book but hardly inspiring or insightful. If you follow this book your business plan will be competent but won’t grab investors. 3 stars.
“Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs,” by Susan Preston (2007). This book doesn’t explain how to write a business plan, but it explains how to make a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation to investors — a presentation that will grab investors. For example, one question is “How is your product or technology scalable?” I also learned some of the financials that angel investors look for, such as what IRR is expected. This book helped and inspired me to write an excellent presentation, that became the basis for my business plan. 5 stars.
“Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur,” by Dermot Berkery (2008). This is a textbook for a business school course about venture capital. This book is full of insights. Every few pages new ideas would compel me to go to my computer and add stuff or rewrite my business plan, for example, Berkery emphasizes the need for clear milestones. Preston mentioned milestones but didn’t make it clear why they are so important. The financials that were briefly presented in Preston’s book are thoroughly presented in Berkery’s book, for example, what gross margin investors look for (80% or more) and why they need such extremely profitable products or services. Plus you learn the jargon or key phrases of venture capitalists, e.g., “a large but well signaled market,” the importance of “market power” and an effective “route to customers.” I feel that my business plan now speaks to investors in their language, with the numbers they are looking for. 5 stars.
Rating: 1 / 5
The book is very comprehensive and covers a lot of venture capital finance. It clarifies a lot of concepts and applies them very creatively to Venture Capital. A good book to learn about the VC industry and in general finance (as VC finance uses the concepts very effectively)
Rating: 5 / 5
Professor Metrick is brilliant as a teacher, meticulous as a researcher and entertaining as a comedian. He captures his lucid lecturing style into written form with this book.
It’s the closest you can come to attending one of Wharton’s most coveted and insightful MBA classes without paying $80,000 and 2 years of lost salary.
It is a great book on how to structure deals in the venture capital and R&D financing fields. Both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists would benefit from reading the book since understanding various payoff scenarios would be essential for both groups.
It has been common for entrepreneurs to sell one or two companies before figuring out how to structure their venture capital funding properly. Many entrepreneurs lost millions of dollars selling their first companies and learned from their own mistakes how to structure deals for following companies. This does not have to happen anymore… Now entrepreneurs can read the book, understand payoff diagrams under various deal structures, try to structure deals for financing their companies correctly, and potentially keep millions of dollars for themselves and their teams.
Entrepreneurs could learn from the book, for example, that the addition of an innocent-sounding word “participating” to “convertible preferred stock” in structuring venture capital investments in their companies could cost them millions of dollars down the road when the entrepreneurs sell their companies. The payoffs of “participating convertible preferred stocks” and “convertible preferred stocks” are different. The book clearly explains differences in payoffs among various types of stocks used to structure VC investments and many other features of venture capital investment deals.
Venture capitalists could benefit from using this book as a reference on various ways to structure deals in order to protect their investments in high tech ventures.
If you are involved in building or financing entrepreneurial ventures, this book is for you!
This is hands down the best VC book on the market. Chapters are digestible in a sitting. Not an overly huge, bulky text book. You can throw this in your bag and catch up on the reading every time you have a break. This is used at most of the top B-schools in the US. The examples are good, but there could be a few more examples and practice problems. This book has hard core math, but it also presents it in a way that is easy to understand. A good mix of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of venture capital. I’m a big fan of Metrick. Too bad he left Wharton for Yale.
Rating: 5 / 5
Want examples of how funding works? Want to know how Venture firms set up their business? Want to know everything about practical application of VC firms? This may be as close as you’ll get without actually working in one. This ought to be a text book in graduate school. I’d suggest “The Venture Capital Cycle” as the first book to get an overview of VC’s. Then, read this one and you’ll be pretty proficient in terms of being an outsider. Great Case Study!
Rating: 5 / 5
A must for anyone wanting to know how VC firms work, structure themselves, and considerations for funding. This is an excellent case study that ought to be in a graduate program! It’s as close as you’ll get without working for a VC firm. I would suggest reading “The Venture Capital Cycle” first to get a general feel for VC and how it works. Then read the case study!
Rating: 5 / 5
In my opinion this is best and most comprehensive overview of modern VC practices available. Dr. Lerner is cleary the nation’s leading authority on VC research and his experiences are detailed in this book.
The case study format is organized into 4 themes (paraphrased): 1. Raising & Structuring Funds 2. Making Investments 3. Exiting Invesments 4. Other forms of VC funds
so the lessons of each case lead to a larger point. Furthermore, the case study format makes the book more entertaining than academic texts tend to be.
If you are somewhat knowledgeable about private equity then this is a “must read”. If you are a beginner make sure you become familiar with the ins & outs of private equity/venture capital before reading or else you may miss a lot of the value of this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was a disappointment. A real textbook would actually have instruction. This book is merely a collection of cases, with a few scattered chapters on VC/PE. Only buy the book if required to for a class.
Rating: 2 / 5
I was tremendously disappointed in this book. The cost of $35-50 is definitely a complete rip-off for what you get from the author. All you need to do is refer to pages 227-246. Those are the pages that represent the bibliography. I actually was so pissed off after reading this book that I counted them. In total the author referenced the words and work of 488 author people. There are only 223 pages of text and 6 chapters in the book. I am certain you can do the math but I’ll do it for you.
There are on average more than 2 references per page and over 80 per chapter. It’s as though the author has never had an original thought of his own. If I wanted to hire somebody to go out and look up the work of other people I would have done that. I was expecting the author to use his own first-hand knowledge and experience in order to help educate and inform others such as myself about the process. Instead, what I got was something a high school student would do while trying to complete a report for homework. My only question is who is less ethical: the author or the publishing company that let this slide through the screening process. For all of those that gave this book 5 stars I can only guess that you don’t enjoy actually reading.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was quite disappointed in this book because I had heard what a great resource it was. Overall the content was useful and was a pretty complete listbut I felt as though it would have been better if it was condensed down into a 4 or 5 page document instead of a whole book. This would be a better book to get from the library instead.
Rating: 2 / 5
Although it is carefully documented, it is almost entirely made up of quotes from secondary sources. If you’ve read some basic books on private equity, you probably already read most of the sources used in this book. There is little in the way of analysis or any kind of value add.
Rating: 2 / 5
Thia book just give you general idea on venture capital. It isn’t worth for your money. The author also not giving additional support on loopholes area. Not so friendly. So, better try another book – david gladstone is much better.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was required to use this book for a course on VC in my MBA program, and I found overly wordy and not very precise in its advice.
It is less of a handbook and more of a treatise. If you are looking for a direct and clear scoop on raising venture capital, this isn’t the book for you. If you have been trying for some time and want to get a deep peek into the minds of the VC’s out there, this could work if you had the time to wade through it.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book is a thorough, practical guide to the nitty-gritty of venture capital investing. This comprehensive, well-organized instruction manual summarizes the homework you should do before you make a venture capital investment, the paperwork needed to carry out the investment and the ongoing work you will have to undertake to have a prayer of seeing your investment pay off. If it is a little plodding, you can understand why. It covers a lot of ground. The authors compare venture capital investing to a partnership at one point, to a marriage at another. They don’t attempt to sell you on venture investing. In fact, by telling you how difficult and labor intensive it is, they may even drive you away. We believe this book definitely belongs in the library of anyone who has ever taken a serious interest in venture investing. It will also help entrepreneurs who need venture capital financing by showing them how to evaluate their companies according to the criteria that serious investors are apt to use.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is obviously been written by people who have seen hundreds of proposals. I found it to be an invaluable guide and full of excellent information. While many things did not pertain to our project, we gained excellent insights and saved ourselves from some embarrassing, amateurish missteps. You may not choose to follow all of the guidelines, but for most VC funding projects, EVERYTHING you need to know is well covered.
This was my first foray into private financing, after two decades in nonprofits. This VC handbook made me look and feel like a pro. Worth the investment many times over. I wouldn’t dream of writing a funding proposal without it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Much updated from previous editions, David Gladstone’s useful text provides a very cursory survey of deal and investment techniques, albeit for slightly later than “sexy” stage deals. However, as this book is designed for the novice, and as Lipper’s text has fallen out of print, this sadly remains the only general text on VC investing for the inexperienced, and is useful in context of the level which it is designed to educate. While the many checklists may be somewhat annoying to seasoned VCs, they are probably indispensable to the novice investor, since they provide a summary framework when working through deal and business terms. And while the book is designed more for later stage (through certainly not LATE stage, as some have alluded to) deals, the book is, again, designed to educate the novice venture investor, who really shouldn’t be doing high tech start-ups anyway. Irrespective of that, anyone who presumes to write a text on investing in high tech start ups would likely find his text applicable only for the next few months after printing. Ours is an industry that evolves very quickly, and changes rapidly in accordance to the latest trends. No one can teach you how to pick the winners in the trend that hasn’t happened yet. Getting the basics from a text like Gladstone’s, however, can give you the fundamentals on which to build that “knack”.
Rating: 4 / 5
I wanted to let you know I just finished your book, and I thought it was a terrific overview of working with VC’s. I’ve been in a handful of start-up software co’s, but on the operational side only. This gives me a much deeper understanding of the issues invovled in funding/building a company.
I’ve recommended INSIDE SECRETS TO VENTURE CAPITAL to my clients as a way to gain immediate insight to what’s really going on in the VC world. Novices have unrealistic expectations and rarely understand what the venture capitalist wants. INSIDE SECRETS tells it like it is.
*I found INSIDE SECRETS to be fast reading and an excellent resource for those beginning their search for VC. In my opinion it can substantially reduce the entrepreneur’s learning curve and allow them to assess their chances of getting equity funding for their venture.*
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve just finished reading Dee Power’s book, The Inside Secrets of Venture Capital,” and it is a classic.
Reading the book was like taking a college course, except that it was more enjoyable. My professor never talked down to me, gave many statistics and excerpts, and brought the entire area of entrepreneurs, angels, and venture capitalists together in a way even I could understand.
Sometimes I chuckled, and occasionally I laughed out loud as I experienced the wit used to explain this tricky field.
Although I don’t plan to get involved in the VC arena, I appreciate the opportunity to know what all the parties face as they go through the various processes.
Tremendous in every way, including resources and a delightful writing style. Congratulations, Dee and Brian
After looking at numerous books and reviews here on Amazon, I picked this puppy up.
Here’s what’s happened since:
1) I’ve repeatedly thought “wow, what a poorly written book.”
2) I’ve been trying to find something of value in the book. I tell myself, “well, I bought the book – I should probably try to finsish it.”
3) Then I tell myself “But hey, you should respect your time more.”
4) I think to myself, well, what if *somewhere* in this book there is a bit useful information? What if I went to page 223 and found a gem of information that’s very good?
5) So then I flip ahead to page 223 and sure enough…nothing.
If you want a book that is basically a collection of survey results from what appears to be poorly conducted and researched surveys of a few VC’s and entrepreneurs, this book is for you. It has absolutely nothing of value in it concerning how VC’s find, judge, value, and finalize a deal. It really only offers common-sense guidelines, which anyone with some basic experience should already have (or should have heard second-hand). There are no “secrets.” None. I promise you.
I can honestly say that I’ve gotten very, very little of value out of the this book, and after page 186 I’m still trying to figure out if there was a drop of value in the thing.
Joe Vanacore, staff writer says: Entrepreneurs can learn from book on venture capitalists. “Brian E. Hill and Dee Power explore how VCs and Es differ in their premises, expectations and frustrations in their book “Inside Secrets to Venture Capital.” Those differences are so deep that the 300-page book could easily hav been titled “Venture Capitalists are From Mars; Entrepreneurs are from Venus.
“And a cash-strapped small-business man, whether Venusian or Earthling, would do well to digest this book before making his pitch to a VC.
“Hill and Power – co-founders of Profit Dynamics Inc., a research and managemnt consulting firm — spent three years collecting data and opinions from VCs and it shows. They cover plenty of ground.
Rating: 5 / 5
Bartlett writes an informative book to those unfamiliar to the details to deal structuring, particularly with the documentation side. This book is truly for the novice who is unfamiliar with business and legal concepts. Those with a business or corporate law background may see this book as a “nice” reference source. If purchased, it’s likely to be unused.
Individuals who wish to know the legal side of basic business structures, term sheets, business plans, and such would find the book resourceful. Though it’s only 157 pages, it provides a foundation to the non-business professional.
Rating: 3 / 5
“Fundamentals” is a distilled version of certain chapters in Bartlett’s “Equity Finance: Venture Capital, Buyouts, Restructurings and Reorganizations”, a 3-volume set available at most major law libraries. “Fundamentals” is really lawyering at its best in that Bartlett unselfishly shares many of the key business points underlying venture finance negotiations but does so in a manner which is easily accessible to most readers. Even for an experienced venture capital attorney, Bartlett’s book is useful because it provides a relatively complete overview of the process and delivers the finer points without significant fluff. I would recommend this book to most entrepreneurs, young attorneys and others interested in a quick and practical overview of the venture finance process.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book outlines the organizational and funding aspects of venture capital from a legal viewpoint for investors and company management. It does a good job of pointing out the basic legal issues for a non-lawyer. It is not useful for assessing a business venture’s fundamentals or valuing a company. The author’s website VC Experts is useful.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’m an attorney with many years’ experience in the venture capital area. The content of the book tends to reflect East Coast practice more than West Coast (Silicon Valley) practice. That’s not necessarily a flaw, but you should be aware that the styles can differ in some respects.
The style of writing though, is my major complaint about this book. In a word, it’s pompous. Too many sentences have very complex, passive or impersonal constructions. Paragraphs are long and dense, without any concern for the reader’s fatigue level.
Also, some quantitative concepts could have been much more clearly expressed with a simple formula (high school-level math). The discussion of weighted average antidilution protection at pp. 90-91 is a case in point. I found this impossible to understand when I first read it. The more I read it, the more obscure it became to me. It could have been described much more accurately, and in many fewer lines, with a simple fraction.
Clear communication didn’t seem to be a priority for this author.
Rating: 2 / 5
Given the overall complexity of the topic, I thought that this was an especially quick read. At the same time, it touched upon enough sub-topics and did so with sufficient detail to get a good overview of how VC approach new businesses. I did not think that this was the authoritative statement on any given point, but a solid primer. To the extent you need to know more about a topic, you should be well armed to research it further.
I encounted the book through a senior capstone course at a local MBA program. I was lecturing on a topic and saw the book on the syllabus.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been a partner in the Venture Capital business my entire career – over twenty years. I have kept a personal list of “lessons learned” from my investment experience; and, I have read many of the books in the category. By far, this is the very best book in all respects. It is extremely well written and easy to read; captures the essence of each “master’s” message; and, also captures the essence of the investor’s personality (at least those that I know). I think this book is so good it should become a text book in business schools with private equity / venture capital programs. A must read for anyone interested in the “craft” of making successful investments in private companies.
Rating: 5 / 5
Every budding entrepreneur should know and implement strategies and concepts found in this book. As a second opinion on the same brand of practical advice found in my own book, “The Expert’s Edge,” this book offers a terrific launching pad. Get it, read it, study it… do it!
Rating: 3 / 5
Most of the reviews are written by this guy’s friends. I read the book…if you can tolerate the first 3 pages, then by it. It is free to skim through the pages you know.
This author’s style of writing is not even fit for a high school level. The book lacks real direction, substance, and I want my money back.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book is a great overview for someone just beginning to think about starting a business venture, but it seemed to be more focused towards the needs of a large venture, rather than a small business. It covered a lot that I thought would not be applicable to the type of business I want to start — a small town retail shop where I plan to run the business myself and will not hire executives or get funding from investors (other than probably a local bank or the SBA). Perhaps this just shows my ignorance of what owning a small business is about, though!
I also have to express my disagreement with his comments regarding attorneys. (Disclosure: I am currently an associate at a big law firm.) It sounds like he happened to get some bad attorneys. For what it’s worth, my thoughts, based on my own observations of attorneys at large and small firms (my own firms and opposing firms), are this: (1) I don’t think his experiences reflect the services provided by all large law firms — I think the quality of services you get depends on whether you hire a good INDIVIDUAL attorney, not law firm, (2) you are much more likely to have someone “learn on your dime” at a small firm than a large one simply because attorneys at large firms do a lot more business and specialize in certain areas and therefore become more experienced with matters that arise in those areas, (3) most small firm attorneys will NOT be as great as the ones he found, and (4) most partners are so distracted by bringing in business and a million other things that associates are much more likely to focus on your deal, keep things moving quickly, and actually pay attention to the details. I think the ideal arrangement for a small business owner is to find a good associate who has a good partner to ask for guidance on big issues when needed. I just don’t think it’s fair to generalize that all big firm attorneys are terrible and negligent with small clients, or that associates are all clueless and learning on your dime. (I can provide proof in the form of reviews from my large and small business clients!) That all being said, there are some fantastic attorneys at small shops and if you find one, you will pay much less for their services. My best advice on finding a good attorney (whether at a large firm or a small firm) is to get referrals from other business owners.
Rating: 4 / 5
I really enjoyed this little gem of a book. It offers ten simple lessons and is easy to read. I thought that the author’s advice is practical, which appears to be one of the benefits of this book versus so many others.
Rating: 5 / 5
In one vivid parable–the “Story of Stone Soup”–Dr. Gold reveals what is at the heart of the entrepreneurial process. In nine additional chapters, he clearly demonstrates how, step-by-step, the reader can start his or her own business venture. Dr. Gold’s lucid writing style and easy layout help to remove the veil of mystery surrounding the start-up process while imparting to the reader a feeling of, “Hey, I really can do this!”
Rating: 5 / 5
This was a waste of money. The CD was about a 20 minute CD of poor quality sound and she didn’t really say much. The package included a brochure that was equally unimpressive. This was a very basic knowledge of Angel Investing.
Venture Capital Cycle are full of questions why and how. For example: 1. How are Venture Capital Structured? 2. How are the Venture Capitalists compensated? 3. Does the capital structure matter?
On these questions, Gompers and Lerners gave you hypotheses from the experts, and in addition, they are proving those hypotheses. Which of those hypotheses are actually supported by the facts? The researches are very wide and valid. And the accomodate the hypotheses very well.
When I was reading this book, I was doing a research for my master thesis. And I realize that this book explain venture capital in a very good way, and straighten up problems on Venture Capital.
Rating: 4 / 5
This was one of the better books I’ve read on VC. Extremely well researched, very informative, though it took awhile to read. Recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is an awesome read for those who want to enter the world of Venture Capital. It explains more than what VC’s do, it elaborates on the “how,when,why” of the entire process. From mathematical and data support (which is a bit complex for the average reader), its value in the book substantiates it’s position on everything from timing funding, to VC experience (or lack of), and even firm or entreprenuerial behavior. Great first book in my opinion!
Rating: 4 / 5
I agree with Michael that this book is probably more suitable for the academic than the practitioner. I found myself ‘fast forwarding’ to the conclusions of each study rather than digging into the stats!
Rating: 2 / 5
I am forced to use this book for level 2 CAIA certification. Unfortunately, unlike the other titles in the curriculum, this title has little or no practical application for evaluating VC investments.
As stated previously, the book is long on statistics and ideas “for further research” but short on practical application.
This title was painful to get through and I will recommend it be removed from the curriculum for the CAIA.
Rating: 2 / 5
Spencer Ante has done a wonderful job writing the life story of General Georges Doriot, respected Harvard Business School professor, military general, and the father of venture capital. I had the good fortune to hear Spencer, who also writes on business for Business Week magazine, speak about Doriot’s story at the French Library in Boston before I started reading the book. His stories about the man who was so influential for U.S. business were fascinating. Here are a few of Doriot’s quotes that he pulled from the book to share with us:
* “A real courageous man is a man who does something when no one is watching him.”
* “If information is to be exchanged over whiskey, let us get rather than give it.”
* “You will get no where if you do not inspire people.”
* “Always remember that someone somewhere is making a product that wil make your product obsolete.”
From the stories about Doriot’s early introduction to entrepreneurship as the son of a Peugot engineer, to Doriot’s entry into Harvard Business School, to the importance he played with R&D during World War II which taught him how to become a venture capitalist to the part he played in the starting up of Digital Equipment Corporation, this book remains fascinating.
If you are in business today or would like to be, this is a must read from a great writer about a visionary business thinker. I think you’ll agree that Doriot really pioneered the transition of U.S. business to an economy built on entrepreneurship an innovation.
Rating: 5 / 5
Spencer Ante’s biography of Georges Doriot left me cheering my head off! He would look at the mistakes of today’s politicians and bank leaders and tell them exactly what they had done wrong and why and it would not be double talk. This is a great read about a true genius of business who came here from France and tried to teach how to be effective capitalists instead of idiot pretenders. It’s too bad we didn’t learn when we could have. We wouldn’t be in this mess now.
Rating: 5 / 5
In his book Creative Capital – Spencer Ante not only captures the amazing story of a French immigrant (Georges Doriot) and his profound contributions to the United States in business education, government service and launch of the systemic US venture capital industry, he also distills the essence of entrepreneurism and its pivotal role in innovation and the growth of the US technology industry. By embracing creative ideas and pro-actively managing the risk inherent in bringing new technologies to market, Doriot demonstrated that economic growth and wealth creation are at the heart of the venture capital model and two sides of the same coin.
At a time when the US economy is looking for direction and the keys to its future growth and sustainably, Ante’s book is a must read for every politician, business leader and investor who is genuinely looking for the levers through which we can grow and extend our competitive advantage in a global economy. After reading Creative Capital, the question that comes to mind is “how can we proactively encourage more of the innovation that Doriot helped bring to life”.
Ante’s style delivers a great story in an easily readable format punctuated with data and facts that draw clear comparisons to the economic challenges we face to day.
Creative Capital is a great business book. It is a must read for anyone interested in stimulating innovation and motivating people. Spencer Ante’s solid biography of General Doriot and the roots of the U.S. venture capital industry inspire. Ante takes the reader from the infancy of the automobile era and tells us an amazing life story about “the General.” Georges Doriot, the father of the modern venture capital industry, should be discussed in every high school history book.
As president of the American Research and Development Corporation (ARD), the world’s first publicly owned venture capital firm, Georges Doriot demonstrated the value of seed capital to stimulate new businesse development. In this book, Spencer E. Ante describes well Doriot’s remarkable discipline, energy, charisma, motivation, and bold vision.
In the right cinematographic hands, this book would make for an interesting movie or documentary. Georges Doriot was as an innovative financier who added value, and helped transform the U.S.’s industrial economy. Men and women like this are again needed in this new age of economic transformations.
Most people that have been involved in a VC-based tech startup have heard the parable of General Georges Doriot and his famous $70,000 investment in Digital Equipment Corporation. However, few people actually know the full (and very extensive) story of Doriot and the creation of the Venture Capital business.
Spencer Ante does an awesome job of telling this incredible history. As a former entrepreneur and now VC, I’ve read many books that touch on parts of the history and have heard many anecdotes. Spencer brings them all together in one concise, well-written, fast paced book.
Every entrepreneur and VC should, along with anyone that is involved in creating companies, should read this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The price is the only beef I have with this item. The material provides an excellent overview of the venture capital business but its a little pricy for 9 or so pages. I would have given it 5 stars if it had been $3.50 or less then again maybe I’m just cheap.
Rating: 3 / 5
I am a small business owner looking at growing my own business and have thought about using Venture Capital (VC) as an option. I really did not want to read an entire book on VC fundamentals and this article was definitely the ticket. I was able to learn what types of returns, companies and industries are typically sought by VC firms. I was also able to get some insight on downside risk and management concerns that are posed by VC investments.
I have been fortunate enough to run a profitable business for 10-years without the need for capital and have very little experience in capital investment. This artical is packed with very useful information on anyone considering using a VC firm to fund their company.
This book was written during the Internet Boom in the late 1990’s, but the author has some amazing insight to what would happen with the VC investments in inflated internet companies that went public. I am writing this review in July of 2006. This is a timeless article that will apply to any company who is considering working with VC in the current business era.
Rating: 5 / 5
This nine-page reprint from the November-December 1998 issue of the Harvard Business Review is an excellent introduction to the economics and operations of venture capital funds. It specifically and accurately describes the motivations of venture capitalists, their investors and the entrepreneurs in whom they invest.
It will be of interest to entrepreneurs seeking venture funding, persons considering a career in venture capital, and anyone else with a serious interest in the subject.
The article describes the author as “president of the Beta Group, a firm that develops and commercializes new technology with funding from individuals, companies, and venture capitalists. It is located in Menlo Park, California.”
Rating: 5 / 5
Bob Zider is president of the Beta Group, a firm that develops and commercializes new technology with funding from individuals, companies, and venture capitalist. This Harvard Business Review-article was published in November-December 1998, which was during the Internet/e-commerce boom.
“Contrary to popular perception, venture capital plays only a minor role in funding basic innovation.” Zider discusses the role venture capital plays: it “fills the void between sources of funds for innovation and traditional, lower-cost sources of capital available to ongoing concerns.” He then continues to describe the investment profile and the logic of the deal venture capitalists use to achieve their investors’ high expectations at an acceptable risk. Zider also explains the attractive returns for venture capitalists (in return for financing one or two years of a company’s start-up) and the reason why “seemingly bright and capable people seek such high-cost capital?” The article is complemented with some extremely useful sidebars to clarify this mythical industry.
Yes, I do like this article. This clear article kills some myths and fairytale stories about the venture-capital industry. It is primarily aimed at beginners, although some financial knowledge is useful for readers. For readers who appreciate this type of article I also recommend Justin Pettit’s 2001-article ‘Is Share Buyback Right for Your Company?’ The author uses simple business US-English.
Rating: 5 / 5
Oh to be Successful. Success What is it? How do you get it? How do you pursuit it?, What does it take to be successful? Having follow Micheal Gerber for 30 years, this book in my opinion is his best work. Micheal Gerber’s life long passionate pursuit of success is summed up in this book. Buy this book, buy an additional copy for a friend.
Get a cup of coffee, put your feet and read this book over a weekend. Monday morning if you apply the principles in this book you will be on the path to success. Being a business consultant for 29 years people come to me all the time and ask me. Is there one business book I can read that will help me right away? There is now!
Rating: 5 / 5
In Gerber’s classic, The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber wrote about the roles of the business owner (entrepreneur, technician, manager) and the importance of systems. Without a doubt, that was a great book. The principles were hard and fast and they were easy to believe, even if not easy to implement.
Since that book, Gerber has gone beyond the systems and has dug into the DNA of the business owner–the thinking, the feeling and the dreaming that makes great business owners. Some folks may not like this so-called “soft side” of small business ownership. Critics will say it’s fuzzy and unimportant. But for those of us who practice the art of entrepreneurship, we know how true it is. And we know that the dreaming Gerber refers to is not the clumsy daydreaming of a lazy wannabe. It’s the rigorous, disciplined dreaming of an ambitious entrepreneur who envisions greatness in her company. Yes, the dreaming Gerber is talking of is hard work.
You can’t build a great small business without following the advice Gerber gives–not just in his original book–but also in “Awakening the Entrepreneur Within” AND this book, “The Most Successful Small Business in the World.” Critics can mock it, but ambitious practitioners of entrepreneurship will appreciate the wisdom Gerber reveals here about the mindset and makeup of The Most Successful Small Business (Owners) in the World.
I loved the book. I am not a book reviewer, or a professional business consultant. The professional business consultants that I consulted with could not help me with the establishment of my business. Michael E. Gerber has! Michael’s language is poetic, intentionally so, as to inspire the creative nature within each and everyone of us.
Before even reading the e-Myth Series I consulted with three well known business consultants. When I explained my company, and the services that we would provide, on all three occaisions, I was told by the professional 1. “what you are doing is too important to fail!” “I can’t help you”. 2. “what you are doing is too important to fail!” “I can’t help you, but I will think about it and call you”. 3rd consultant the most well known author and marketing professional, said “what you are doing is too important to fail”, “I can’t help you”, “but you should read e-Myth by Michael E. Gerber”. I called Michael Gerber, he said “What you are doing is too important to fail; I will help you”!
I am new to business, so creating a company that had even the most elementary of standards is at very least a direction, But to create a World Class Company, is Michael’s standards. Michael expresses and believes that world changing purpose must drive any Entrepreneural Venture.
I have participated “in the Dreaming Rooms” and of course nothing is free and yes everyone should go. Is it hard and foreign, trying to wrap your head around something etherial, it certainly is worth a try!
I expect that within a very few months the name of my Company and our services will be touching the very heart of our nation at least 10,000 times.
Michael mostely reminds us that nothing is impossible with God, especially in business we all need to know that.
Rating: 5 / 5
I don’t normally comment in these venues, but was taken aback by the nasty attacks on Michael Gerber. It wasn’t even about the book, but about the person. (Makes the attacker look very small, but that’s his problem.) I read the book and found it inspiring. Plain and simple. If you are offended by the mention of God, don’t read this book then, because Gerber is inspired. Yes, by God. Imagine that! You won’t find it over-done in the least, but there are some who actually bristle at the very mention of the Divine, and get very distracted from the main message. And the main message is actually in the title of the book. I always say that if you take away one thing, from a book or seminar, that will improve your life, it was well worth it. Twas a bargain to gain new insights from Michael Gerber for under 20 bucks. One example of what I walked away with was reading very specific guidelines for finding a market and creating a successful business that can sustain the nightmarish economic responses to the acts of our wayward politicians. (My political view, not his.) Go for it!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
I read the book, and didn’t find a heck of a lot of reference to G-d in it. I was looking for it because of “Dr. Toad’s” complaints in his review. Yes there was some, but hey, I’m inspired by that, rather than turned off. Glad to see Michael E. Gerber isn’t afraid to acknowledge G-d in this age of PC and narcissism. Even our Founding Fathers knew that we couldn’t do great things on our own … but I digress. As usual, Michael’s quips and easy writing/speaking style guide us through important concepts, unlike most of the business books on the market that can substitute for Ambient. This book will not only inspire you, but put big ideas into simple language. Repetition? More like “review,” which is what every good teacher does. And Michael E. Gerber is definitely the teacher I wish I had in business school!
Rating: 5 / 5
An outstanding read! Clearly written, I devoured this book in three nights, have since re-read it twice and constantly refer to it for reference.
I also bought the book as a gift for the CEO of an Internet Security startup firm. Interestingly, he left it on a plane by mistake and promptly bought a new copy so as not to go without!
Golis outlines the key elements for structuring the V.C. business plan, which takes a bit of effort to get straight but is well worth incorporating his elements in a formal Business Plan.
As a reality check for other buyers, I used this book as a constant reference source in building a submission for Stage 1&2 V.C. raising (which has now successfully been accepted and is in the ‘heads of agreement stage’ for $500,000 in funds placement).
The book does not present company management issues. Its focus is on the Entrepreneur and Venture Capital raising issues.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m looking forward to reading this book — Jim is speaking at the upcoming conference in Denver (The Capital Factor http://TheCapitalFactor.com) and I plan on meeting him there! I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about him from people who have heard him speak and you gotta admit, what the guy has accomplsihed so far is astonishing!
Rating: 4 / 5
I found this book on the syllabus of one of the entrepreneurial courses for Dartmouth’s MBA (a resourceful way to find good reading). It was far superior to New Venture Creation (timmons) which seemed to be the main reading on that syllabus. That book is good but full of a lot of superfluous info–I’m still wading through that one. This book is concise, packed, and speaks exactly to entrepreneurs seeking angel money or creative financing. It doesn’t wax poetic about starting a venture, but does give the down and dirty on where investors are, the history of angel investing, and how that has lead to current investor expectations. It includes examples of what a cram-down round looks like on a spread-sheet and more.
I was very impressed with this reading and highly recommend it. Every time I was reading and was wishing it had a resource, that resource popped up in the next few pages. Excellent info in a concise format. If you’re not looking for angel financing however, you’ll be disappointed as this book won’t speak to you.
This book is full of useful information for both angel investors and entrepreneurs seeking funds for any start-up. There are anecdotes, facts and figures describing the industry and trends, a comprehensive list of resources, groups and sample agreements. There are checklists for use in everything from business planning to due diligence. If you are interested enough to be reading this review you should just get the book, you will be glad you did.
Rating: 5 / 5
And I’m only in the 3rd chapter. I’ll agree I was disheartened when I realized at least half the book is an appendix and the first chapter is a bit repetitive, but….., the information that follows is well worth the $30 I paid. A little more work and $50 for the book would only raise an eyebrow or two. If you expect to get $1,000 worth of reference material or a bible for an industry insider, well…., forget it. If you’re really on the fence considering it, buy it second-hand at $15, don’t buy coffee for a month and I’ll guarantee you’ll be well ahead of the game. Is it for someone with previous experience in Angel Investing? No, go write your own book if you have that experience. Is it useful for the price and its’ stated intent? No question. There’s obvious experience being laid out in the book and that’s worth thousands more than any price I’ve seen asked for the book.
Just my 2 cents, go to get back to that next chapter now…
Rating: 4 / 5
I did, so I bought five books. I will review them from worst to best.
“Finding an Angel Investor In a Day,” by The Planning Shop (2007), told me nothing I didn’t know, and I didn’t know anything about business plans or angel investors. The title is ludicrous and the advice is obvious, e.g., “Your business plan should be concise, compelling, and irresistible to investors.” 1 star.
“The ABC’s of Writing Winning Business Plans,” by Garrett Sutton (2005), walks you through writing business plans for a lawn mowing business and buying a pizza restaurant. If your business is more complicated, this is not the book for you. 1 star.
“The Ernst & Young Business Plan Guide,” by Brian Ford, Jay Boorstein, and Patrick Pruitt (2007), is a good book but hardly inspiring or insightful. If you follow this book your business plan will be competent but won’t grab investors. 3 stars.
“Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs,” by Susan Preston (2007). This book doesn’t explain how to write a business plan, but it explains how to make a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation to investors — a presentation that will grab investors. For example, one question is “How is your product or technology scalable?” I also learned some of the financials that angel investors look for, such as what IRR is expected. This book helped and inspired me to write an excellent presentation, that became the basis for my business plan. 5 stars.
“Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur,” by Dermot Berkery (2008). This is a textbook for a business school course about venture capital. This book is full of insights. Every few pages new ideas would compel me to go to my computer and add stuff or rewrite my business plan, for example, Berkery emphasizes the need for clear milestones. Preston mentioned milestones but didn’t make it clear why they are so important. The financials that were briefly presented in Preston’s book are thoroughly presented in Berkery’s book, for example, what gross margin investors look for (80% or more) and why they need such extremely profitable products or services. Plus you learn the jargon or key phrases of venture capitalists, e.g., “a large but well signaled market,” the importance of “market power” and an effective “route to customers.” I feel that my business plan now speaks to investors in their language, with the numbers they are looking for. 5 stars.
Rating: 5 / 5
as an entrepreneur and VC investor tfor more than 20 years, i higly recoomend the book. extremely useful insights for both roles, which indicate how experienced these authors and their advisors are. the book covers all important aspects of the business, along with useful tips and watch outs known only the most experienced people in this business. By far the best book in its category.
Rating: 5 / 5
by far the most comprehensive and concise book on entrepreneurship and venture capital investment. The book takes a rather unique approach of introducing fairly complicated issues in a straighforward fashion. The authors are looking at all aspects of VC investments and businedd development with a ‘value investing” approach, something I liked a lot. warning of fads and bubbles and legal pitfalls, they provide excellent insights that only experienced investros and entrepreneurs know how important they are. As an entrepreneur and VC investor for more than 20 years,I highly recommend the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The authors need to learn how to write a real introduction to their subject matter as the 3 1/2 pages in this book is inadequate. The title is also mis-leading in that the material that is really covered well deals with entreprenuerial finance. The rest of the material dealing with 1) innovative idea, 2) core team, 3) business plan, 4) employee recruitment, 5) entrepreneurial law and 6) intellectual property are summarized in five all too brief chapters in part I of this book.
I suggest the authors re-title the book to “Entrepreneurial Finance for High-Tech Start-Ups” as that would accurately reflect the content of the book and that they retain the content of section I, but that they recognize that the material offered is but a short summary and that readers need to be directed to other sources to fill in the gaps.
A resource bibliography needs to be built into each chapter in section I. My suggestions go as follows: 1) John Nesheim’s soon to be released book “Unfair Advantage” for the chapter on innovative idea, 2) Nesheim’s book on High Tech Start-ups for the chapter on the management team, 3) a number of resources are quite good for the business plan chapter:
Rhonda Abrams’s “Six-Week Start-Up”
Rhonda Abrams’s “The Successful Business Plan”
Bovee, Thill & Mescon “Excellence in Business”
Cunningham, Nikolai & Bazley “Accounting: Information for Decisions”
Terrell & Terrell “Survey of Accounting: Making Sense of Business”
4) A good set of job descriptions on an industry by industry basis would really help most companies here. I suggest looking at “Labor Market Information: Industry Report Archives” at novaworks.org , 5) Bagley & Dauchy’s “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law” and 6) for IP go to the real experts at Nolo Press. “Patents for Beginners”, “Nondisclosure Agreements”, and “Patent Searching Made Easy”.
“From Concept to Wall Street” is a good book when you get to the entrepreneurial finance stage of your start-up, but in the meantime you really need the help from the type of resources that I mentioned earlier. Otherwise you’ll probably never make it to that stage.
4 stars for the entrepreneurial finance material (authors are much too condensed in their treatment), 1 star for misleading title and for the lack of pointers to the material you will need in section I. Overall rating of 3 stars.
“Angels” are private financial supporters and other professional underwriting entities who provide more funds to business entrepreneurs than any other source, according to authors Mark Van Osnabrugge and Robert J. Robinson. This book offers ways to bring together those with imaginative ideas and those with the funds to “finance” those ideas, for a profit, of course. Do you have an innovative project? a new toy or software product? Looking for investors? Read this book, there may be something in it for you. A matching service is also included in the book.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book seems good when you read the 50 first pages but then…the same ideas…again and again. I started to writte on a piece of paper some of the ideas cause I was making a study of the venture capital industry for my MBA. But there were so many repetitions in this book…really annoying sometimes! In addition, the book is a little bite disorganized sometimes. It starts from A, jumps to J, comes back to D, go to W, …. hard to follow sometimes. The content is not strong! Contrary to what you could believe about the presentation of this books (the two authors make a lot of references to [previous researchers in that field, which is however useful if you want to go back to their main publications), this book has been made for a large public…a very large one.
I believe this book has been made very quickly during the boom of the so-called new economy when business angels and venture caqpital companies were at the apogee. This book is a little far behind the new trend. It even misses some strend that were occuring when this book was written…so, very disappointing.
However, the book is still affordable and I think that people who are still impressed by the words Business Angels and that still don’t know what it is about should buy this book. It gives a simple but still interesting pictures of the Mysterious investors. If you want a comparison about Business Angeles and Venture Capitalists, that is also a good book.
Conclusion: Good for the large public. Jusr OK for those that have some insight about the VCs and other Business Angels Avoid it for all the other ones…it’s ot worth the price.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book is full of quality information to help those seeking start-up funding. After reading it once, I was inspired for my search for funds. If you are out weeding your way through the jungle of financing, get this book as a quality resource.
Rating: 5 / 5
My motivation for purchasing this book was to gain a deeper understanding of the legal aspects for start-ups, venture capital investments, and buyouts. I was pleasantly surprised to read how clearly the points were made (I am not a lawyer) and thoroughness of the different sections. This book covers popular topics like start-ups and buyouts in addition to more esoteric topics including industry consolidations and turnaround investments. Furthermore, each topic discusses various ways to structure the transaction (e.g. business entity, financing) and the implications of the decision (e.g. liability, tax impact, regulations). Although the book is targeted to business lawyers it really is an invaluable source of information for entrepreneurs and business owners. For example, techniques for VCs to negotiate deal terms with entrepreneurs are covered. Entrepreneurs should be familiar with the options to make sure they are getting the best deal for their situation.
Anyone looking for a quick high-level read should skip this book as there are a lot of details. However, if you are looking for a comprehensively detailed reference book, then I highly recommend “Structuring Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Entrepreneurial Transactions” by Jack S. Levin.
“You’ve created a great resource for entrepreneurs. I’ve added ‘Attracting Capital from Angels’ to a short list of books that I recommend to companies who are raising funds to take their business to the next level. Congratulations!” –
Rating: 5 / 5
I would recommend this book only to the complete novice to angel and venture investing. I was hoping for more details regarding the angel investing process. One thing it teaches, though, is that angel investors are much less sophisticated and organized than professional venture capitalists (the way I understood it). What it feels like is a collection of experiences with the interpretation left mostly to the reader. Great if that’s what you’re looking for.
Rating: 3 / 5
“The complexity of business in economically demanding times makes finding constructive angels that much more challenging. The advice and tips in Attracting Capital from Angels are, therefore, invaluable. The wisdom offered here is not just for start-ups or neophytes, but is a well-timed companion to already existing resources and approaches to helping a business in all phases of development. It’s also a great manual for people who want to share their knowledge (and invest capital) as an angel. I plan to recommend Attracting Capital from Angels to every entrepreneur I run into in the future who asks for mentoring sources. Great job!” (Bob Bozeman, General Partner, Angel Investors, LP)
Rating: 5 / 5
The approach taken for “Attracting Capital From Angels” is unique. The authors depend not just on their own areas of knowledge, but also on the opinions, and knowledge of others in the field through surveys, short questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The reader gains a sense of how the game is played from the players themselves.
Enjoyable to read with lots of true life anecdotes from both entrepreneurs who have obtained venture capital and the angel investors themselves.
A must read for entrepreneurs on the hunt for investors.
Rating: 5 / 5
Everything I needed to know was in this book. I didn’t wastetime calling tapped-out funds or people who didn’t care. They also offer an electronic version delivered via email. They say don’t do it, but I used the database for a personalized fax campaign Friday and Monday and received 13 reponses from cold calls in about 15 hours isn’t to shabby. This is a whole lot cheaper than the directories that cost over $300 bucks.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was disappointed in the quality of the directory. Kennedy Information’s Gold Book of Venture Capital Firms and Pratt’s Venture Capital Directory are much better.
Rating: 1 / 5
For the reader with a bright idea of a new company, but who lacks capital, this book is recommended. It has much practical advice for soliciting so-called angel capital. This is seed money, typically from $50 000 to a few hundred thousand dollars, that can be used to carefully finance a modest initial operation.
The text describes several organisations scattered throughout the US, that are venture forums. This is the preferred term for a group of well heeled individuals, and some venture capitalists, that regularly meet with prospective company founders. You, the founder, give a short presentation and they bombard you with questions about the viability of your idea.
Along these lines, the book helps you prepare your presentation. By giving questions that you should have some answers to, beforehand. These act as a preliminary assessment. Other aspects covered here include the crucial issue of valuation. How much is your idea worth, if it is to be instantiated in a company?
Despite the book’s title, the text also explains other possible sources of funding, like asset-based loans or incubators. The only problem with the description of the latter is the absence of a warning that you could be selling yourself short. Some incubators ask for more than 20% of equity, in return for providing little more than office space for a couple of years. If your idea truly is good, an incubator could be a very bad deal.
Rating: 4 / 5
John May and Cal Simmons spell out the steps, but more importantly give insight into the relationships, that allow businesses to get their initial capitalization. If you have a business in need of capital or a business plan, you should read this book. In the examples, pay attention to the the sub-themes of who introduces new companies to the investor group and who endorses the concept.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have the pleasure of being a member of one of John May’s groups, Active Angel Investors (http://activeangelinvestors.com/) and I am extremely glad I joined this group.
And now for a one sentence review of the book:
Just the first three chapters (How Angels Evaluate Entrepreneurs, When to Dance with an Angel, & Finding Angels and Making your Pitch) are worth the price of the book and if you are a successful entrepreneur, they can be worth millions!
* Benjamin, Gerald A. and Margulis, Joel B., Angel Investing – How to Find and Invest in Private Equity, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000.
* Benjamin, Gerald A. and Margulis, Joel B., The Angel Investor’s Handbook: How to Profit from Early-Stage Investing, New York: Bloomberg, 2001.
* Gompers, Paul and Lerner, Josh, The Venture Capital Cycle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999
* Hill, Brian E. and Power, Dee, Attracting Capital From Angels: How Their Money and Their Experience Can Help You Build a Successful Company, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2002
* Keeley, Robert H., Cooper, Jeffrey M. and Bloomer, Gary D., Business Angels: A Guide to Private Investing, available from the Kauffman Foundation, Kansas City, 1998.
* May, John and O’Halloran, Elizabeth F., State of the Art: An Executive Briefing on Cutting-Edge Practices in American Angel Investing, Charlottesville, VA: Darden Business Publishing, University of Virginia, 2003.
* Moore, Karl and Coveney, Patrick, Business Angels: Securing Start Up Finance, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998
* Osnabrugge, Mark Van and Robinson, Robert J., Angel Investing: Matching Start-up Funds with Start-up Companies – The Guide for Entrepreneurs, Individual Investors, and Venture Capitalists, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
* Simmons, Cal and May, John, Every Business Needs an Angel: Getting the Money You Need to Make Your Company Grow, Washington DC: Crown Business, 2001.
* Williams, Kelly, Working with Angel Investors for Community Development, New York: Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, 2003.
To the entrepreneur with the next idea that will change the world & make you a billionaire:
1) Read Every Business Needs an Angel (or better yet all of the above referenced books).
2) Contact me & send me your compelling executive summary!
NOTE: By compelling I mean that your executive summary is going to have me calling you before I finish reading it. Good luck to you all! (…)
Rating: 5 / 5
This is the best book I’ve read about how those individual investors make decisions with their own money when facing start up companies – entrepreneurs. Maybe the authors are right – every business any where needs angels.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have read several angel books as well as having spent 5 years running a large fund in the Valley, and I just don’t feel that Cal and John have their views correct. The investment world has changed and those who can be to the point and have a good idea with good management have a shot. However, I hope for these folks that Cal and John are not on the other side of the table evaluating.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is a fun, easy-read on the subject of angel clubs – which are valuable but should not be confused with real individual angel investing. John and Cal’s writing style is case-book and easy to read. This is a business book that makes you smile … a little bit because the stories are fun … and a little bit because there are a lot of not-so-happy stories that they don’t tell you about. But being the perpetual optimist, I like reading about the nice stories.
Rating: 3 / 5
If you are preparing a business plan to sell the merits
of your business to an outside investor, this is the book
you should use for guidance. BUY THIS BOOK TODAY!
Most business planning guides do not address the investor,
in fact, they often ignore the
investor completely. In addition to preparing a sound plan, this book tells you how to value your
business, communicate this value to your investor, and
demonstrate to the investor how he/she will get their money
out.
Rating: 5 / 5
unlike many books coming out, which are more like reworked thesis papers from dried up PHd programs, this book was readable and enjoyable.
Rating: 4 / 5
Finally! A practical, hands-on guide to raising venture capital. This step-by-step handbook gives an entrepreneur a clear, real-world roadmap to the fundraising process. I only wish I had a book like this when I started my company.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book illuminates the vital role played by Business Angels in today’s venture capital markets. I think writing style is as important as content when you are addressing a professional audience. This book gets A+ on both counts. The Informal Venture Capital Market by Moore and Coveney should be required reading for entrepreneurs and private investors. William E. Wetzel, Jr. Director Emeritus Center for Venture Research University of New Hampshire
Rating: 5 / 5
This book by Gerald Benjamin contains solid information on raising capital for new ventures and young companies. It’s a keeper. As someone who has worked on many, many capital raising projects for new emerging growth businesses, I would personally advise you to get this book. The advice is priceless! — Principal of a Venture Financing Firm
Rating: 5 / 5
Castillo describe en forma cándida, simple y directa su propia experiencia como emprendedora e inversionista en empresas. Su estilo personal genera un sentimiento de camaradería cuando comparte abiertamente errores reales con el fin de ilustrar un punto. El libro es un resumen práctico y un “abrir de ojos” para aquellos que recién se inician en el mundo empresarial o se dan cuenta de que necesitan un cambio en la manera de manejar sus negocios.
Rating: 4 / 5
Creando Empresas …fabulosas”, es un libro , realmente fabuloso, diferente, es una delicia leerlo, porque es ademas ameno e inspirador.
Me parecio muy practico, y lleva en forma muy directa a la reflexion y a la accion.
Es un libro basico para todos los que sonamos con crecer, nos aclara muchas ideas, y ayuda a dar giros a conceptos importantes,que antes nos hacian quedar en medio camino.
Realmente lo recomiendo…….. para todo el que quiera realmente ampliar su vision empresarial.
Rating: 5 / 5
As the Dot Coms become Dot Gones…its hilariously obvious that the modern VC is the equivalent of the Junk Bond Trader of the 80’s. Reading about their exploits as “Masters of the Universe” in investing huge sums of someone else’s money in money losing ventures and vapid startups with no business plans makes one wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place – true entrepreneurs have build companies by hard work, vision and determination. The short term, get rich quick results, fad driven, something for nothing mindset of the VC is the embarassing legacy of the .Com Disaster.
Rating: 1 / 5
There are many books in the marketplace that target different types of entrepreneurs with different types of approaches. Respectively, none of them work unless you are starting a mom-and-pop business. Believe me, I’ve gone through most of them! I have found that they are either based on a fandango “boilerplate business plan” model or written by beings from outer space, with grand delusions that your idea will rivet the attention of a venture capital firm or an investment banker. Forget it, those days are gone.
If you are serious about finding and raising private equity for your start-up company, this book will give you plenty of facts, stories and anecdotes. Angel Financing will also give you the methods and processes to get it done properly.
Promote your idea into a practical one. This book is pure common sense. Write a business plan to attract financing. The blueprint for operating your company is the next step. Look around and discover that Gerald Benjamin is a pioneer in this field and his views about how to raise private equity is gaining a foothold and turning heads. Recently, I attended one of his seminars and the people sitting next to me were simply top-caliber entrepreneurs.
There are very few companies that will ever make it to the public equity markets. For example, many large companies such as SAIC (headquartered in San Diego) are employee-owned. Just look at the facts presented in his book and reconsider your options, especially if you would like to retain control of your start-up.
There is one suggestion. Carefully review all the how-to-do a business plan material out there. Make sure it is suitable for your exact needs
All the basics of VC, but more fun to read and much more likely to stick with me over the years as compared to some other “Intro to VC” books you’ll find. This book comes across as VC 101 from the true practitioners perspective.
Rating: 5 / 5
Venture capitalists have developed their own lingo, and this book cracks the code! Whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, or just amused by VC-speak, this book captures the spirit of silicon valley. If you’ve ever heard a clever saying and written it down, well, this book is chock full of witty sayings — “The first man gets the oyster; the second man gets the shell” and “In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.”
Rating: 5 / 5
The book reveals incredibly insight into some of the key fundamentals which drive the modern VC business.
The literary content helps frame those principles and puts them into practice, but in an fun and easily to read way. It will help those who aspire to enter the VC business truly understand what he/she is getting into.
Sadly, this book is similar to most on venture capital in that it is based on interviews of VCs. The weakness behind this approach is that it provides unorganized content that lacks depth and utility. In short, while it doesprovide some important insight, these insights are neither unique or critical and can be found in other books that provide a much better resource to the entrepreneur.
Rating: 2 / 5
I’m pretty familiar with VC and entrepreneurship in the US, but have no experience in Europe. This was a good history, primer and cultural reference.
Rating: 4 / 5
While the author did present good sound background and structure to understanding the angel financing market, I wish I had known beforehand that much of the information was based on experiences in Britain, not the U.S. I would not have purchased this book — especially at its price. Many of the tables and references were in pounds, not dollars, and entities British, which required translation. I just couldn’t relate beyond the basics. Sorry. Not my cup of tea!
I was expecting a book discussing and employing actual valuation methods for different stage start-up companies, rounds of financing and maybe, the valuation of the different classes of stock that get issued in the subsequent rounds.
Instead, the book talked in generalities about how difficult valuing start-up entites is and how VCs focus on the product, the market and the management team. There was only one page where exit multiples and time to exit were discussed. In another section, there were some numbers presented regarding the effect of per share round on the price, but it was so poorly written and the exhibits so badly laid out, I could not follow what they were trying to say.
Each chapter was written by a different VC and reflected their own opinions and experiences, which was good.
There was good information in the book, but not at all what the title implied.
Rating: 2 / 5
I think anyone interested in investing in private companies or anyone who wants to understand the process of angel investing should read “Angel Financing”
Many wealthy investors are turning to financing small businesses due to the huge potential return. Benjamin and Margulis tell us that the angel investor who put $100,000 into Ciena Corporation saw the value of his investment grow into $285 million in three years, when the company went public. Further, knowledgeable business people can enhance the value of their angel investments through their experience, knowledge, and contacts. Unless you’re extremely wealthy, this ability to add value to your investments isn’t available when you invest in large publicly-traded companies.
Angel investing isn’t for everyone. Benjamin and Margulis say angel investors expect about one-third of their investments to fail completely. Further, many bad deals out there must be avoided. So, anyone considering angel investing should have business experience. And, there must be good chemistry between the investor and the entrepreneur.
To help new investors ask the right questions and avoid bad investments, Benjamin and Margulis provide a detailed due diligence questionnaire which will help investors understand what questions they should ask before making an angel investment.
“Angel Financing” is also a good book for entrepreneurs seeking angel financing. It helps entrepreneurs answer the questions: “Is my company financeable? Am I financeable?” And, “Angel Financing” helps entrepreneurs understand the private equity market.
We learn that the average angel investor is 48-59 years old, has a postgraduate degree, has management experience, and, typically, invests between $25,000 and $250,000 per deal. Many angel investors are self-made millionaires with a net worth between $1 million and $10 million dollars. Eighty percent of angels have previously started a company and have small business experience.
Benjamin and Margulis tell us that seeking private investments from people with a net worth below $1 million, or an annual income below $200,000, isn’t usually desirable. These people do not possess the discretionary income to make angel investments and are usually not classified as accredited investors. This could create legal problems for the entrepreneur if the investment fails.
Benjamin and Margulis point out that many of the wealthiest families and individuals have their wealth managed by conservative trusts or professional advisors. So, seeking an angel investment from an ultra-rich person may not prove successful, because the trust administrator often kills the deal because of the high risk involved.
Because angel investors don’t need to invest, Benjamin and Margulis tell entrepreneurs to be flexible in structuring the deal to meet the investor’s needs. Many entrepreneurs do not listen adequately to what potential investors are telling them.
“Angel Financing” contains a good appendix about private placements, discussing such things as exemptions from full securities registration under Rule 504, 505, and 506, although much of this information is also available free from the SEC.
Benjamin and Margulis say that entrepreneurs should expect to budget about 10% to 15% of the amount to be raised as fundraising expenses. We learn that costs of a SCOR offering average about $30,000 nationwide. (SCOR, Small Corporate Offering Registration, allows companies to raise up to $1 million and is highly state-specific. Some states encourage SCOR while other states are more hostile to it.)
Overall, “Angel Financing” is an excellent book for entrepreneurs and angel investors.
Peter Hupalo, Author of “Thinking Like An Entrepreneur”
Rating: 5 / 5
Zook demonstrates that physical geography continues to be a paramount factor in where a startup is located. His study is from the dot com era, and shows the striking correlation and clumping of US startups. Silicon Valley dominates, unsurprisingly. But then there are also major clusters in Seattle, New York, Austin, Los Angeles and Boston.
The book shows the prediliction of people in any industry to aggregate, even, or perhaps especially, when there is intense competition between companies in that industry. Ultimately, the clumping benefits the industry, by permitting an easier transfer of ideas and people. So that successful ideas and companies can grow.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a must read for anyone looking to learn about VC. The problem with it is that the content is extremely basic so anyone who is interested in working for a VC should already know that a a lot more. But it give a good background for everybody else and especialy entrepreneurs.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is an example of a new type of rip-off sometimes found on Amazon.com.
- An impressive book title indicates a specialist book on a niche subject
- A detailed book description with all the rigt words
- A high price tag signals quality
And then, when the book arrives, the reader discover that the text is very short and very basic, and could have written by a school boy. But he cannot complain, because the book is about the stated subject.
I picked up this book in a bookstore expecting the typical rhetoric and was enlightened. It explained not only the typical demographic of an angel investor but also descriped the thought processes of several different types of angels. A must read for startup executives if you’ve never done a startup before. Should be a required MBA course.
Rating: 5 / 5
Want to make obscene amounts of money without having to run the company yourself? Become a venture capitalist! This book assembles the stories of some of the brightest names in the business and shows how they made their mark on the industry, usually with a smashing success but occasionally by changing the way venture capital works. An inspiring and useful read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was VERY expensive. It took a while to get to me. I really looked forward to it. Then it arrived. It is SMALL. Look at the published physical dimensions in the description. I read the book. It is THIN. Look how few pages are in this book. Then I noticed that an ENORMOUS chunk of this book is NOT articles by famous VC persons but rather just BOILERPLATE legal contract language. This leaves several TINY articles of GENERIC, NOT SPECIALIZED information about the venture capital market. If I had READ the description more closely to see how small this book was (physically and page length) I might have had some idea how disappointed I would be. But I would NOT have figured out just HOW LAME THIS BOOK IS without owning it and seeing how much of it is WASTED SPACE in my opinion. You could learn more (at the moment) by visiting Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneurship program online and watching the videos of real venture capitalists and real businesspersons discussing IN-DEPTH the thinking behind their moves. DON’T LET YOURSELF FEEL TAKEN. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. This book is a terrible waste of money that could have gone to print business cards or take a train to a meeting or anything better to promote your entrepreneurial ambitions.
Rating: 1 / 5
you can find the information found in this book via the internet… the only thing i found this book good for is to convince the obvious: venture capital business is big business.
also get to know who the big-wigs are in the business… which can be discovered on the internet… check out redherring.com and subscribe to the VC p.s. newsletter.
Rating: 3 / 5
Very detailed look into one case study and insight into how the industry started.well written and easy to follow. I would recommend this to anyone curious about the world of Venture Capital
Rating: 4 / 5
This brief book offers a sound introduction to the fundamentals of venture capital investing. Though it emphasizes the United Kingdom, it illustrates the state of the venture capital business in other nations as well. Richard Thompson gives a straightforward explanation of what “real venture capital” is. He distinguishes venture capital for new business development from private equity, or refinancing, for established companies. Case studies and anecdotes from the author’s own experience support his plain, commonsense recommendations. While this book will be particularly appropriate for readers in the U.K., getAbstract also recommends it to any reader seeking a short, practical guide to the business of investing venture capital.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been a limited partner in venture firms for over twenty years. Karen Southwick’s “fly on the ceiling” view of actual general partners meetings was an eye opener. She pulls no punches such as a general partner’s comments on one firm, “I’ve basically given up on the company. They did everything I told them not to. There’s no CEO. They’re going to run out of money and I don’t want to write another check”… “I’ve totally lost confidence in the team”. This honest reporting of behind the scenes action makes the book a must read for anyone interested in venture capital and Silicon Valley.
Rating: 5 / 5
I can’t say enough good things about this book! Gompers and Lerner provide a crystal clear explaination of the role venture capital plays in the economy and offers an insightful view of how venture capital will change in the future.
Anyone who is launching a new venture should bypass the “How To Write A Business Plan” books and pick up a copy.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book captures the true essence of private venture capital investing and shows the importance of the venture capital investor taking a hands on interest in the investee companies as opposed to the reputation of venture investors as short term exploiters who are investing for the profit only. All future venture investors and entrepreneurs can greatly benefit from Mr. Thompson’s experience and successes outlined in this book. An excellent read!
Rating: 5 / 5
This well written book gives you the whole story: What’s in for entrepreneurs raising funds, for VC investors, and how the industry creates value as a whole. It will give you insights that may be valuable if you haven’t been a player or gone through financing rounds before. A must read!
Rating: 5 / 5
Gompers and Lerner have written the best book on venture capital thus far. The authors have done a great service to entrepreneurs, VCs, and the entire business community with this work.
It is written, organized, and executed at perfect pitch and should be read by anyone considering taking the plunge into entrepreneurship, pursuing a career as a VC, or simply wanting to know more about the complexities and true nature of venture capital.
As venture capital gradually becomes more plentiful in the next 24 months, reviewing this work should be required of serious-minded professionals.
Rating: 5 / 5
You will find the quite difficult to follow, but it is interesting to read and you will find new information on each page if VC is stranger to you.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is good if you are looking for a somewhat decent introduction to terminology and processes. However, I think you will find other books a far better investment in your time. I would say this is a high school level course in VC.
I question some of the motives of the author through the book. At one point he says that the best way to meet a VC is to have an introduction by a broker. In my experience taking three companies through VC, I have found this is the absolute worse way of dealing with them. All of my friends who are partners at Chicago based VC firms say they would rather the entrepreneur come directly to them. You can tell the author is an attorney, because his advice is to use an attorney to find Venture Capital. Also, the author touts the fact he is a lecturer at Wharton. Lecturer and Professor are worlds apart. It isn’t that hard to get an invitation to speak at a business school, so I don’t put much weight on his using this as a claim to fame.
This book is good for terminology, but not good for advice. My recommendation is that you do not follow the guidelines here, only use the book as an introduction to terminology.
If you want a real book on advice, listen to someone that has taken a company through the process. Get Rob Ryan’s book “Entrepreneur America”. You will find it is a much better investment of time and money.
Rating: 2 / 5
This seems to be a bunch of lecture notes for a Venture Capital course masquerading as a book. Like lecture notes, the material presented is spotty and uneven, but interspersed with enough factoids to keep the reader interested. As a text, it would have benefited from an outline and a good editor. About 45% of its 368 pages are appendices (course handouts) of sample contracts. If this is your first venture into venture capital, find the course text or read something like Linda Chandler’s Winning Strategies for Capital Formation. Then read this to add some depth.
Rating: 3 / 5
10,000 years ago there was a civilization where people would throw money onto the street and it would turn into huge castles and fat bank accounts. Then there was an unknown worldwide catastrophe and that world completely disappeared. Later on a book was discovered where the people throwing all the money around told their stories, oblivious to the coming world catastrophe. Its fascinating to see inside the minds of these primitive humans.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is a must read for every entrepreneur and VC. The snippets of information in it are very valuable even after the downfall of the Internet economy-most of the text is more focused on timeless vc/entrepreneur related issues. I would highly recommend this book…
Rating: 5 / 5
As I read this book, I had to keep flipping back to the start to convince myself it was actually a true story. While the author has cleverly kept names out of the tale (”to protect the guilty” he says), some of the stuff these investors did is incredible. If venture capitalists are half as bad as this guy found them to be, the economy is in trouble.
The story is a set of diary entries charting the rise and fall of this startup company in “Silicon Valley”, USA. You can really feel for the author when things start to go bad, but even from the first entry you know he’s worried because the investor is trying to chat up teenage girls during a business lunch. Between the company ’sponsored’ trips to France (apparently for sex for the investor), and bringing in a collection of scam-artists to suck money out, these investors really screwed this guy. What’s great about the book is you can see things going downhill, but there’s never really a moment where you see how the company could have stopped it, even though they realized they were being had.
The big mysteries of course are: who exactly is Karl Capita, what was the company, and most importantly, what’s being done about dodgy VCs now?
I totally recommend this as an entertaining and shocking read. I’m sure this kind of story is exactly why the stock market crashed and all those ‘dotcom’ millionaires disappeared so quickly. BTW, it’s not a typical boring business book at all. More like a movie plot! Very funny but touching moments too (like the 11th September 2001 entry).
[I read the hardback, but adding my review to the other versions since it's the same book and it's a bloody excellent read.]
Rating: 5 / 5
This is an extremely unique and exciting book. I have always had questions for venture capitalists, and reading this book answered many of them. The style is clear, and it is very easy to understand. The interviews have obviously been conducted meticulously, and very good questions are asked. If you run an internet business or are going to have any future interaction with venture capitalists, you would be silly not to pick this up and read it.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is truly unlike anything I have read so far on venture capital. It definitely contains true insights from the VCs featured-instead of glossed over “how to” comment in other venture capital books. A very interesting and educational read for anyone in the Internet or technology industry.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a well-researched and written guide for anyone interested in a VC career. It is primarily targeted at MBAs exploring their options after business school and puts a career in VC in context with the typical MBA alternatives – investment banking and management consulting. Even though as a mid-career executive I am not within that target group, I found this a compelling reading with helpful tips on how to get one of those elusive entry level VC positions through networking and aggressive self-marketing. I ordered this book directly from wetfeet.com and I was charged a whopping $15 for surface delivery.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is the first book that I have read on venture capital that actually covers “real” topics. The individuals interviewed in the book really know their stuff and because it is in an interview format there is no “glossing over” of any topics or terms. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the venture capital world-it is really a very different type of book than anything else out there.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is very brilliant and I can definitely use it in London, where I have a small consultancy business and use the internet for E-Commerce.
Secondly, because of the low interest rate of 6-7%, I can secure a loan to buy PCs for my office.
With the usage of an accounting application and spreadsheet, I can make quick financial statements and be in control of the business.
I cannot be that lucky in Ghana, if I were now starting up.
I run an application software development company, and I have connected by PC to the internet.
In Ghana, interest rates are high at about 45-50% Internet technology is available but skilled labour is limited Incomes are generally low; the minimum daily wage is about 70 cents and limits the market
The majority of Africa faces similar situations to that of Ghana.
In conclusion, I wish to suggest that a chapter is added to the book to discuss business planning in technologially disadvantaged economies like Ghana, to formulate a business planning manual without the use of the relatively expensive PC so the potential African entrepreneur can also have something to read from.
Rating: 4 / 5
Dense read. Definitely not a book you can “skip” through. However, after having read many books on VC, I can easily say this is the best historical overview (up to 1991) of the US VC industry I know. A must-read if you’re serious about understanding the VC industry, its past mistakes, and where it’s going.
Rating: 4 / 5
With the exception of Japan, all now industrialized East Asian countries were poor in the 1960s – well, nearly all poor. In a brief time period to-date, S. Korea has moved from traditional industries to semiconductors; Taiwan graduated from PC accessories to wafer fabrication; and Singapore from electronics to semiconductor manufacturing. Through tenacity, and emphasis on the domestic “invisible market” made up of low-income consumers, these countries have moved from low-tech to high-tech, and transformed poverty into (potential) wealth. How did that happen?
” Rice and Chips” asserts that countries that succeeded first developed their own technological ecosystems based on “Silicon Valley rules of [fostering] innovations.” The rules require venture capitalists to finance the incubation of technologies and “technopreneurs” to take those technologies to market. The goal of the book is to explain the rules that successful Asian countries have followed to get where they are today, and which other developing countries aspiring to technological advancement can emulate. The explanation ends up in eight rules of thumb. Without further ado here they are:
Rule 1: Build a powerful team of experts: researchers, scientists, engineers, suppliers, and even hobbyists.
Rule 2: Locate ecosystems near research institutions and universities, just like Silicon Valley is located near Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and similar institutions.
Rule 3: Beep the horn loud for role models by telling the stories of successful entrepreneurs to encourage others.
Rule 4: Develop an innovation culture by inspiring your people to think creatively – provide public lectures, plays, concerts, and the like.
Rule 5: Take advantage of economies of proximity that allow knowledgeable people to interact, exchange ideas, and for the ideas to flourish.
Rule 6: Turn the “brain drain” into the brain shower – tap into the Diaspora.
Rule 7: Develop effective financial and legal systems that would permit venture capital markets to emerge.
Rule 8: Take risk, fail, learn, take risk again, …, and eventually succeed!
This book is great: well written, economically written, and powerful message!
Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
I knew I wanted to work in venture capital but breaking into the market in these tought times was pretty intimidating. A friend of mine suggested these guides as a good resource and I’m glad I followed his advice. I now have a much better idea of the challenges facing the industry right now, and how to leverage my background to get where I want, despite the tough market. This guide also provided insight into which firms are staying afloat and which ones are struggling. I feel like I definitely have a cutting edge now.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m currently looking into interning at one of the VC firms in and around Silicon Valley and was happy to find a guide that could give me the skinny on what’s going on with the industry in general (ok, it’s tougher than ever!) and which firms really appear to be viable options for my personal and professional goals. The glossary of VC lingo was an amusing and informative read as were the Likes and Dislikes of various insiders. I was thinking this could be the industry for me, but now I really feel enthusiastic about trying it out. Thanks, WetFeet, for confirming my hunches and helping me figure out my immediate career path.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book, knowing very little about going about getting a career in venture capital. I would compare this book to the Dummies or Idiots series of books – a good introduction, but by no means comprehensive.
You will be more happy with this book if you are more concerned with information about venture capital firms themselves. The book devotes a large portion to an overview of a number of prominent VC firms in the US. This will help you select what VC firms you may want to try to get hired on with, if you are unaware of the specialties of each.
What the book does not devote much time to is the “day in the life” type of discussions. There are a couple entries by people employed in VC that are at different stages in their careers. But I believe that more of these types of journals would give a more comprehensive overview of a career in VC.
I think this book is a good place to start if you are interested in learning about a career in VC. After reading the book, you will be able to decide whether or not you are interested in learning more about the industry, or whether it’s not for you.
Rating: 4 / 5
This report has everything you could need as an entrepreneur looking to raise venture capital. The chapters by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists provide incredible insight, while the term sheet and other documents are incredibly useful, and will help you get the right deal on valuation. Having been in venture capital related fields for over 10 years, this is the best resource I have found – I recommend this to everyone I know that is raising venture capital or interested in the true workings of venture capital.
Rating: 5 / 5
Steve Harmon’s reputation as one of the brightest stars in the stock world is well deserved. Steve has a gift for uncovering real value in this Internet age. I follow Steve’s Broadband Report and my portfolio is up 220%.I rate Steve’s new book with five stars because it’s even better than his first…and I learned volumes from that book. I always say, the proof is in the pudding and I happen to be enjoying a rather large bowl thanks to Steve Harmon.
Rating: 5 / 5
Steve has presented an in depth look at the venture capital world in this release of Zero Gravity 2. I appreciate his no-nonsense approach and his willingness to expose what goes on behind the scenes. Very good insights!
Rating: 5 / 5
Steve Harmon knows how to get to the heart of the matter. This book has given me very helpful insights and has helped me make sense of the recent investment arena.
Rating: 5 / 5
I just purchased a copy of Harmon’s book Zero Gravity 2.0. I am new to the investment arena and found this book extremely useful. In fact, I have already acquired backing for my venture. My hat is off to you Mr. Steve Harmon…
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is pure rubbish. Even worse than the first Zero Gravity book (I should have learned my lesson). If what you want is mindless anecdotes, shameless name dropping, and little substance, this is the book for you. For shame.
Rating: 1 / 5
Twenty-five case studies of businesses that started without venture capital on the Internet, how they grew and what sorts of problems they ran into along the way.(Case no. 19 is about MSEN, the ISP I was involved in in 1991-1995, and I was interviewed for the book.) A well-researched book on lots of issues facing the small internet business, made even more relevant by the drying up of venture capital.
Rating: 5 / 5
The author shares many lessons learnt over 20 years in the PE business.
Would be very helpful to many, including PE investors looking to avoid investing in PE funds that will not make them money (most, unfortunately, after fees) and PE funds that make many of the mistakes the author so clearly explains.
The examples and suggestions provide business guideposts to starting and growing an innovative company on the Internet. Under the radar is that vast space of million and multi-million dollar niches that don’t qualify for the VC or IPO. This is the space where we can do well for others, make money, and not get trampled by the elephants. The area that Arnold Kling describes is even riper since the dot com bubble broke.
Buy this book for the chapter about the economics of VC financing alone. It is a clear short demonstration of why VC financing is unsuitable for the majority of startups (and perhaps is a quick way ruin a good thing).
Get some experience without having to live through it all.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am one of the featured case studies in “Under the Radar,” so you could say I’m biased. That said, I *really* wish this book had been available when I started my first Internet company. It has lots of great “from the trenches” advice, from developing your strategy to recruiting the right people to courting investors to designing your web site to… you get the picture.
The only quibble I have is at the very end, when the author suggests that technology and statistics may open up the investment pool to “Under the Radar” companies by allowing investors to better manage risk (i.e. make investment decision on more than just “gut feel”). That may be so, but his examples — a computer that can beat the world’s best Othello player, automated underwriting of consumer loans — are less than persuasive because they deal with relatively simple problem sets (winning a game based on probability, making a loan based on a few easily defined credit characteristics). The profile of a successful startup contains many, many hard-to-quantify attributes (including luck) and they are often mutually exclusive. For example, as an investor do you look for a charismatic CEO like Steve Jobs or a reclusive techno-genius like Seymour Cray? The answer is both. I suspect we’re a long way away from a reasonably reliable system for predicting startup success. (Witness the stock market, where the majority of professional fund managers fail to outperform the averages even though they have a wealth of data and modeling technologies at their disposal.)
But this is just a quibble, and an irrelevant one at that. The focus of this book is how to start a successful business, not picking winners and losers. Whether you’re already on your third Internet business or just thinking about making the leap for the first time, this book is a must read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was well organized, easy to follow and written by a knowledgeable author. It lays out the basics of what private equity is (venture & buyout considered separately), how returns are generated (at a very high level of detail), historical return analysis of PE, and a very brief overview of how to set up an investment program as an LP.
As someone who works in finance, I find it very hard to believe that someone who is a professional money manager (e.g. LP) would need a book like this – yet that is the supposed target audience to which the book is addressed. If there truly are LPs out there who have never invested in PE before (nor have their employers or co-workers for that matter), this book would still be of no use because there isn’t enough information in the book to spell out exactly how to construct an investment strategy step by step. Yet if you do have any prior exposure to PE the book is interesting, logical, but disappointingly basic. I am surprised how little info was packed into 250 pages.
This book is probably a great intro for people who don’t already work in finance, or a quick (disappointing?) read for those who do.
Rating: 4 / 5
As a business owner, I am quite pleased with the information I was able to extract from this book.
It will not make you rich overnight, but it will explain patiently the unique challenges of starting and operating an Internet-based business.
Not all ideas are VC-worthy and this book describes the basic VC premises.
The case studies are quite in-depth and definitely will help you avoid same mistakes. The author does not shy away from early failures and fatal choices of wrong business partners.
In short, you’ll enjoy the book and learn many things. I highly recommend it to any enterpreneur.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a really great resource on venture capital deals. Viewed it on my computer, which I prefer a lot more than to reading hundreds of pages in a book. The DVD is great and features 100 minutes live with the VC, Alex Wilmerding. Highly recommend this product….
Rating: 5 / 5
Private Equity is the most “underpublished” asset class. Meyer and Mathonet provide a thorough and comprehensive guide into private equity, which it is more valuable when books of this kind barely exist. A must for investors in the asset class!
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a very good read for students and practitioners. It is easy to read, well laid out and a very useful reference document that you will consult regularly.
Rating: 5 / 5
The best thing about this book is that it’s written by someone who has succeeded at the internet and yet kept his success in perspective. This is very refreshing given that the typical business/internet book is written by someone who has not succeeded on the net but thinks they know exactly how to do it. The book is very accessible to the casual reader yet substantive enough that serious practioners of the internet and business in general will find it highly instructive. The author has lots of interesting stories that help to chronicle the development of the net and how businesses have struggled to harness it. The book is somewhat textbook like in its explanation of key concepts but is never boring. It’s very funny at times and always makes you think. It’s like having a class with a good teacher. You enjoy yourself and learn at the same time. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5
The production values of this video (from ReedLogic Executive Seminars) are abysmal by today’s standards. It appears to be the result of transferring an old analog video tape to DVD with minimal editing and has a grainy, digitized appearance. The setting is what appears to be the corner of a small conference room where the presenter, Alex Wilmerding of Boston Capital Partners (a man in his early 40’s casually dressed in an open-collar, button down blue shirt), sits and is flanked by two mostly empty bookcases. He appears to be responding to a series of unspoken questions by an off-camera producer whose voice does, unexpectedly, break through twice near the middle and end of the video. The presenter himself is clearly not practiced in public speaking or well-rehearsed, as his answers are frequently interrupted by pauses and “huhs” and the delivery is emotionally flat and monotonous. The whole thing is poorly scripted and very repetitive.
Regarding the content and organization of this “seminar,” it is a series of 18 sections preceded by a short introduction. The sections are:
1 Term Sheets
2 The Wording of the Term Sheet
3 The Management Team
4 Red Flags in the Term Sheet for the Entrepreneur
5 Red Flags in the Term Sheet for the Investor
6 Valuation
7 The Role of the Term Sheet
8 Negotiation Strategy for Investors
9 Negotiation Strategy for the Management Team
10 Important Sections of the Term Sheet for Investors
11 Important Sections of the Term Sheet for Entrepreneurs
12 Where Executives Get Confused
13 Strategy for Establishing Valuations
14 Factors in Establishing Valuation
15 Financial Tools/Ratios
16 Case Study: “NewCo”
17 Key Players and their Motivation
18 Advice for the Management Team
Looks good, no?
There is no navigable menu or table of contents here. The only way you can navigate to any of the sections is by using your fast forward, pause and reverse controls like on an old-fashioned VCR. This video is only a little over an hour long meaning each of the sections is very short and consequently superficial. And did I mention that they’re very repetitive?
I found the actual content to be modestly informative but strange because the intended audience is advertised to be “C-level executives” (CEO, CFO, etc.) yet the presentation is clearly for “beginners.” That being so, the content is lacking for this audience as well since a number of VC jargon terms (e.g. “pre-money,” “post-money,” various kinds of ownership dilutions) are not defined. The main take-home message is self-promoting and seems to be that VCs are important because they “protect the downside while maximizing the chance for high [10x] multiples of return” (in exchange for 30-40% ownership of your company). What a surprise. Rather than being a good investment, I view the 99 bucks I paid for this video as a “sunk cost.”
Perhaps Mr. Wilmerding’s various books on these subjects (and similar ReedLogic products) are more substantive and better produced and one might be tempted to give them another chance. But, as George W. Bush has advised: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
I have had the advantage of reading the manuscript of this book in advance, and one of the comments on the cover is my own.
Unlike other books on the subject, this one does not dive straight off into complicated areas such as return analysis, nor does it deal with such nebulous matters as the GP/LP relationship (indeed, the writer states that he considers this last topic to be something of a red herring). Instead, the book sets out to be a comprehensive account of private equity from first principles onwards, and will guide you steadily through the intricacies of the asset class until you find yourself quite happily using very complex analysis models to look at buyout and venture returns. More importantly, it focuses on explaining the principles which underlie all of this, so you will actually understand what you are doing, and why. As the writer says repeatedly “don’t just look at the figures – try to think what lies behind them.”
Fraser-Sampson has twenty years experience of the private equity industry, and the depth and range of his knowledge shines through every page. I was a great fan (and a reviewer) of his first book “Multi Asset Class Investment Strategy”, and ideally they should be read together. The first explains why you should be allocating 25% of your portfolio to private equity, and this one explains how you should actually go about it. Just as the first one came up with a whole new way of looking at investment in general, so this one makes some very innovative points, not all of which will make happy reading in some quarters. For example, he believes that private equity performance should be judged across an investor’s whole allocation (what he calls Total Return investing) rather than, as presently, on just that small part of it which may be invested at any one time.
Both books are brilliantly written and make very easy reading out of what are very complex issues.
Hello, My name is Mervin Evans, I am the author of this title.
In this title, Mervin Evans, president of the Evans Venture Partners, a California-based firm that invests in commercializing new technologies, presents an analysis of present-day venture capitalists and shows why its practitioners have a lot more in common with investment bankers than you might think. The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Today’s venture capitalists are more like conservative bankers than the risk takers of days past. They have carved out a specialized niche in the capital markets, filling a void that other institutions cannot serve. They are the linchpins in an efficient system for meeting the needs of institutional investors looking for high returns, of entrepreneurs seeking funding, and of investment bankers looking for companies to sell. Venture capitalists must earn a consistently superior return on investments in inherently risky businesses. The myth is that they do so by investing in good ideas and good plans. In reality, they invest in good industries–that is, industries that are more competitively forgiving than the market as a whole. And they structure their deals in a way that minimizes their risk and maximizes their returns. Although many entrepreneurs expect venture capitalists to provide them with sage guidance as well as capital, that expectation is unrealistic. Given a typical portfolio of 10 companies and a 2,000-hour work year, a venture capital partner spends on average less than 2 hours per week on any given company. In addition to analyzing the current venture-capital system, the author offers practical advice to entrepreneurs thinking about venture funding.
If you need investmnet Capital – You need this title
Rating: 5 / 5
This book does a competent job of giving an overview of private equity sufficient for the stated purpose of helping investors understand where it might fit in a portfolio of investments. The book won’t prepare you to start your own private equity fund, but it will prepare you to fend-off investment advisors that want to push an unsuitable investment into your portfolio. The writing style is a bit “British” – wordy by American usage standards – but it’s their language, isn’t it? That being said, the book overall is concise and mercifully short.
Rating: 3 / 5
This item is not 19 pages. Outright misstatement. It is actually a 7 page agreement that only deals with one issue- transfer of shares by the selling shareholder. It allows the company a first right of refusal. It does not acccount for possibilities such as retirement, death of a shareholder, or disability. Worst of all – there is no language defining how the shares will be valued. This agreement is useless at best.
I am an attorney. I was very disappointed with this CD and ended up buying the Nolo press Shareholder agreement with CD. Nolo’s agreement was much better and accounted for all of the eventualities that I needed. However, Nolo’s CD language is not correlated to the test boxes in the book. I ended having the secretary retype the entire agreement out of the book, quite time consuming.
Rating: 1 / 5
As someone mentioned in the book, I’d like to nominate it for a World Fantasy award – as fiction it’s wonderful. The Digg part of the book is full of fake history, lack of fact checking, and, in one particular glaring instance, bald-faced dishonesty in attributing to me something I never said (no attempt was ever made to contact me to verify actions or words attributed to me). Calling this shoddy journalism would be too forgiving.
The “thoughts” and “insights” here are about as passè as Crystal Clear Pepsi while bringing a perspective as fresh a jug of milk that has sat out in the SoCal sun for a week or so.
This book also represents several hours of my life that I won’t get back.
Once your lucky, twice your good…by Sarah Lacy…. A MUST READ, for any internet start up!
I LOVE this book i am only half way through but had to share my feelings about it thus far. As an online web entrepreneur, i speak with thousands of potential “mega stars” each year and listen to ideas, dreams and plans on how to “make it”, this book easily shares insights into a world most of us business types only dream of as well as gives you a glimpse into the lives of some of the internet’s brightest starts. This book has ignited by passion for what I do. Thank you Sarah!
ONCE YOU’RE LUCKY, TWICE YOU’RE GOOD, a great motto for the post so called collapse of the Internet bubble silicon valley. Authored by Sarah Lacy, who reported around and in the circles of people making and giving birth to our generation.
History as we must know, conceives the paths of the future. Written in this book is basically a bible of the events taking place causing the largest mass collection and connection of people in the history of the world, via and called simply WEB 2.0.
Taking off from the leading footsteps of some of the valley’s first veterans, in the like’s of M. Levchin. Then we are lead into steps of the revolution which many felt coming but only a hand-full knew. R. Hoffman and P. Thiel to M. Zuckerberg, these are some of the names who are a part of the genius and the gift of WEB 2.0. Exploring through a biographical view of the silicon valley’s rebels who refused to give in to any of the conformities from the Venture Capitalists; And mutually helping to pull through a great generation.
Concluding the book, one of the things ironically can be considered that the dotcom crash was the hammer which broke-through the dugout rock (WEB 1.0) concealing inside it a diamond (WEB 2.0) in the rough. Lets not miss out on this next one.
This is a fast and entertaining book, I highly recommend it for all those in the valley and beyond curious about the personalities behind the Web 2.0 scene. Well researched and full of unique insight.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have always been leery of purchasing these types of books. This one just reinforces the suspicion that they are over priced and poorly written.
Rating: 2 / 5
I cannot stress enough how uncomfortable I am while listening to Mervin L. Evans talk down to his audience on the CD’s. He addresses his audience with anger, a condescending voice, and makes the listener feel less then and ignorant. I have never run accross anything like it.
Personally, if this man gave his money away I wouldn’t take it as I would not want to deal with him on any level.
I am going to see if I can get a refund. I simply cannot listen any longer. He probably has something valuable to say but I can’t hear it past his attitude.
I personally am totally repulsed by this speaker and I think any intelligent person would feel the same!
SW
Rating: 1 / 5
Michael Arrington on
March 16th, 2010 8:08 am
settle down, Denmark.
whatever on
March 16th, 2010 8:25 am
I was about to say that.
How is Twitter a force of good, when all they are doing is selling retards’ tweets to Google and Microsoft for profit?
Anna on
March 16th, 2010 8:32 am
I think it is a very successful experiment to make people speak their mind.
You should employees of other companies to freely and anonymously speak their mind too.
James Gillmore on
March 16th, 2010 8:44 am
Twitter should stop being such panzies so afraid to make a mistake and release some real profit-generating features already. I did like with Evan had to say about creating a win win that doesn’t make customers go around you get their needs met (i.e. which is a lose to Twitter cuz it means some people are pissed with their service). But to be so afraid to provide to add some advertising is a joke. Just try something already. I know if my job was to do nothing but think of Twitter advertising models, I would have thought of a shitload already. Scoble had some good ideas with all the meta data associated with tweets and the popups that they generate. Twitter already started that with the location marker. Just stuff a frigging ad marker already that leads to a popup. Using up 7×11 pixels for a market that leads to an ad is surely something that wont clutter their interface and make them a few bucks. It would be a nice test for them too. Basically they gotta stop this pussy fake ass shit. It’s a front that won’t last long and is bound to break down at some point, as Michael was saying. And really, it’s just dishonest. If that’s the plan become a non-for-profit already. I rather someone do professional honest business with me than someone lying to me. They’re creating this stigma like there is something wrong with making money. Just say it like it is: they dont wanna make money now at the expense of possibly slowing down growth. It’s as simple as that, not this goodie two shoes circus.
E on
March 16th, 2010 9:00 am
do you know that research show that Denmark is the world happiest country? we should tell them that socialism is not the way to run a country… maybe they should stop paying 90% of salary as unemployment benefit (for four years) and terminate their completely free healthcare system.
or they are confused, thinking that they are happy only because back in collage, they got laid plenty.
Kevin on
March 16th, 2010 9:26 am
I would be yelling too if my company was slowly falling off the social network map into teenage obscurity.
The only thing keeping them going is the hope they offer to up and coming artists.
Other than this, why would anyone use Myspace?
David Murphy on
March 16th, 2010 9:29 am
Great stuff! Congrats guys.
Clint Pee on
March 16th, 2010 9:31 am
I always thought twitter was doing good as they are.Hope they don’t change things and become “goodtwitter”
Alex Khomenko on
March 16th, 2010 10:07 am
What I’d like to see is a company adopting a “Don’t Be Stupid” slogan instead. Arrington, if you can find a way to auction this one off to the highest bidder, we’ll split it 50/50.
LC on
March 16th, 2010 10:17 am
We run a small shop with Magento on a very modest dedicated server and it runs ok but for sure, performances are really not there.
Also it stills not a lot of work to make it more non-US friendly.
But it still a solid software and with php and Zend Framework you can crawl on the code quickly.
darrylxxx on
March 16th, 2010 10:27 am
I’m very disappointed in this release. At the very least I expected the ability to switch between paypal accounts (I have several for business and home use). Yes, some welcome functions like request payment and transfer to bank, but to miss multiple accounts is a big FAIL IMHO.
One thing that I only wish for this paypal app is its security… the last thing a user would like to happen is to find someone sniffing his credit card details without being aware.
CareBear99 on
March 16th, 2010 11:04 am
There are some companies that pretend to act good like Twitter and Facebook and Google, but they’re really evil.
On the other hand, you have a company like dirtyphonebook.com that is outwardly evil but is actually a force for good in that forces people to do nice things to people or face real consequences.
Anyway, I’m just trying to figure out how chatroulette figures into all of this.
jardenberg kommenterar – 2010-03-16 | jardenberg unedited on
March 16th, 2010 11:10 am
[...] PayPal Launches Revamped iPhone App, Teams With Bump For Phone-Tapping Money Transfers [...]
Sean Percival on
March 16th, 2010 11:11 am
Tim lets go out to launch, your treat of course
Pooya on
March 16th, 2010 11:19 am
Right on the money Mike….Couldn’t agree more with “Let others use Twitter to do good things” statement.
You should provide a damn good service/product and whether or not it’s gonna be a MEANS for GOOD, will be mostly up to people using it.
If you don’t park actual cash in there, then there is no problem… Every paypal user should be using credit cards anyways, or at least their debit number to pay for stuff… Problem solved
Not MG Siegler on
March 16th, 2010 11:35 am
Did you have to say “play” in the title? Why not leave it at “e-commerce platform”?
God I fucking hate this jargon bullshit.
Vivek on
March 16th, 2010 11:55 am
Its a good thing and Congrats to the Magento team.
Josh on
March 16th, 2010 11:55 am
Great idea and execution, but in some sense its pointless.
Can’t accept credit cards (there goes your Square arguments again)! Works only with peeps that run PayPal. That’s not everyone. Nice try though guys.
Still…they are focusing in the wrong area. Why don’t they have a mobile web optimized landing page for people to enter in login and or information when I send them there. (as in I really will). Google and Paypal still are completely deficient in this arena. For small vendors we rely on such services, so how will mobile transactions ever take off if you can’t buy a shirt on the fly from Gap or specialty chocolate from a small business who is so savvy?
Magento obtiene $22.5 millones de dólares de inversionistas | Incubaweb on
March 16th, 2010 11:58 am
[...] | TechCrunch Más información | Magento Blog Enlace | Magento Comparte este [...]
Chad Huber on
March 16th, 2010 12:01 pm
the second to last paragraph couldn’t be more true. unfortunately there are investors who are riding up twitter’s ass about expansion and growth (need. profits. now.) luckily they are private investors… so they hopefully know a little about long term investing which is why they should never go public (and I commend Zuckerburg / Facebook very much so for his adamancy about not doing so – twitter should certainly follow suit on this).
Shahed Islam on
March 16th, 2010 12:11 pm
Anthony spree looks very good. we are settling with php after 10 years, how many will learn new programming to switch platform, also with Ruby its still like CF, few developer you can find.
Shahed Islam on
March 16th, 2010 12:22 pm
I agree with server resource issue, we have done 85+ ecommerce sites mostly on oscommerce/creloaded platform but we like magento and wanted to move many sites, now most clients cant afford dedicated server and it takes so much resource. why cant they come up with less featured version.
Sergei Shablovsky on
March 16th, 2010 12:26 pm
Hi there !
When I try to work with PayPal at the first time, I’m going to be frustrating about how PayPal takes fees.
I spend more and more times to try understand how this all staff working…..
The are more then ten books like “PayPal for dummers” on Amazon, I read it and nothing changed. May be I’m not very care reader. But I only try to understand how much money are all this hidden fees: Merchant rates, currency conversion, transaction fixed fees, transaction amount fees,…. ugh!….
In Appstore I found great apps named PayPal Transaction Fee PRO Calculator (may be too long as for me .
But it is extremely easy, fast and correct for my payments in USA shopping, eBay items, and some international staff.
Bump Technologies builds mobile applications and APIs that allow two smartphones to identify one another and connect by simply being bumped together.
I can’t wait to have this installed.
Michael Arrington on
March 16th, 2010 12:32 pm
I thought I banned Singapore IPs from this site. hm.
Revamped iPhone app for paypal | Stream Media on
March 16th, 2010 1:01 pm
[...] http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/15/paypal-iphone-app-bump/ Tags: apple, BUMP, bump technologies, iPhone, paypal, paypal mobile « Windows Phone Marketplace for Windows Phone 7 Series unveiled, the only way to get WP7 apps [...]
Nibras Bawa on
March 16th, 2010 1:15 pm
I am of the belief that business can indeed make social change happen. So yes, do no evil is a valid ideology.. At the minimum it should remind the business of its great purpose when tempted to do worldly evil… Over here in Singapore you get many slogans like that.. “profit without ethics is just a figure” , “do no evil” , “dignified capitalism” are things you usually find here… Its OKay to be a little philosophical nah ?
Wil Schroter on
March 16th, 2010 1:20 pm
Roy too
irfanp on
March 16th, 2010 1:36 pm
PayPal does have a app for android. However some of these feature will be rolled out in the coming months for other platforms
PayPal Mobile
Wil Schroter on
March 16th, 2010 1:59 pm
Ray – wow! Much deserved.
mrzod on
March 16th, 2010 2:02 pm
congrats jake and team! Bump deserves all this!
Nischal Shetty on
March 16th, 2010 2:04 pm
“Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society. ”
hahah… EPIC!!
Rachel on
March 16th, 2010 2:17 pm
How do people plan on using these in FB? I’ve only ever used them to get to the Android Marketplace.
Pipit Purch on
March 16th, 2010 2:27 pm
Congrats Roy!
John McGrath on
March 16th, 2010 2:35 pm
This is a real copycat move by Twitter. In an effort to differentiate ourselves, Wordnik.com is rebranding itself as “the evil dictionary.”
Bill on
March 16th, 2010 2:37 pm
Magento liked the ecommerce “reward system” concept that http://www.vyoom.com had, which was about 10 months ago.
Anthony on
March 16th, 2010 2:45 pm
Magento posts once a month about “performance improvements.” But it still crawls.
It’s kinda embarrassing that “performance improvements” are even considered an enhancement. Shouldn’t they have thought about performance from day 1?
Magento is great if you have no clue about how to develop on your own. Of course, if you have no clue, why not just rock Shopify?
Anthony on
March 16th, 2010 2:59 pm
Seriously, you’re dead on about that. We looked at Magento that decided Spree.
Spree flies. I’d be kicking myself endlessly if we weren’t using it.
If you haven’t play with it check it out. Just clicking around the demo you can instantly notice the performance difference.
Wade on
March 16th, 2010 2:59 pm
There’s such distrust of Paypal. I don’t see how this is going to work (in the mainstream) unless they clean up their act *tremendously*.
Paypal is like putting your money in bank where Hugo Chavez is the CEO.
Chris on
March 16th, 2010 3:02 pm
No sign for me yet..
jd on
March 16th, 2010 3:18 pm
That sounds like too much cash for this type of company. It’s a decent offering but in a very crowded place with no one making much dough. Miva dominated the market at one point and sold for a couple mill (which was too much!).
Sriraj on
March 16th, 2010 3:19 pm
Any one knows if there’s something similar from Paypal for Androiders’?
I can’t find anything in the market place.
Tuhin Kumar on
March 16th, 2010 3:26 pm
I totally agree. The self proclaimed righteousness should be left for good and companies march in the direction that is best for them. We all know this is business so stop talking about love for humanity and shit stuff. Make good stuff and let people use it for good. Humanity has lots of “goodness” left yet before it becomes a nice venture opportunity.
Robert Owen on
March 16th, 2010 3:28 pm
+1 – I love the post – Being a college student myself I get pretty tired of the self-righteous idealism, and it only makes it worse when well known companies parade the ridiculousness around.
Also, I am excited to get something from Ev’s appearance today other than bashing Haque or “Hack” or whatever his name is.
josh on
March 16th, 2010 3:34 pm
Gay
Sahil Gupta on
March 16th, 2010 3:46 pm
This is exactly in line with PayPal’s original mission. Peer-to-peer transfers is their home run space, but I’m waiting to see them really innovate against larger B2C payments – i.e. bill pay. PayPal oddly has stayed away from giants like CheckFree (now Fiserv), where real innovation is needed.
Electronic bill payment and presentment is in real need of innovation, and PayPal has the consumer pull to innovate against payment. As a tangent, presentment is also in need of innovation – to learn more about we are doing at Zodah to fix this, go to http://zodah.com to sign up for an invite to our beta.
Apollo83 on
March 16th, 2010 3:47 pm
Cool ! Cash is dead.
The video about the app is quite funny
bluesix on
March 16th, 2010 4:00 pm
Yeah, that def ain’t a good stat they should be telling people.
Shan on
March 16th, 2010 4:01 pm
“Be a force for Good”
Whose Good??I think Mike you misunderstood there..
“Be a force for Good” for Twitter – This is the real motto..
Iveghaata Hardaan on
March 16th, 2010 4:04 pm
Congratulations Magento.
John Rampton on
March 16th, 2010 4:27 pm
I am so going to love this!
SYMK on
March 16th, 2010 4:31 pm
I have been using from past 2 years for my e-commerce. It is easy to use and works fine.
Joe on
March 16th, 2010 4:35 pm
Magento is amazingly slow and bloated. Investors should do a bit of technical due dilligence before investing.
Andrew on
March 16th, 2010 4:58 pm
I hope they make Magento a lot less server resource hungry. It’s telling that it’s been downloaded 1.5 million times, yet there are only 60,000 active merchant sites.
jimjerky on
March 16th, 2010 5:01 pm
Not feeling this site. It was sluggish when I tried it and not enough content to be useful. Sorry guys but this is likely headed for the deadpool already.
jason on
March 16th, 2010 5:11 pm
Mobile to Mobile transfers was the idea for the original PayPal, except using Palm Pilots and not iPhones. This is a natural progression for each company, although I don’t see this being widely used.
Square is still fine, VeriFone is ever safer.
Dan on
March 16th, 2010 5:15 pm
funny, this is what Paypal originally set out to do back in 98 (only with PDAs).
Brian S Hall on
March 16th, 2010 5:21 pm
Well, that may be the case when/if the Paypal + Bump app is cross platform. So, I can bump my iPhone to your Blackberry Bold, for example, and exchange funds. Soon enough we’ll all have smartphones so this has got to become cross-platform.
(Ignoring for the moment that in many cases we’ll all still want to review the transaction, sign for legal reasons, etc.)
Vibhu Norby on
March 16th, 2010 5:24 pm
If you remember, PayPal was originally a service that let people beam money to each other through their Palm Pilots. Nice to see them return to their roots with the help of Bump!
Anthony on
March 16th, 2010 5:53 pm
Am I the only 1 that thinks Spree dominates Magento?
The Magento team will have some serious competition will Spree hits 1.0. Of course, I’m sure there’s room enough for 2 major open source ecommerce apps.
Brian S Hall on
March 16th, 2010 5:56 pm
No wonder my kids keep bumping our iPhones together!
Obi on
March 16th, 2010 6:11 pm
Seems like a much better alternative to Square:- Paypal can link to a Credit Card, no dongle required and just a bump to securely transfer cash.
jason on
March 16th, 2010 6:37 pm
We just started customizing our Magento theme and we can already tell that it is going to help take our small business to the next level. It has all the tools necessary to manage our products and I’m excited to learn more about the software.
mark on
March 16th, 2010 6:57 pm
Yes, this is going to avalanche. No need for anything but your phone.
Merchants will just need bump on the register.
Wow.
Not good for Square.
Bryan on
March 16th, 2010 6:58 pm
If anyone using the T-Mo N1 on EDGE on AT&T wants to sell me theirs… just let me know.
simon on
March 16th, 2010 7:01 pm
I think Iphone and Nexus users should vent there issues on an open fourm together so att can see all of there vents at on place! http://www.ventnation.com
Jason Nazar on
March 16th, 2010 7:32 pm
Congrats to Roy and a great team, Magento is a fantastic product that we’ve referred to a number of startups.
preston Landers on
March 16th, 2010 7:37 pm
so whats the point of square?
Timb on
March 16th, 2010 7:55 pm
Oddly enough, this is pretty much exactly the app idea that I submitted to PayPal’s “Developer Challenge”.
Chances are good I forfeited my soul by submitting the idea anyway.
MG Siegler on
March 16th, 2010 8:00 pm
true, but how many people are going to pay $500 to do that?
how many U.S. consumers do you think even know what a SIM card is, let alone how to take one out? maybe google should do another one of those “what is a web browser” videos
librarianchat on
March 16th, 2010 8:05 pm
That’s the stuff I’m talking about. This is what we need.
Matt Cutts on
March 16th, 2010 8:31 pm
“this new Nexus One is only being sold as an unlocked phone that can work on AT&T if you get a SIM card on your own (something which most consumers will never do in the U.S.)”
But it’s trivial to take the SIM card out of another AT&T phone (such as the iPhone) and insert it into the Nexus One.
Chris on
March 16th, 2010 8:54 pm
Still waiting for a Verizon Wireless version of this phone. I will definitely not switch to TMobile or AT&T.
Bryan Lyle on
March 16th, 2010 9:31 pm
Considering the phone was released on T-mobile, is there anyone REALLY surprised that sales numbers would be low?
Big Deal on
March 16th, 2010 10:25 pm
Sweet. I just bought one. AT&T works great in my area.
ArticlePlayground.com on
March 16th, 2010 10:50 pm
i see!
Shervin on
March 16th, 2010 11:14 pm
I agree! Most of the ads are irrelevant and extremely annoying! Makes you not want to use YouTube, but it is the place to go to find just about anything in video format so it’s a conundrum!
Rob Dupuis on
March 16th, 2010 11:45 pm
I will no longer use YouTube. Mostly because they are now making money off of my content without me being paid. That’s not right and there should be a lawsuit involved.
Just my opinion, I’m not an expert on business but unless the content creator makes any money off of YouTube’s overlay ads, then it’s just not right. I’m moving to Vimeo, they look better anyway.
Michael Boyd on
March 17th, 2010 12:03 am
The Facebook iPhone app is “just an excuse” for Facebook to do your social networking on their site.
The Spotify iPhone app is “just an excuse” for Spotify to supply your music needs.
Google Desktop is “just an excuse” for Google to get me to use their search and show their own ads.
So why the stupid and kinda-aggressive title?
Russell Heimlich on
March 17th, 2010 12:14 am
I totally agree that viewers will get fed up. These ads are nothing like the text ads used in AdWords ads. These overlay ads get right in the way of what you’re watching which makes them less effective.
Mossberg Solution review here: http://solution.allthingsd.com/20100316/xobni-review/ (“If you use a PC, Microsoft Outlook and a BlackBerry, Xobni offers a smart solution for automatically organizing all of your contacts into one place and allows for your contacts to be stored somewhere other than just in Outlook or just on your mobile device. If it was a little easier to access on the BlackBerry, I’d like it even more.”)
Jason Barone on
March 17th, 2010 12:31 am
The overlay ads are not near as annoying as the Commercials they’ve been playing before videos. I don’t have time to sit and wait for commercials to play when I’m trying to quickly play a video and move on. I think this is a bad move. I don’t run ad blockers on Chrome and I’ll put up with overlays, display ads and even full page background ads, but please don’t make me watch commercials. They’re the main reason I don’t watch TV anymore.
Chris on
March 17th, 2010 12:42 am
This is exactly why Adblock Plus is a beautiful thing. I never even knew Youtube had ads in its videos until I had to reinstall my OS and forgot to install Adblock for a while. Needless to say I installed it immediately afterwards and I’ve been back to awesome video-watching ever since
Roy Rodenstein on
March 17th, 2010 1:07 am
Erik, I agree the overlay ads are already getting annoyingly recurring/in the way, although this is still a very interesting development.
Any data on clickthrough rates on those YouTube ads? I guess Visible Measures would have that.
NZN on
March 17th, 2010 3:06 am
Interesting choice of pic for article. Big Data is a big concept and big reality. Corporate structure takes big data and transforms everything into a language construct of automation. Good? Bad? Does it matter?
That pic reminds us of the Matrix; an idea drawn out to the extreme wherein corporate structure, profit driven managerial efficiency mixed with global and one day universal scales of competitive advantage will take the leverage of Big Data to the extreme.
At that extreme, humans cease to be human creatures bound by time to evolution, transcending limitations as bits of Big Data. We already see and feel the consequences of this when dealing with credit agencies, the IRS, Verizon and ATT, etc.
What part of your human experience do you own? You arrive from a womb, for the time being, and what belongs to you? Your DNA is Big Data. Your citizen status is Big Data. You are a small part of Big Data. So where is the freedom the title of this article eludes to?
No one seems to be worried about freedom anymore. Its as if everyone thinks money will just buy it for them. Problem is, if you don’t own that which you actually should be regarded as the owner of before you are incorporated into Big Data… you never will. Not really. Not in any way that matters. Thats Big Data slavery, and we are already being exposed by it here and now in the Facebook era of our Big Data lives.
Having been in venture capital related fields for over 10 years, this is THE term sheet to use when doing venture capital deals (as entrepreneur, lawyer, or venture capitalist). The document is ready to use, so you can literally just plug in your numbers and alter minor wording where necessary. The other documents, such as the non-disclosure agreement are also incredibly useful.
Rating: 5 / 5
For those who like me enjoyed this video (which I am not reviewing here), I thought I’d provide an update on the author:
Walter Wright is now practicing at Trinity Law Group LLC. (www.trinitylg.com)Trinity Law Group is a greater Boston corporate law firm which practices the broad range of business law throughout Massachusetts, the United States and the world with well-recognized attorneys of stellar academic and professional accomplishment who leverage technology and relationships. Started in February 2007 by former President of the Boston law firm Rich May, Dan Clark, and former Managing Director of Rich May, Walter Wright, the Trinity Law Group has over 55 years of experience combined helping clients from a broad spectrum of business backgrounds. Critically acclaimed as “Super Lawyers” and described by their clients as the “most experienced corporate lawyers practicing today,” the Trinity Law Group is dedicated to provide competence, commitment and communication to all of their clients.
Rating: 5 / 5
Marcus Hast on
March 17th, 2010 4:00 am
Yes and no.
Spotify can launch where they want, but the Eu are (and should be) working on blanket licensing for the entire Eu.
Currently I believe Spotify has to negotiate deals for each country they want to operate in. Naturally this costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. For smaller countries it may not even make financial sense to move into that country if it costs too much to negotiate a deal.
Welcome Gardening Enthusiasts on
March 17th, 2010 4:06 am
[...] Live Blog: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says Music Service Now Has 320,000 Paid Subscribers [...]
Discohero on
March 17th, 2010 4:50 am
Well, I know for a fact they have an licensing agreement with EMI after the latter sued them sometime ago. I’m guessing the service legitimized itself as it evolved (and got sued along the way).
I am not based in the US and both are available in the EU country where I live. I would have to agree that Spotify’s quality (on average) tends to be better than Grooveshark’s, but I find the difference to be negligible.
I am primarily using GS because they have a BB app (Spotify doesn’t so I can’t use it on my mobile) and are significantly cheaper from user perspective (35 USD/year vs 170-200 USD/year depending on VAT/FX rate).
librarianchat on
March 17th, 2010 5:00 am
Piano improv guy is hilarious.
Peter Chang on
March 17th, 2010 5:21 am
Interestingly I never said white. And, actually, this is also true of the number of latin americans I came across. For them it wasn’t so much “ching chong chang” as it was doing the slanty eyes gesture.
It’s no biggie but I doubt they would do this if they were walking down the street.
Mitt Romney made his fortune by buying companies, breaking them up, firing their employees, and selling the assets. Now that he has his eyes on national office, he is trying to re-make himself into a kinder, gentler person.
Don’t be fooled. According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, Romney was able to turn a profit on the Winter Games by not tapping its reserve account. Had, for example, it snowed more, the organizing committee that “ran” the Games would have had to spend money on snow removal. It didn’t, and they didn’t. So should Romney be called a wonderkind because the weather cooperated?
You decide.
I think it’s more important to look at what the organizing committee did, rather than what it didn’t have to do. For instance, the skating arena was subject to shoddy development, cost over-runs and a roof collapse. Romney, however, has never accepted blame for this construction disaster.
The Winter Games were a great event. But their success came at the expen$e of the federal government.
Romney simply showed up and took the bows.
Color me unimpressed, both with the man, and his book.
Rating: 1 / 5
David Haddad on
March 17th, 2010 6:13 am
Yes listening to Rock music on Spotify increases you pagerank.
ChatRoulette = GayFest & Business Opp | Tech Wankers on
March 17th, 2010 6:24 am
[...] to those nice people at TC, the stats look like this: 89% male, 47% American, and 13% [...]
Tom on
March 17th, 2010 6:34 am
That has nothing to do with the European Commission.
Spotify decides where it wants to launch.
ryan on
March 17th, 2010 6:38 am
Robert, can you please explain to me how the data form ChatrouletteMap works? I’m quite obsessed with Chatroulette and have spent a few days returning to the map application to view the changing data points – of which there are NONE! It’s merely a static grab from a single point in time.
john on
March 17th, 2010 6:40 am
HEY:
“If you go into any Telius store in Sweden, you can go in and pick out a smart phone that comes preinstalled with Spotify. 3-6 months included.” <– the name is Telia, not Telius.
Alex on
March 17th, 2010 6:52 am
Interesting that the reported American userbase is 47%, when Alexa.com reports 29.3% (and this is up only a bit after about a month from 25.%, which I reported here: http://www.webecologyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/WEP-chatroulette.pdf). Obviously a sample of 2k isn’t much compared to the overall size of the site, but I wonder if this informs us a bit as to the true randomness of ChatRoulette (eg., perhaps it skews toward IPs closer to home)?
Jon on
March 17th, 2010 6:59 am
Smart move, talk about creating a series for your target audience. Hopefully it will live up to its huge potential.
ArticlePlayground.com on
March 17th, 2010 7:02 am
Can Spotify boost search engine ranking for online businesses?
Frank Lopez on
March 17th, 2010 7:06 am
HOW CAN I GET A US ACCOUONT? i PAID FOR THE PREMIUM version but 9.99 euro is a lot for a very limited music catalog
Toby on
March 17th, 2010 7:17 am
Chatroulette has got to be for the most desperate sexually people ever………..! You can’t get on when ANY age children are near for fear some sick dude with a little dick will pop up. Give me a break, that’s what porn is for! SICK FUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!
ram on
March 17th, 2010 7:26 am
test2
Justin Paine on
March 17th, 2010 7:33 am
been using it for a few months now (free account in the US) and I must say I like it. I don’t know if I’d pay for a pro account simply because the music catalog just isn’t quite there yet, but if they increase the size of their catalog I’d consider it.
EpixHD on
March 17th, 2010 7:36 am
We’re pretty excited about it too. We have more ‘pretty awesome’ stuff on the way
You can see what we’re up to by following us on twitter, @EpixHD
VFisa on
March 17th, 2010 7:42 am
I wonder why such a great service is not available in all EU countries, namely I simply cannot use the service in Czech Republic, even though I would like to..
Interestingly, why EU Commission does not do anything with it?
ram on
March 17th, 2010 7:44 am
test
Daryl Griffiths on
March 17th, 2010 7:47 am
Should be bleeding excellent if it’s anything like as good as Dan Lyon’s FSJ blog!
Brian D on
March 17th, 2010 7:51 am
Does ‘no person’ include the furries ?
Mark Reed on
March 17th, 2010 7:52 am
Thanks, I noticed that in the email they sent to welcome me, should read my emails before I post!
Sam on
March 17th, 2010 7:59 am
Egnyte is awesome! My office uses their solution.
Colin Percival on
March 17th, 2010 8:08 am
For what it’s worth, I think ZumoDrive is a great product — I just think they should admit that security isn’t what they’re about. Many people don’t need or care about security, and for them ZumoDrive is fine.
Oh, and it’s Tarsnap, not TarSnap. I hate camelcase.
How Decluttering Can Be Fun | on
March 17th, 2010 8:09 am
[...] ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android … [...]
Spotify Consumes More Internet Capacity Than All Of Sweden | bruno trani dot info on
March 17th, 2010 8:37 am
[...] during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On [...]
Michael on
March 17th, 2010 8:43 am
EPIX is a great service, I was testing it out when it was first mentioned here at TechCrunch. Received a BETA invite via Twitter.
Ted on
March 17th, 2010 8:44 am
Wow, this dude got talent. He should appear on TV some talent show or pair up with Terry Fator in Las vegas.
I would love to learn some improvisation from this dude. man what was awesome!!!
Patrik on
March 17th, 2010 8:47 am
Grooveshark is not even close to Spotifys quality, do they even pay the artists or record labels?
With a title like “turnaround” I was expecting Mitt to explain why he has reversed all of his positions on abortion, sexuality etc just in time for the Republican nomination.
Unfortunately not.
This book is about a simpler time when Mitt did not have to reverse or hide all of his principles in order to seek higher office. It tells the story of his rescue of the Olympic Games. It is actually quite good (although Mitt takes a LOT of the credit for things that others did). Unfortunately, it also reflects on the “old” Mitt rather than the Mitt 2.0 who is running for the nomination today…
Rating: 2 / 5
It would be even better if it was fake Steve Jobs and fake Larry Charles working on a fake comedy series.
Mark Reed on
March 17th, 2010 9:29 am
Hey! Just installed the windows versions and it only gives 1gb FREE? Everywhere it mentions 2GB Free? Any Ideas? Thanks.
murat on
March 17th, 2010 9:39 am
thank you post
David Gjester on
March 17th, 2010 9:40 am
We put indie music on Spotify and a bunch of others. Most Us bands havent figured out how important thsi service is in Europe yet. I guess they will if Spotify survives. HAving your tracks on Spotify is a matter of course if you want to be available in Europe. If they survice and Apple does nothing Itunes could easily loose their number one position in the eyes of musicians. Nto that they would really care I guess.
MogLuvR on
March 17th, 2010 9:41 am
I tried them both. Mog is way better! I don’t get all the Spotify Hype!
Discohero on
March 17th, 2010 9:54 am
Spotify is quite nice. Those in the US may want to give Grooveshark a try as the two are pretty much the same. Grooveshark is cheaper $3/month for mobile access while Spotify is €9.99/month … Spotify really needs to decrease the price!
Garth on
March 17th, 2010 9:57 am
Come on ladies, this gender disparity in junk displaying is unacceptable.
But in seriousness, chatroulette is a fascinating phenomenon. It would never exist without the internet, and reveals something profound about the human condition. What it reveals exactly, I’m not sure, but it is brilliant.
sunny on
March 17th, 2010 10:09 am
Interesting. mobile reading is a big deal since more and more people are using smart phones, there is another name coming out today, that is TidyRead. Very cool.
What are some ideas you have for organizing a house with very limited space for inexpensive? | How To Get Organized on
March 17th, 2010 10:22 am
[...] ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android … [...]
Suhasini on
March 17th, 2010 10:22 am
lol, that must be funny and I am waiting eagerly to watch fake Mr. Steve Jobs.
The basic concept of this story was interesting. The Olympics are exciting… unfortunately, 150 pages dedicated to a line-by-line analysis of an Olympic budget is not exciting. Nor is the constant name-dropping of international CEOs and executives. Nor is the re-affirmation every 40 pages that Mitt sacrificed a lot by leaving his multi-billion dollar private equity firm to work for the Olympics and the accompanying statement that he was blessed enough in his life to be able to afford to make that sacrifice.
I gave this book two more stars than I wanted to because a) Amazon won’t let me give a book zero stars and b) I like the Olympics.
This book does accomplish one thing: It’s a 400-page long example of just how detached from the average voter Mitt really is.
Rating: 2 / 5
Some One Or the Other on
March 17th, 2010 10:43 am
Yes… What he said!
David Ulevitch on
March 17th, 2010 10:47 am
Colin Percival — FreeBSD committer and security guy, and author of TarSnap (a sort of competitor but not really) takes a hard look at the ZumoDrive security model:
Also available for iphone. Just downloaded it – works well.
Kiran Vaka on
March 17th, 2010 11:03 am
“..will offer localized TextApps for these countries.” (India, Brazil) – Hence apart from Portuguese and Hindi, can we also expect to see the major languages like Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi etc.? For that to be possible, the phones will need to support these scripts first, and I’m not sure if we’re there yet.
Patrik on
March 17th, 2010 11:08 am
I think it’s just the collaborative playlists that other people can make changes to.
Jason Wagner on
March 17th, 2010 11:20 am
HAHA! That does sound pretty awesome. Can’t wait to watch.
mark on
March 17th, 2010 11:28 am
That’s some funny stuff, I’ve a feeling soon there’s gonna be a TV show about Chatroulette, already its very popular on Youtube!
Anonymous on
March 17th, 2010 11:29 am
I’m waiting for the day that product reviews are provided through an API, for free… with monetization on the portal side.
Jake on
March 17th, 2010 11:29 am
Leena,
Nice post. It seems like cloud companies see smartphones as a big piece to the puzzle. I use Egnyte on my blackberry and I believe it is accessable with iphone and android. Have you heard of their solution?
Dave Hanna on
March 17th, 2010 11:42 am
I totally agree, I get ‘white boy’, ‘cracker’ ‘must be racist’ whenever an Asian pops on
dave on
March 17th, 2010 11:46 am
phone + text > niche apps + hype
Shorthand Mobile looks like they have a really well positioned product with expansive reach.
How to add a watermark to a foto or picture » Blog Archive » ‘Test Article’ for “Unique Article Wizard†on
March 17th, 2010 11:47 am
[...] Shorthand Mobile Launches TextApps To Bring Web Content To Basic … [...]
Scott Kwon on
March 17th, 2010 11:48 am
Sounds to me like they were burning cash too fast, the insiders ponied up the $ to clean the house & get somewhere in time.
David Wehrs on
March 17th, 2010 12:01 pm
Is there still a US beta going on? I’d like an invite as well. Thanks
Brian S Hall on
March 17th, 2010 12:32 pm
The smartphone is the computer!
This seems like cool tech that will bring the mobile web to the planet’s 6 billion even faster than I would have assumed.
Oh, and in 10 years, (still PC centric) Microsoft’s stock will be what it was 10 years ago. If they’re lucky.
Raxit Sheth on
March 17th, 2010 12:33 pm
Check Moible4Mumbai, Mumbai city bus on your mobile without SMS, without GPRS. Mumbai-Bombay is Asia’s second largest and Asia’s largest city bus hub with daily 42,00,000 (yes..42 lakh!) people travelling.
Dave Hanna on
March 17th, 2010 12:39 pm
Thanks Roger, that was funny
The new entertainment medium- on demand no less- ad a rapper, comedian and get rid of the f’g perverts so folks can have a good time.
Imagine if Skype got in the middle of this to offer up scenario- 5 at a time no less
Please be aware that this “CD-ROM” includes ONE poorly formatted 600k .doc file and its .pdf copy. This file consists of four variations of “Venture Capital Term Sheet”, 34 pages of explanations and obvious “Summary of Terms”. The page size is 5.5″ x 8.5″ which is exactly ½ of the regular page. Despite of the most of this information could be freely found on the Internet, I would gladly pay for this document $10. Editorial Review is misleading. I’m sending it back.
Rating: 2 / 5
Ishtiaq on
March 17th, 2010 12:57 pm
I use Spotify almost exclusively for my music. I haven’t bought any music in a long while now. (Sorry iTunes). I especially like the way I can load my phone with my playlists and listen to the music I have downloaded when away from home or any internet connection. Best thing to happen in music for years and the application leaves all web based services for dead when it comes to speed of searching or playing music. Cheers… Ish
And the real point remains: With Chatroulettemap now running (again, see above link) , WHO would still be doing this?
Imran Yousaf on
March 17th, 2010 1:34 pm
I was not aware of this service. Will try to get beta invitation.
Michael Boyd on
March 17th, 2010 1:41 pm
I first used Spotify ages ago and it was great.
Now though, it has become like MySpace — crazy ridiculous backgrounds that make text unreadable, absurd numbers of adverts, and pop-ups even outside of the damn player. The government ads in between songs are probably the worst… they make me wanna slit or something.
For that reason, I hope Spotify dies a painful death and nobody pays for it.
Simon Hansson on
March 17th, 2010 1:43 pm
I really like spotify
My Locator ® on
March 17th, 2010 2:05 pm
surprised benchmark, DST and Ron Conway haven’t invested in this phenom.
cease on
March 17th, 2010 2:16 pm
I also believe there statistics are flawed. 13% is low. From my observations, I pressed play and saw some dudes junk, pressed next and saw another dudes junk. Chatroulette makes me question how we made it as far as we did as a society, if man’s best ideas to use a communication service is to show them pleasuring themselves.
John ouclous on
March 17th, 2010 3:07 pm
Twitter data is what is important, this company needs to focus on Twitter data and they will be golden.
Eric Bremen on
March 17th, 2010 3:21 pm
Actually, the pervert here is TechCrunch. What seems like a legitimate research about Chatroulette is actually a shameless self promotion of RJMetrics.
asdfg on
March 17th, 2010 3:36 pm
Welcome to the internet sir.
Wayne Lambright on
March 17th, 2010 3:41 pm
Yelp is a service but they need to find a way to exist without charging restaurants for advertising or pay for play. Good food will sell itself.
Luke on
March 17th, 2010 4:20 pm
all kidding aside, it’s NOT a waste of time. it’s an analysis of a new technology–what do you come here for?
dan f on
March 17th, 2010 4:31 pm
hear something once–take it with a grain of salt. hear something a few times–start to believe it.
George on
March 17th, 2010 4:32 pm
If Yelp is doing anything illegal, I definitely do not support this. But I think the focus should be more on solutions. With such a large sales force, there’s got to be some bad apples. So how do other large institutions regulate handle these issues?
Jonathan Wong on
March 17th, 2010 4:35 pm
“The tool works with Exchange 2033 and 2007…”
What about versions of Exchange between 2007 and 2033?
Garen Thoms on
March 17th, 2010 6:23 pm
Thank For That post
jenkins on
March 17th, 2010 6:26 pm
This had to be an asset sale for a company heading for the deadpool. Anyone else have a clue? Never heard of this site and can’t find much activity about it anywhere.
Gaith Saqer ??? on
March 17th, 2010 6:52 pm
good acquisition hope it goes well
Dave F. on
March 17th, 2010 7:07 pm
Congrats to Mike, Jeff, and the Citizen Sports team.
Benjamin Standefer on
March 17th, 2010 7:49 pm
Good job Citizen Sports! Salary Cap Baseball for the win!
Yeah the site definitely contains some spyware. With $3mm in funding, you would have thought they could hire a designer to improve the site. Ugly!
Ryan Hunt on
March 17th, 2010 11:11 pm
11 million? Really? That’s a crazy number for a userbase that isn’t engaged in technology. How are they acquiring members? Where are their members coming from?
Very skeptical.
Wynne on
March 18th, 2010 12:00 am
Although I agree that smart phones are trending strongly upwards, I think there is still massive room for Mocospace to dominate.
Where everyone else is rushing to supply smart phone apps, these Mocospace guys are going for the kill on non-smartphone devices. I think it is a clever move. Mocospace mobile social network
Surprising Mobile Social Network – Mocospace on
March 18th, 2010 12:23 am
[...] Mocospace is a surprising mobile social networking application that is looking in a strong position as an advertiser. Firstly it is one of the few [...]
mg55 on
March 18th, 2010 12:49 am
Site looks like the “BoostMobile”, of online communities.
Rob Solomon on
March 18th, 2010 12:49 am
Great run Ash. Enjoy the break & good luck figuring out what’s next.
Dave Baker on
March 18th, 2010 1:01 am
Funny. Moco means buggers in spanish. Pretty much BuggerSpace. Nasty, slime in yo face!
EH on
March 18th, 2010 1:25 am
Whew, adding yourself as a contact? Give the guy a patent!
jesus on
March 18th, 2010 1:42 am
I didn’t think it was possible for something to look worse than myspace does, but congrats Moco, you win.
WTF on
March 18th, 2010 2:13 am
Rod Bahat is a ego driven blowhard…
EH on
March 18th, 2010 2:16 am
Bahat’s email has the distinct tone of “I hope two weeks severance is fair for a valued employee such as yourself.”
Bill on
March 18th, 2010 2:23 am
Hey, Techcrunch, your link to Mocospace tries to install spyware on my computer. Check your links before posting them.
Dirk Zondag, Jr on
March 18th, 2010 2:31 am
To anyone laid off, my company can help you get new careers. We are working with some of the hottest startups talked about here in TC every day.
Feel free to email or call, info on our website, my email is Dirk AT elevaterg DOT com
iptiam (iPad, Therefore I am) on
March 18th, 2010 3:18 am
“The startup prides itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device.”
thats not sustainable, its impossible to keep peeople engaged in social behaviour without multimedia
Marina Martin on
March 18th, 2010 6:19 am
Congratulations to Gist and to the Learn That Name team! I thought this app was brilliant the moment I heard about it and it’s a great fit for Gist.
aviel on
March 18th, 2010 6:47 am
<3 Eric Koester
Paul Mensah on
March 18th, 2010 6:56 am
I like how it is also listed in order of relevance. FourSquare rules them all!
MG Siegler on
March 18th, 2010 8:29 am
again, exactly. used google translate
Michael Tejada on
March 18th, 2010 8:47 am
Did you guys use them to translate you post tittle? It should say “necesita traduccíon?”
This book is an excellent overview of business development valuation and great for those who want to catch up on some techniques and tools. It gives an accurate picture of BD in pharma. For those in the business, you may have to skip some easy parts but it remains a very valuable tool.
Rating: 5 / 5
Nasr Khan on
March 18th, 2010 12:37 pm
Dear Leena,
What you are talking about and what these guys are doing are quiet different in context. As correctly pointed out by Bernard above, this is a PPC (or commonly known as SEM) crowdsourcing platform. SEO is a different ball game altogether and I’d really want to see someone coming up in SEO space with the same concept.
Cheers
Trada Optimizer on
March 18th, 2010 12:41 pm
Actually, it’s SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEO is organic search, SEM is paid search.
Mike on
March 18th, 2010 12:57 pm
It’s not SEO but PPC marketing.
Bernard Van Isacker on
March 18th, 2010 1:05 pm
SEA you mean? SEO has got nothing to do with Search Engin Advertising…
Joao Rei on
March 18th, 2010 3:12 pm
Well done Opera!
And they were the 1st ones pushing this issue with the European Commission, so I guess they deserve the increase.
What about other browsers? Did Chrome, Mozilla and the smaller players reveal their numbers yet?
Pete on
March 18th, 2010 3:48 pm
They should have listed it as the only browser developed in Europe….
Joey Yokubaitis on
March 18th, 2010 4:13 pm
Not to nitpick, but I’d hardly call them Web users when they essentially have access to an enclosed network. That’s like saying my company has 7000 “web users” because we use the same Exchange server.
Brian S Hall on
March 18th, 2010 4:32 pm
If the hardware/network bank rates are as suggested, we can soon have street buskers, coffee house poets, local bands, anyone or any group accepting SQUARE (or paypal bump) payments.
In the future, everyone will be an entrepreneur!
Ilan Ben Menachem on
March 18th, 2010 4:43 pm
Really its Awesome , this is cool and pretty excited to see what will happen when people have on the fly connectivity
jimjerky on
March 18th, 2010 4:46 pm
Is it actually impressive that two political fundraisers are using Square? Almost with any new product there will be some people that try it out. This means nothing.
JoyW on
March 18th, 2010 5:02 pm
Chinese consumers are taking cell phone as a fashion product, not only a communication tool. People are very likely to be affected by others who have a fancy cell phone. The number there maybe over optimistic, but the trend is imperative.
=== popurls.com === popular today on
March 18th, 2010 5:35 pm
=== popurls.com === popular today…
yeah! this story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…
Brian Ginn on
March 18th, 2010 5:36 pm
When I visited China last month there was a cell phone store about every fifth shop.
Ankit Anand on
March 18th, 2010 5:42 pm
the 957 million subscribers is the TOTAL mobile penetration and NOT mobile Internet penetration, right? i think this post mixes up this very important distinction.
Jason on
March 18th, 2010 6:03 pm
140bets.com/tweetbracket
Harel Eilam on
March 18th, 2010 6:17 pm
I find this numbers highly suspect. 1.3 billion mobile subsribers by 2014? That means, keeping with current population growth in China, a 95% entry to mobile phones. That’s impossible, really. Every villager? Every eldery over 80?
Over 20% of china’s population is under the age of 14. Even if every kid over 8 will get a phone, that’s STILL less then 95%. Not to mention I cant’ imagine every family in china could afford phones for all, especially in poor, rural china.
Nischal Shetty on
March 18th, 2010 6:19 pm
Lots of traffic for Godaddy now
The site’s still parked, or may be the DNS changes haven’t propogated everywhere!
Mehdi Muhammad on
March 18th, 2010 6:31 pm
Weird. Meh.
matthew on
March 18th, 2010 6:39 pm
Can you say burn?
JoyW on
March 18th, 2010 7:02 pm
Based on population in China, it is not surprising to see this coming soon. Mobile apps future is in Asia.
Ryan Barr on
March 18th, 2010 7:15 pm
YAY! for GoDaddy Parked Domains!
-_-
The size of the market on
March 18th, 2010 7:56 pm
That’s why it’s ridiculous of Google to try to make us believe that they really consider quitting the Chinese market.
Tomek on
March 18th, 2010 8:20 pm
Just too bad they don’t have an access to the not-censored-internet there.
Samarth on
March 18th, 2010 8:27 pm
I totally agree with mg..love google and all it’s branches but some how buzz seems the weakest of them all…
Francis Oghuma on
March 18th, 2010 8:42 pm
INteresting trend,
china ……… a must visit nation lol.
MG Siegler on
March 18th, 2010 8:57 pm
care to elaborate. you’re literally the first non-google person i’ve heard from who isn’t frustrated by many parts of the user experience.
Bryan on
March 18th, 2010 9:03 pm
This is interesting. This only happens because our economy is draining and our improvement is lacking.
Miguel A. Rios on
March 18th, 2010 9:44 pm
“Overall frustrating experience”? I’m sorry but “overall” is quite a general term here. I love Google buzz and I’ve no frustration with the service.
Vijay Rayapati on
March 18th, 2010 9:54 pm
Awesome , this is cool and pretty excited to see what will happen when people have on the fly connectivity
vlectronica on
March 18th, 2010 11:46 pm
i have a feeling that even if they release a full version of this plugin that we’re not hearing the full story here.
Perhaps consumers will have to pay for the plugin?
And, as someone mentioned above, there will be interesting data to emerge about who is opting out of the service (geo and demographics).
I think privacy is as important as free speech, and we can make this a win-win for everyone if we compromise and listen to the entire story, as it develops, to understand the true caveats of this possible release.
James W on
March 18th, 2010 11:49 pm
The tin hat and freetard brigade already have this blocked with adblockers and javascript disabled etc.
Not sure I see the point. Unless Chrome will soon not support any adblocker.
Karim Yaghmour on
March 19th, 2010 12:10 am
I get some users’ point. I use noscript myself, just because I don’t like stuff executing randomly without asking. I guess one could use something like that to block GA altogether as others have alluded to above.
HOWEVER, I guess nothing precludes content providers from making their content opaque to those that block GA; or at least trying. Something like: “Sorry, to view this site’s content you must allow Google Analytics.” And if a major player does that, it’ll be fair game for a lot of others web sites too. Then the only ones who will have been served by this feature Google plans to add are those who would think this is good riddance anyway. And if you’re that against GA, you’ve likely already fixed your problem.
So what’s the need being fulfilled here?
tatsuke on
March 19th, 2010 12:12 am
“People who opt out of ads and tracking, but still go and get free content that web sites, editors and publishers put a lot of time and effort into are really hypocritical.”
No we’re not. If content providers (of which I am one) don’t like it, they can, how shall I say it, GTFO.
Hypocritical would be me demanding content, but also demanding that it be free, which admittedly also happens. But if they give me a free or pay option, I’m taking free all the way.
Oh, and I’ll be installing this plugin as soon as it’s released.
David on
March 19th, 2010 12:24 am
I have to pay for my web site somehow.
Austinite on
March 19th, 2010 1:10 am
FAIL
Content provider/merchants are the customers of Google Analytics, not the browser. Did they ask for this feature?
I am sure they did not. And if they did, I am sure it was a small portion of them that have interest in such a feature. Allowing this type of exclusion should be optional for the GA account holder.
Otherwise, as someone said, it devalues GA and people will just start to use a different service for analytics.
This seems like a feature dreamed up entirely within the engineering team. 99% of the web has no idea they are getting tracked by GA. The other 1% does not care or is using the hacks described in the comments here.
Why build this add-in?
(+/- 100% accuracy on my statistics, just like the accuracy people will have if this gets implemented)
Adam Grenier on
March 19th, 2010 2:02 am
Agreed – but I think scale plays more into that. Nielsen was monitoring you, just through sample vs. actual data. At the time when most people were watching over the air analog TV, the Nielsen sample was relatively accurate and something the marketers were willing to trust enough to fork over the money and the producers got their cut.
Our media options are so wide spread now, and include producers who build a product for a very niche groups of people (i.e. bloggers).
An internet sample might be somewhat represented for a Facebook, Google or YouTube, but when it comes to the majority of online content the impressions they receive are so small when compared to total impressions on the internet most would be overlooked by the sample.
And thus, media partners wouldn’t pay bloggers and content creators for the ads showing up on their sites, and those creators would likely not exist to the extent they do today.
Not disagreeing with you at all – I just feel most people take the huge amount of free content available to them for granted some times.
Zee on
March 19th, 2010 2:12 am
Naa, put all the audience on stage and then the panelists out in the audience. No wait.
David on
March 19th, 2010 2:32 am
If you don’t have your DVR connected to a telephone line DISH charges $5.00/month but it still works the same. I pay the fee.
Chance Stevens on
March 19th, 2010 2:36 am
It’s crazy enough to work. Seeing people present (or try to) can be mindnumbing. Getting some regular Joes and Janes up on the stage to liven things up would be a great way to help fight off the snoozes and feel better about paying $1500 to join the fun.
(
Robert Schultz on
March 19th, 2010 3:14 am
Good for them! Nice to see a company from the central valley to make it.
Ricardo on
March 19th, 2010 3:19 am
that’s stupid because every website owner has in house simple web analytics ….. No more tracking? that’s the plan ? … online Ads just get useless without tracking…..
Abdelrahman Mahmoud on
March 19th, 2010 3:37 am
I have Analytics blocked already too. And, btw you misspelled “Explorer” in “Internet Exploerer”.
Ahsan R. Shami on
March 19th, 2010 3:52 am
Ha! That’d be pretty smart. Sabotage your free offering to make sites upgrade to a white label version.
I don’t think that’s the point of the plug-in and I think Google would get too much flak for doing something like that, but who knows.
POE on
March 19th, 2010 3:56 am
As Jeff says below, block the analytics domains in hosts file by directing to 127.0.0.1 (above)
POE on
March 19th, 2010 4:17 am
When I had over-air analog TV, AC Nielsen didn’t monitor my television habits, either. Now that I have cable, I’m sure cable company stores stats on my viewing habits for marketing purposes.
Tyler on
March 19th, 2010 4:49 am
I recently found today on several of my sites that IE8 has a setting seemingly turned on upon download that does not allow GA to track user visits as well.
Is I am the only one that that is news too?
David Shantz on
March 19th, 2010 4:54 am
Brest topfl sheep and lemings rapandt in the-money and black revenue split conform requesting investment capital. Top Tier. If you get my meaning…
Jeff on
March 19th, 2010 5:03 am
I just have google analytics blocked in /etc/hosts… Whaddoo I need a plug-in for? *shrug*
Jay on
March 19th, 2010 5:33 am
I’d have to guess because they sold their company for over a billion dollars but I’m not really sure. Just a guess.
Tracy from W. Seattle Blog on
March 19th, 2010 6:11 am
Applause for experimental approaches with information presentation – and for people who help the community get answers – it’s a role we’ve found ourselves taking in addition to curation, collaboration, moderation … But re: that last word, I am sorry to hear they have decided against comments, for such a cliché reason. If you set rules and enforce them, you can have civil discourse. That’s what we do. WITHOUT “real name” requirements or registration. Certainly you might not consider some of our commenters perfectly civil and enlightening, but the discussion is VITAL. It happens during breaking news. It happens when new business owners ask for opinion on what their shops should stock. It happens when weather/utility crises require information-sharing. If Peer has some perfect new system to facilitate that, great – but the comment section works most excellently for that in our view, and we have avoided the racism, the hate, the overt insults, by setting rules and enforcing them as best we can. If ugliness you don’t want on your site – “not in my house” – erupts, you delete it. Simple. I wish more large media concerns would have and enforce rules, but I don’t think the solution is “we won’t have comments, because some people misbehave.” You’re penalizing the majority of people who participate with help, enlightenment, sometimes even humor and good spirit.
sr on
March 19th, 2010 6:15 am
I would assume it at least tracks opt-out users, otherwise that makes the entire product worthless especially when this will inevitably be widely used by the ad-block crowd.
Danny Roa on
March 19th, 2010 6:22 am
Because bad writing doesn’t mean you can’t build a billion-dollar company.
Daniel Johnston on
March 19th, 2010 6:41 am
I believe the role of the free press in a democracy is to report on the news and give the facts, as well as opinions of experts. I do think we have too many people out here who don’t know what they’re talking about influencing the people. Some even say the media is like a fourth branch of the government. I think his idea of having pages like Wikipedia is a very great way, and something that could be very useful, because it could organize all the information in one place. I agree with not having comments on newspapers like that, because people put their opinions in their comments, and if they were an expert, they probably wouldn’t be commenting, so it’s just an amateurs opinion, which isn’t at all what a news paper is trying to do.
I highly support this idea and hope it spreads further,
Adam Grenier on
March 19th, 2010 6:50 am
This is disappointing.
People who opt out of ads and tracking, but still go and get free content that web sites, editors and publishers put a lot of time and effort into are really hypocritical.
I know this is a lot to ask – but understand the environment you play in before you demand changes.
Darren Mckeeman on
March 19th, 2010 7:14 am
Why in the world do people give VC money to people who can barely write?
Tristan Harris on
March 19th, 2010 7:30 am
This sounds like a great new attempt at local reporting.
I just got back from SXSW where we tackled the topic of the “Future of Context” with Jay Rosen (professor from NYU), Matt Thompson of NPR, and Staci Kramer from PaidContent. John Temples discussion of re-orienting news away from being “episodic”, and instead towards topic pages that act as re-usable “building blocks” is almost exactly the proposal Matt and Jay and I had promoted in Austin.
We also have a website up for people who want to further the idea of re-orienting the entire news model around context, here: http://www.futureofcontext.com
Brett Grendahl on
March 19th, 2010 7:34 am
I dunno, to me this just seems to be making the fire hose of information bigger. Do we really always need just more information? Does that make life better?
With some things, yes. With many, no; as that seems like we are hamsters just running on a treadmill of digesting information with no destination.
titan on
March 19th, 2010 7:49 am
The paid version is already there – Google’s Urchin Analytics. Not sure if this new opt-out will affect that or not.
More News about Omidyar’s Peer News (TechCrunch) | Quick Hot News on
March 19th, 2010 7:53 am
[...] the original post: More News about Omidyar’s Peer News (TechCrunch) peer news announces new editorbut little elsePierre Omidyar, eBay founder and philanthropist, held [...]
August Capital Bets Big On Blippy (Michael Arrington/TechCrunch) | TechCombo on
March 19th, 2010 8:33 am
[...] Arrington / TechCrunch:August Capital Bets Big On Blippy — Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people are enraged by its [...]
Mitch Maddox on
March 19th, 2010 8:36 am
Could this be the first step toward a “premium” for companies to get a branded analytics platform that’s separate from Google but uses their technology? In other words, Google Analytics = free but can be disabled globally or you can take the option of paying to have “ACME Analytics” which can’t be disabled but can still be used “in aggregate” by Google.
MyLocator (tm) on
March 19th, 2010 8:50 am
You can see where all this is going. Blipmeme.com, ReBlip.com, Blipster.com, Blipdeck.com, Blipper.com, BlipStream.com, BlipWiki.com.
Problem: nobody trusts the credit card companies and with good reason. EX: Blipper uses card and nears the limit and blips that he dont care as long as hes at the concert. CredCo’s flag his account, drop the limit and raise the interest rate. CredCos can and will use your blips against you.
Diego Ferreyra on
March 19th, 2010 8:55 am
Won’t this make wen developers choose a different tracking service other than google? I would, why would I want skewed analytics?
On the other hand, using both google analytics and another service could help shed some light on what the “paranoid internet users” market does on your site.
“Not only I’m still following you, now I can see you in the middle of the flock muahaha”
Nicola Cassolato on
March 19th, 2010 9:02 am
“Pud, I love that you’ll comment on my iTunes purchases but you won’t take my fucking phone call to talk about the funding round. ” (via http://blippy.com/arrington)
You always make me laugh, Mike
Chris Duell on
March 19th, 2010 9:07 am
If this comes into play, there’s a good chance I’ll stop using analytics to track my stats, what’s the point.
skippy monticrisco on
March 19th, 2010 9:15 am
It’s amateur hour. Give a kid a php for dummies book and flash and their first project is a creating a site like that. I wouldn’t pay a 100 bucks for a complete site that look like that, let alone one hour.
what on
March 19th, 2010 9:21 am
I hope you get lucky with that pickup line app. Good luck.
Matt Lawson on
March 19th, 2010 9:40 am
I admit 50% is not exactly worth it-
But you charge $100 an hour for your services!!
But thanks to guys like you my company is pulling in 5300+ hrs of paid development at $35 an hour in February.
Thanks James
James Gillmore on
March 19th, 2010 9:56 am
These guys are absolute morons. They’re giving ideas away for 50%. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about the execution and that’s what they do. Who gives a shit about the idea. And the ideas that were listed sounded budged game ideas for kids anyway. What’s wrong with these guys. I hope to god they have something up their sleeves for why they are so desperate to get other people’s ideas.
James from FaceySpacey.com
Fred2baro on
March 19th, 2010 10:10 am
of course if they murder you, you won’t click on ads anymore an produce content for their websites .. so no they don’t want to kill us. But yeah ! hell yeah ! it’s a knew kind of imperialism. The only differences with empires is that you choose by your own will to be ruled by their law. by google law … but still I don’t find so bad since the failure of politics to respect ourselves.
cease on
March 19th, 2010 10:13 am
i look at this link , and it gives me even more reason to ask what is the appeal of this service from a user perspective. Why would you want to tell people how much you are spending and where you are spending it everywhere ?
I can understand leaving ratings on amazon, and discussing your purchase their.. but this is not a rating service, and not even detailed reviews of products.
MG Siegler on
March 19th, 2010 10:13 am
i see darth vader?
axzm on
March 19th, 2010 10:14 am
As with any large company, the initial desire to grow and expand into other markets is driven by self preservation. The area Google is moving into has the potential to become scary many years down the road. Futurists like Bruce Sterling have illustrated the conundrum we will find ourselves in when we effectively document and organize “everything on the planet”.
Although this could make for some amazing interactive experiences with the world we live in, it could also become a self-made prison depending on who has control of the steering wheel.
This is why Open Standards for information, government and source code are imperative for this new wave of technology to work long-term. People will disengage and lose trust eventually, and videos like this are a prime example of that dystopic view.
Surfy on
March 19th, 2010 10:19 am
So this guy pud is now sucking on the same vc teat he used to criticize and tear apart on f*ckedcompany.com
I always knew he wanted to play the game, but hated on it because he couldn’t get on.
Now we know.
David Haywood Smith on
March 19th, 2010 10:22 am
I think Facebook will use this so that shop and bar owners can print out stickers that people can use to ‘become a fan’ while in the building.
jon on
March 19th, 2010 10:40 am
I just saw a comment pud made on one of the purchases on Blippy that says Amazon is actually coming soon:
Government grants to start a business – Is it possible on
March 19th, 2010 10:50 am
[...] August Capital Bets Big On Blippy [...]
Ceri May on
March 19th, 2010 10:58 am
I am sorry but I don’t see anything wrong with this video, they don’t say that google is doing anything wrong just pointing out what google are doing.
And to be honest the video is built quite well I think…
Andrew on
March 19th, 2010 11:03 am
If you’re going to argue against hype and exaggeration MG Siegler, take a look in the mirror.
Suchit Agarwal on
March 19th, 2010 11:25 am
Wow, this is really entertaining! But ridiculous!
Antonie on
March 19th, 2010 11:33 am
Methinks you might need Soocial. Cross-platform addressbook sync with same functionality. Works with Gmail, Facebook, iPhone, Mac, Blackberry, Office etc.
sergiu on
March 19th, 2010 11:36 am
The thing the producers of the vid are trying to underline, I think, is the danger of monopoly. In one market, or over all markets.
Pogues on
March 19th, 2010 11:48 am
Unless pud can fix the search…
Addison Ryan on
March 19th, 2010 11:56 am
If Facebook would come to their senses and stop their locked-down ways, they could do this better than anyone!
Viki on
March 19th, 2010 11:59 am
This is great fodder for Anti-Google privacy advocates.
Do you hear it? Its Google inside Darth Vader’s costume breathing down my neck…scanning my Gmail account..Do you hear that menacing breathing sound…..?
Oh Get over it. If you don’t like Google use other services, or you just can’t resist Google’s dark charms? Sheesh…..
ShoppingNotes.com on
March 19th, 2010 12:01 pm
Congratulations to Blippy. Makes me wonder if we should make our ShoppingNotes.com like Blippy… We have data of exactly what users are shopping for, and better yet, right before they make the purchase (vs. after the purchase in the case of Blippy). Of course this should be done on an opt-in basis so existing users don’t worry.
Patrick Brinksma on
March 19th, 2010 12:34 pm
With this title are you comparing Google to China? I think Google’s intentions are not evil, but in the wrong hands a lot of evil can be done.
Check this link out to see some of the down side to using Blippy..
igniman on
March 19th, 2010 12:47 pm
because as michael says it’s controversial. Not so much because of privacy issues (after all, you opt IN) but because it’s kind of a huge show-off and you run the danger of being nominated “douche” for using it. Plus investors seem to invest on anything as long as it’s “social”
I think they should introduce badges for buying stuff (or spending money). I want the “douche” badge [and a share of the profits if you implement my idea]
Marco on
March 19th, 2010 1:23 pm
Good for them. It’s always nice to see startups get some attention from VCs…Personally I think its a bit of an information overload, I never really cared what other people buy, but thats just me!
Addison Ryan on
March 19th, 2010 1:23 pm
Its not on Youtube, so I can’t watch it right now on my Android phone.
Wait, OH GOD GOOGLE OWNS ME.
Michael Arrington on
March 19th, 2010 1:48 pm
you gotta read past the headline.
Jasmin Hadzic on
March 19th, 2010 1:49 pm
Great and all, but what is their business model!? How will they be making money?!?
Eli on
March 19th, 2010 2:05 pm
It creates conversations around purchases. You can ask a “trusted” person what they think about something they actually purchased.
About the valuation, there is no other place to put the money, that is what investors do they invest. Also I can think of at least 20 ways to monetize it.
acronyms for jabronies on
March 19th, 2010 2:06 pm
Labor as a service. HA.
Seriously? Isn’t “labor as a service” or LaaS generaly been known as a job or work for quite some time?
Kudos to the person who came up with this for their buzzword generating prowess.
Time for me get back to work…Oops LaaS.
remmy on
March 19th, 2010 2:14 pm
Hey folks. Before you all get on the bandwagon, LEMMING style, can someone please tell me how much money Pud has returned to his investors so far?
joe on
March 19th, 2010 2:20 pm
this video is just exposing the reality…
Sean Percival on
March 19th, 2010 2:56 pm
Think about the value of those shopping market cards every major chain gives out. They are probably making millions each year based on all that data. Sure they give you some deals here and there, but ultimately they use it to predict inventory needs and the best price points to maximize revenue.
Now imagine you have data like this across 1000s of retailers.
Shan on
March 19th, 2010 3:12 pm
They would be sending mails without user’s consent?
Sean Percival on
March 19th, 2010 3:30 pm
High valuation or not, I see this being a great investment for anyone. Go David!
Sean on
March 19th, 2010 4:10 pm
I just do not understand the appeal of this service. Nothing to do with privacy, just… why is getting so much buzz? And $50M valuation? PUH-LEASE. These VCs are insane.
Jane Cooke on
March 19th, 2010 4:27 pm
They do seem to have had a head start over other similar players. Interesting to see whether they become the Overture or Adwords of real time search.
cease on
March 19th, 2010 7:14 pm
thats two big losses from yahoo this week, whats going on over there.. bartz must be doing something wrong.
James Hicks on
March 19th, 2010 7:29 pm
Loving that I’m right in line with the big boys here at TechCrunch – since I posted a similar article earlier on THE Tech Scoop: http://www.thetechscoop.net
“Hanging with the big time”
Gaetano Marano on
March 19th, 2010 8:11 pm
the WePad is BETTER than iPad since 90% of the iPad/TabletPC users want a MULTITASKING OS as shown in this international POLL: http://alt-pad.blogspot.com/
Tomas Sancio on
March 19th, 2010 10:01 pm
meant to say: according to Google, it’s a feature, not a bug.
That’s the case of Opera 10.50 which brings native GUIs in each operating system… instead of Qt only like it used to be.
Jacob on
March 20th, 2010 3:49 am
You should check out Opera 10.50. It looks a lot better now (not as nice as Chrome though, imo).
Dave Hanna on
March 20th, 2010 4:05 am
Like a new option to fail Adobe- hate having my computer crash or freeze because of.
This is a great idea
Gary Wilkinson on
March 20th, 2010 4:41 am
I don’t think Operas GUI fits in nicely with any operating system it always seems so foreign. If they sorted that out I’d be more interested as they’ve always been very innovative.
Really can’t see how people still use IE8 though, it’s not that it’s bad it’s just Chrome and Firefox are just better.
Crocodoc (YC W10) Sets Its Sights On Adobe Acrobat With New Update on
March 20th, 2010 4:53 am
[...] full post on Hacker News If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it! Tagged with: Acrobat [...]
chris arkenberg on
March 20th, 2010 5:01 am
“Crocodoc sets it’s sights on Acrobat”
Heh. That target is so big even Kim Jong Il could hit it with one of his “ballistic missiles”.
Cata on
March 20th, 2010 5:02 am
What about the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview? I did not get the test to run on it. Anyone else?
I have been an angel investor for about 7 months and am eager to learn more about angel investing, so that I can do it better. Sadly, I found that this book was severely out of date, and most of what I read in it was the same old stuff I’ve read elsewhere. I don’t yet have an alternative book to recommend.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book provides a good reference guide for investors and entrepreneurs alike. While expert angel investor or experienced entrepreneurs may find the information in here a bit obvious, for relative newbies this book is quite useful and an intuitive read. The entrepreneurs can benefit from learning what the investor would care about, what types of investor to look for, and where to look for them. For investors, the books provides a simple reference of the type of due diligence to do to get comfortable with a startup. With the venture capital firms growing up in size and getting out of early stage ventures, angel investors have grown all the more important. Highly recommended.
Rating: 4 / 5
Okay, first up, to state my allegiances, I LOVE THIS BOOK!
I’m an aspiring entrepreneur, holed up in an incubator center, I think I know my technology, my market and my cash flows, but I’ve been getting the hot flushes at the prospect of entering the arcane world of VC.
Will I do something dumb and give away my company to some VC who’s smarter than me, will I ever raise money, how do I get impartial advice (in the VC world where everyone seems to have a vested interest)…..
What I like about this book is that it gives a structured, and methodical roadmap, it’s not burdened down by jargon, and I’m actually able to follow the approach and take real actions based on the guidance Berkery gives.
I’ve been able to set out the stepping stones for my company, and yes, we’re starting to hit them.
I went back over our business plan having read the book, and made a few “minor adjustments”, particularly based on the risk dynamics discussed in the book.
Clearly, this guy has been around the block in the VC world, and he’s been pretty good about sharing the insider info with us.
Will we raise funding after following the advice in the book? Dunno, but I definitely feel like I’m in control of our process now, and am better armed to face the VC dragon.
I’ve been boring the other guys in the incubator alongside me about this book, they’ve pretty much all now got a copy and have been converted into Berkery disciples
Okay, that’s the good bit, what’s there not to like about the book?
Not a whole lot to tell the truth.
The title is a bit geeky, don’t let it put you off.
……..and, that picture of the author just gives me the shivers!!
He looks just like the type of guy who’d mercilessly take you apart each and every month over not hitting your targets!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve noticed same comment made (almost word by word) to the previous book of Gladstone (Venture Capital Handbook) meaning that they’re not reviews at all but sheer PR or advertisement to sell books. I didn’t buy both of them.
Rating: 1 / 5
The book contains a lot of very valuable information. It is geared primarily towards the investor who wants to explore angel investing, i.e. private investmentment in early-stage enterprises. The book does a good job in explaining the risks, necessary time commitment and potential benefits of angel investing. Thankfully, it is not of the ‘how to get rich easy’ kind. On the negative side, the book repeats some of its points ad nauseam and is not a stylistic masterwork.
Rating: 4 / 5
a very complete book about the fund raising process; certainly a must read for entrepreneurs who want to tap the private equity capital.
Could have detail more other form of venture capital like debt venture.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a fantastic book to read. Simple and comprehensive with lots of good examples and discussions, good for novices as well as finance professionals.
Rating: 5 / 5
Nice book,
Easily read and well thought out.
Certainly not exhaustive, but, if you are starting to go down the investor road, this book can help with getting the terminology and process in your mind before tackling the task in hand.
5 out of 5 for readability and basic understanding of the investor process.
Regards
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a thorough, practical guide to the nitty-gritty of venture capital investing. This comprehensive, well-organized instruction manual summarizes the homework you should do before you make a venture capital investment, the paperwork needed to carry out the investment and the ongoing work you will have to undertake to have a prayer of seeing your investment pay off. If it is a little plodding, you can understand why. It covers a lot of ground. The authors compare venture capital investing to a partnership at one point, to a marriage at another. They don’t attempt to sell you on venture investing. In fact, by telling you how difficult and labor intensive it is, they may even drive you away. We believe this book definitely belongs in the library of anyone who has ever taken a serious interest in venture investing. It will also help entrepreneurs who need venture capital financing by showing them how to evaluate their companies according to the criteria that serious investors are apt to use.
Rating: 4 / 5
Gerald A. Benjamin and Joel Margulis tell the current or prospective angel or early-stage investor how to best judge pre-IPO investments. They emphasize matching investors with the right entrepreneurs to create an effective team in which the investor not only provides the seed or early-stage capital but also contributes good advice and contacts. Besides discussing effective strategies, the book includes an extensive directory of top venture forums, angel organizations, publications and Web sites. In addition, any investor will benefit from the thorough rundown of due-diligence points that the authors recommend. While the book is targeted at prospective investors, we [...] encourage entrepreneurs with start-up companies to use it as a productive guide to making more effective funding pitches, although the companion book for entrepreneurs would probably be more helpful. One caveat: Some ideas are repeated – even with similar wording – from chapter to chapter. But overall this is a solid book, even though the free flows of money it evokes have been arrested somewhat lately.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a must for every VC aspiree. I have pointed every student who has aspired to join the venture capital industry to this book, and they both cover the depth of the technical knowledge required and also the scope of industrial sectors. There is nothing better for this price. 99 Inside Secrets on Startup Finance (Gingko Publishing House Guide e-books, Volume 4)
Rating: 5 / 5
The next best thing to having “The Planning Shop & Joseph R. Bell” in your back pocket. This amazing book answered 99.5% of all my questions re: Angel Investor’s. Very user friendly, easy read, just simply awesome.
I now feel I have the neccessary tools, to present my Business Plan to anyone with excellence and with confidence!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
Much updated from previous editions, David Gladstone’s useful text provides a very cursory survey of deal and investment techniques, albeit for slightly later than “sexy” stage deals. However, as this book is designed for the novice, and as Lipper’s text has fallen out of print, this sadly remains the only general text on VC investing for the inexperienced, and is useful in context of the level which it is designed to educate. While the many checklists may be somewhat annoying to seasoned VCs, they are probably indispensable to the novice investor, since they provide a summary framework when working through deal and business terms. And while the book is designed more for later stage (through certainly not LATE stage, as some have alluded to) deals, the book is, again, designed to educate the novice venture investor, who really shouldn’t be doing high tech start-ups anyway. Irrespective of that, anyone who presumes to write a text on investing in high tech start ups would likely find his text applicable only for the next few months after printing. Ours is an industry that evolves very quickly, and changes rapidly in accordance to the latest trends. No one can teach you how to pick the winners in the trend that hasn’t happened yet. Getting the basics from a text like Gladstone’s, however, can give you the fundamentals on which to build that “knack”.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is a wonderful introduction to the VC world. It is useful for people looking for funding and for people interested in getting into the field.
The book is clear and direct; it is not “VC for Dummies” but it is easy to understand, with helpful examples and illustrations.
After reading this book, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of how the VC world works and an appreciation for how VC executives think.
Rating: 5 / 5
Just finished the book. Very good understanding of how the VC game is played. This book will help entrepreneurs formulate a targeted biz plan with a better chance of funding.
Well written and easy to understand…highly recommend!
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a good book if you want to learn the basics on what angel investing really means, how to find an angel investor(s), and the steps you may need to take for additional venture capital down the road.
Rating: 4 / 5
At first glance when I pulled this book off the bookstore shelf a few days ago I figured it was going to be a 4-star book. The text is kind of thin at 150 pages, and the individual pages have a lot of white in the top and bottom margins. But when I read the book this afternoon I really liked the topic that was covered and the content that was included. I highly recommend this book to any wanta-be entrepreneur or small business owner that is in need of capital for her business that a new partner, new co-owner, or angel investor could provide. Two thumbs up!
I read this book a little out of order since I am somewhat familiar with its topic. I started with the Glossary at the end of the book. Knowing the definitions of the terms included in the Glossary will definitely help the reader better comprehend the front part of the book. I then read the section entitled “The Experts Talk” and enjoyed those short dialogs. And then I skimmed the Sample Term Sheet included.
Lastly I read through chapters 1-9 which make up the body of the book. My favorite chapter was Chapter 5 entitled Valuation. Putting a value on a startup is tough to do in practice, but I think the author did a great job covering the subject. I think it could have been done better, but it was definitely done well.
I’m a SCORE volunteer counselor and I read books like the instant one in order to determine if I should recommend it to my SCORE clients for reading. Many of my SCORE clients have had questions about angel investors and venture capital firms as sources of raising funds for their startups. And I tell many of my SCORE clients that if they really need capital and they don’t want to sell out in 2-5 years, then they should think in terms of getting a partner who can infuse capital into the business. Up until reading the instant book I have not had a book to recommend to these clients. I’ve had to explain it verbally during our face-to-face counseling sessions. This book includes what I tell those clients AND THEN SOME. 5 stars!
Rating: 5 / 5
I did, so I bought five books. I will review them from worst to best.
“Finding an Angel Investor In a Day,” by The Planning Shop (2007), told me nothing I didn’t know, and I didn’t know anything about business plans or angel investors. The title is ludicrous and the advice is obvious, e.g., “Your business plan should be concise, compelling, and irresistible to investors.” 1 star.
“The ABC’s of Writing Winning Business Plans,” by Garrett Sutton (2005), walks you through writing business plans for a lawn mowing business and buying a pizza restaurant. If your business is more complicated, this is not the book for you. 1 star.
“The Ernst & Young Business Plan Guide,” by Brian Ford, Jay Boorstein, and Patrick Pruitt (2007), is a good book but hardly inspiring or insightful. If you follow this book your business plan will be competent but won’t grab investors. 3 stars.
“Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs,” by Susan Preston (2007). This book doesn’t explain how to write a business plan, but it explains how to make a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation to investors — a presentation that will grab investors. For example, one question is “How is your product or technology scalable?” I also learned some of the financials that angel investors look for, such as what IRR is expected. This book helped and inspired me to write an excellent presentation, that became the basis for my business plan. 5 stars.
“Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur,” by Dermot Berkery (2008). This is a textbook for a business school course about venture capital. This book is full of insights. Every few pages new ideas would compel me to go to my computer and add stuff or rewrite my business plan, for example, Berkery emphasizes the need for clear milestones. Preston mentioned milestones but didn’t make it clear why they are so important. The financials that were briefly presented in Preston’s book are thoroughly presented in Berkery’s book, for example, what gross margin investors look for (80% or more) and why they need such extremely profitable products or services. Plus you learn the jargon or key phrases of venture capitalists, e.g., “a large but well signaled market,” the importance of “market power” and an effective “route to customers.” I feel that my business plan now speaks to investors in their language, with the numbers they are looking for. 5 stars.
Rating: 1 / 5
After reading through this book and the financial models, I have to say that this is the best book in its class.
Dr. Metrick did a fantastic job.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the mechanics of the venture capital industry.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is very comprehensive and covers a lot of venture capital finance. It clarifies a lot of concepts and applies them very creatively to Venture Capital. A good book to learn about the VC industry and in general finance (as VC finance uses the concepts very effectively)
Rating: 5 / 5
Professor Metrick is brilliant as a teacher, meticulous as a researcher and entertaining as a comedian. He captures his lucid lecturing style into written form with this book.
It’s the closest you can come to attending one of Wharton’s most coveted and insightful MBA classes without paying $80,000 and 2 years of lost salary.
Rating: 5 / 5
It is a great book on how to structure deals in the venture capital and R&D financing fields. Both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists would benefit from reading the book since understanding various payoff scenarios would be essential for both groups.
It has been common for entrepreneurs to sell one or two companies before figuring out how to structure their venture capital funding properly. Many entrepreneurs lost millions of dollars selling their first companies and learned from their own mistakes how to structure deals for following companies. This does not have to happen anymore… Now entrepreneurs can read the book, understand payoff diagrams under various deal structures, try to structure deals for financing their companies correctly, and potentially keep millions of dollars for themselves and their teams.
Entrepreneurs could learn from the book, for example, that the addition of an innocent-sounding word “participating” to “convertible preferred stock” in structuring venture capital investments in their companies could cost them millions of dollars down the road when the entrepreneurs sell their companies. The payoffs of “participating convertible preferred stocks” and “convertible preferred stocks” are different. The book clearly explains differences in payoffs among various types of stocks used to structure VC investments and many other features of venture capital investment deals.
Venture capitalists could benefit from using this book as a reference on various ways to structure deals in order to protect their investments in high tech ventures.
If you are involved in building or financing entrepreneurial ventures, this book is for you!
Rating: 5 / 5
This is hands down the best VC book on the market. Chapters are digestible in a sitting. Not an overly huge, bulky text book. You can throw this in your bag and catch up on the reading every time you have a break. This is used at most of the top B-schools in the US. The examples are good, but there could be a few more examples and practice problems. This book has hard core math, but it also presents it in a way that is easy to understand. A good mix of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of venture capital. I’m a big fan of Metrick. Too bad he left Wharton for Yale.
Rating: 5 / 5
Want examples of how funding works? Want to know how Venture firms set up their business? Want to know everything about practical application of VC firms? This may be as close as you’ll get without actually working in one. This ought to be a text book in graduate school. I’d suggest “The Venture Capital Cycle” as the first book to get an overview of VC’s. Then, read this one and you’ll be pretty proficient in terms of being an outsider. Great Case Study!
Rating: 5 / 5
A must for anyone wanting to know how VC firms work, structure themselves, and considerations for funding. This is an excellent case study that ought to be in a graduate program! It’s as close as you’ll get without working for a VC firm. I would suggest reading “The Venture Capital Cycle” first to get a general feel for VC and how it works. Then read the case study!
Rating: 5 / 5
If you are interested in quickly learning about how to raise a VC fund, save your time and money. This book does not offer many clues.
Rating: 2 / 5
In my opinion this is best and most comprehensive overview of modern VC practices available. Dr. Lerner is cleary the nation’s leading authority on VC research and his experiences are detailed in this book.
The case study format is organized into 4 themes (paraphrased): 1. Raising & Structuring Funds 2. Making Investments 3. Exiting Invesments 4. Other forms of VC funds
so the lessons of each case lead to a larger point. Furthermore, the case study format makes the book more entertaining than academic texts tend to be.
If you are somewhat knowledgeable about private equity then this is a “must read”. If you are a beginner make sure you become familiar with the ins & outs of private equity/venture capital before reading or else you may miss a lot of the value of this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was a disappointment. A real textbook would actually have instruction. This book is merely a collection of cases, with a few scattered chapters on VC/PE. Only buy the book if required to for a class.
Rating: 2 / 5
I was tremendously disappointed in this book. The cost of $35-50 is definitely a complete rip-off for what you get from the author. All you need to do is refer to pages 227-246. Those are the pages that represent the bibliography. I actually was so pissed off after reading this book that I counted them. In total the author referenced the words and work of 488 author people. There are only 223 pages of text and 6 chapters in the book. I am certain you can do the math but I’ll do it for you.
There are on average more than 2 references per page and over 80 per chapter. It’s as though the author has never had an original thought of his own. If I wanted to hire somebody to go out and look up the work of other people I would have done that. I was expecting the author to use his own first-hand knowledge and experience in order to help educate and inform others such as myself about the process. Instead, what I got was something a high school student would do while trying to complete a report for homework. My only question is who is less ethical: the author or the publishing company that let this slide through the screening process. For all of those that gave this book 5 stars I can only guess that you don’t enjoy actually reading.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was quite disappointed in this book because I had heard what a great resource it was. Overall the content was useful and was a pretty complete listbut I felt as though it would have been better if it was condensed down into a 4 or 5 page document instead of a whole book. This would be a better book to get from the library instead.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book is a disappointment.
Although it is carefully documented, it is almost entirely made up of quotes from secondary sources. If you’ve read some basic books on private equity, you probably already read most of the sources used in this book. There is little in the way of analysis or any kind of value add.
Rating: 2 / 5
The book provides a great overview of the process, and is a tool I used in my decision making.
Rating: 5 / 5
Thia book just give you general idea on venture capital. It isn’t worth for your money. The author also not giving additional support on loopholes area. Not so friendly. So, better try another book – david gladstone is much better.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was required to use this book for a course on VC in my MBA program, and I found overly wordy and not very precise in its advice.
It is less of a handbook and more of a treatise. If you are looking for a direct and clear scoop on raising venture capital, this isn’t the book for you. If you have been trying for some time and want to get a deep peek into the minds of the VC’s out there, this could work if you had the time to wade through it.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book is a thorough, practical guide to the nitty-gritty of venture capital investing. This comprehensive, well-organized instruction manual summarizes the homework you should do before you make a venture capital investment, the paperwork needed to carry out the investment and the ongoing work you will have to undertake to have a prayer of seeing your investment pay off. If it is a little plodding, you can understand why. It covers a lot of ground. The authors compare venture capital investing to a partnership at one point, to a marriage at another. They don’t attempt to sell you on venture investing. In fact, by telling you how difficult and labor intensive it is, they may even drive you away. We believe this book definitely belongs in the library of anyone who has ever taken a serious interest in venture investing. It will also help entrepreneurs who need venture capital financing by showing them how to evaluate their companies according to the criteria that serious investors are apt to use.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is obviously been written by people who have seen hundreds of proposals. I found it to be an invaluable guide and full of excellent information. While many things did not pertain to our project, we gained excellent insights and saved ourselves from some embarrassing, amateurish missteps. You may not choose to follow all of the guidelines, but for most VC funding projects, EVERYTHING you need to know is well covered.
This was my first foray into private financing, after two decades in nonprofits. This VC handbook made me look and feel like a pro. Worth the investment many times over. I wouldn’t dream of writing a funding proposal without it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Much updated from previous editions, David Gladstone’s useful text provides a very cursory survey of deal and investment techniques, albeit for slightly later than “sexy” stage deals. However, as this book is designed for the novice, and as Lipper’s text has fallen out of print, this sadly remains the only general text on VC investing for the inexperienced, and is useful in context of the level which it is designed to educate. While the many checklists may be somewhat annoying to seasoned VCs, they are probably indispensable to the novice investor, since they provide a summary framework when working through deal and business terms. And while the book is designed more for later stage (through certainly not LATE stage, as some have alluded to) deals, the book is, again, designed to educate the novice venture investor, who really shouldn’t be doing high tech start-ups anyway. Irrespective of that, anyone who presumes to write a text on investing in high tech start ups would likely find his text applicable only for the next few months after printing. Ours is an industry that evolves very quickly, and changes rapidly in accordance to the latest trends. No one can teach you how to pick the winners in the trend that hasn’t happened yet. Getting the basics from a text like Gladstone’s, however, can give you the fundamentals on which to build that “knack”.
Rating: 4 / 5
I wanted to let you know I just finished your book,
and I thought it was a terrific overview of working
with VC’s. I’ve been in a handful of start-up
software co’s, but on the operational side only. This
gives me a much deeper understanding of the issues
invovled in funding/building a company.
Jeff from California
Rating: 5 / 5
Jerry Chautin
Volunteer SCORE Business Counselor, http://www.SCORE.org
I’ve recommended INSIDE SECRETS TO VENTURE CAPITAL to my clients as a way to gain immediate insight to what’s really going on in the VC world. Novices have unrealistic expectations and rarely understand what the venture capitalist wants. INSIDE SECRETS tells it like it is.
*I found INSIDE SECRETS to be fast reading and an excellent resource for those beginning their search for VC. In my opinion it can substantially reduce the entrepreneur’s learning curve and allow them to assess their chances of getting equity funding for their venture.*
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve just finished reading Dee Power’s book, The Inside Secrets of Venture Capital,” and it is a classic.
Reading the book was like taking a college course, except that it was more enjoyable. My professor never talked down to me, gave many statistics and excerpts, and brought the entire area of entrepreneurs, angels, and venture capitalists together in a way even I could understand.
Sometimes I chuckled, and occasionally I laughed out loud as I experienced the wit used to explain this tricky field.
Although I don’t plan to get involved in the VC arena, I appreciate the opportunity to know what all the parties face as they go through the various processes.
Tremendous in every way, including resources and a delightful writing style. Congratulations, Dee and Brian
Best wishes Judy V.
Rating: 5 / 5
After looking at numerous books and reviews here on Amazon, I picked this puppy up.
Here’s what’s happened since:
1) I’ve repeatedly thought “wow, what a poorly written book.”
2) I’ve been trying to find something of value in the book. I tell myself, “well, I bought the book – I should probably try to finsish it.”
3) Then I tell myself “But hey, you should respect your time more.”
4) I think to myself, well, what if *somewhere* in this book there is a bit useful information? What if I went to page 223 and found a gem of information that’s very good?
5) So then I flip ahead to page 223 and sure enough…nothing.
If you want a book that is basically a collection of survey results from what appears to be poorly conducted and researched surveys of a few VC’s and entrepreneurs, this book is for you. It has absolutely nothing of value in it concerning how VC’s find, judge, value, and finalize a deal. It really only offers common-sense guidelines, which anyone with some basic experience should already have (or should have heard second-hand). There are no “secrets.” None. I promise you.
I can honestly say that I’ve gotten very, very little of value out of the this book, and after page 186 I’m still trying to figure out if there was a drop of value in the thing.
Rating: 1 / 5
Joe Vanacore, staff writer says: Entrepreneurs can learn from book on venture capitalists. “Brian E. Hill and Dee Power explore how VCs and Es differ in their premises, expectations and frustrations in their book “Inside Secrets to Venture Capital.” Those differences are so deep that the 300-page book could easily hav been titled “Venture Capitalists are From Mars; Entrepreneurs are from Venus.
“And a cash-strapped small-business man, whether Venusian or Earthling, would do well to digest this book before making his pitch to a VC.
“Hill and Power – co-founders of Profit Dynamics Inc., a research and managemnt consulting firm — spent three years collecting data and opinions from VCs and it shows. They cover plenty of ground.
Rating: 5 / 5
Bartlett writes an informative book to those unfamiliar to the details to deal structuring, particularly with the documentation side. This book is truly for the novice who is unfamiliar with business and legal concepts. Those with a business or corporate law background may see this book as a “nice” reference source. If purchased, it’s likely to be unused.
Individuals who wish to know the legal side of basic business structures, term sheets, business plans, and such would find the book resourceful. Though it’s only 157 pages, it provides a foundation to the non-business professional.
Rating: 3 / 5
“Fundamentals” is a distilled version of certain chapters in Bartlett’s “Equity Finance: Venture Capital, Buyouts, Restructurings and Reorganizations”, a 3-volume set available at most major law libraries. “Fundamentals” is really lawyering at its best in that Bartlett unselfishly shares many of the key business points underlying venture finance negotiations but does so in a manner which is easily accessible to most readers. Even for an experienced venture capital attorney, Bartlett’s book is useful because it provides a relatively complete overview of the process and delivers the finer points without significant fluff. I would recommend this book to most entrepreneurs, young attorneys and others interested in a quick and practical overview of the venture finance process.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book outlines the organizational and funding aspects of venture capital from a legal viewpoint for investors and company management. It does a good job of pointing out the basic legal issues for a non-lawyer. It is not useful for assessing a business venture’s fundamentals or valuing a company. The author’s website VC Experts is useful.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’m an attorney with many years’ experience in the venture capital area. The content of the book tends to reflect East Coast practice more than West Coast (Silicon Valley) practice. That’s not necessarily a flaw, but you should be aware that the styles can differ in some respects.
The style of writing though, is my major complaint about this book. In a word, it’s pompous. Too many sentences have very complex, passive or impersonal constructions. Paragraphs are long and dense, without any concern for the reader’s fatigue level.
Also, some quantitative concepts could have been much more clearly expressed with a simple formula (high school-level math). The discussion of weighted average antidilution protection at pp. 90-91 is a case in point. I found this impossible to understand when I first read it. The more I read it, the more obscure it became to me. It could have been described much more accurately, and in many fewer lines, with a simple fraction.
Clear communication didn’t seem to be a priority for this author.
Rating: 2 / 5
Given the overall complexity of the topic, I thought that this was an especially quick read. At the same time, it touched upon enough sub-topics and did so with sufficient detail to get a good overview of how VC approach new businesses. I did not think that this was the authoritative statement on any given point, but a solid primer. To the extent you need to know more about a topic, you should be well armed to research it further.
I encounted the book through a senior capstone course at a local MBA program. I was lecturing on a topic and saw the book on the syllabus.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been a partner in the Venture Capital business my entire career – over twenty years. I have kept a personal list of “lessons learned” from my investment experience; and, I have read many of the books in the category. By far, this is the very best book in all respects. It is extremely well written and easy to read; captures the essence of each “master’s” message; and, also captures the essence of the investor’s personality (at least those that I know). I think this book is so good it should become a text book in business schools with private equity / venture capital programs. A must read for anyone interested in the “craft” of making successful investments in private companies.
Rating: 5 / 5
Every budding entrepreneur should know and implement strategies and concepts found in this book. As a second opinion on the same brand of practical advice found in my own book, “The Expert’s Edge,” this book offers a terrific launching pad. Get it, read it, study it… do it!
Rating: 3 / 5
Most of the reviews are written by this guy’s friends. I read the book…if you can tolerate the first 3 pages, then by it. It is free to skim through the pages you know.
This author’s style of writing is not even fit for a high school level. The book lacks real direction, substance, and I want my money back.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book is a great overview for someone just beginning to think about starting a business venture, but it seemed to be more focused towards the needs of a large venture, rather than a small business. It covered a lot that I thought would not be applicable to the type of business I want to start — a small town retail shop where I plan to run the business myself and will not hire executives or get funding from investors (other than probably a local bank or the SBA). Perhaps this just shows my ignorance of what owning a small business is about, though!
I also have to express my disagreement with his comments regarding attorneys. (Disclosure: I am currently an associate at a big law firm.) It sounds like he happened to get some bad attorneys. For what it’s worth, my thoughts, based on my own observations of attorneys at large and small firms (my own firms and opposing firms), are this: (1) I don’t think his experiences reflect the services provided by all large law firms — I think the quality of services you get depends on whether you hire a good INDIVIDUAL attorney, not law firm, (2) you are much more likely to have someone “learn on your dime” at a small firm than a large one simply because attorneys at large firms do a lot more business and specialize in certain areas and therefore become more experienced with matters that arise in those areas, (3) most small firm attorneys will NOT be as great as the ones he found, and (4) most partners are so distracted by bringing in business and a million other things that associates are much more likely to focus on your deal, keep things moving quickly, and actually pay attention to the details. I think the ideal arrangement for a small business owner is to find a good associate who has a good partner to ask for guidance on big issues when needed. I just don’t think it’s fair to generalize that all big firm attorneys are terrible and negligent with small clients, or that associates are all clueless and learning on your dime. (I can provide proof in the form of reviews from my large and small business clients!) That all being said, there are some fantastic attorneys at small shops and if you find one, you will pay much less for their services. My best advice on finding a good attorney (whether at a large firm or a small firm) is to get referrals from other business owners.
Rating: 4 / 5
“It is extremely comprehensive, and will be a help to anyone who intends to be a budding venture capitalist.”
- Koh Boon Hwee, Chairman, DBS Bank Ltd
Rating: 5 / 5
I really enjoyed this little gem of a book. It offers ten simple lessons and is easy to read. I thought that the author’s advice is practical, which appears to be one of the benefits of this book versus so many others.
Rating: 5 / 5
In one vivid parable–the “Story of Stone Soup”–Dr. Gold reveals what is at the heart of the entrepreneurial process. In nine additional chapters, he clearly demonstrates how, step-by-step, the reader can start his or her own business venture. Dr. Gold’s lucid writing style and easy layout help to remove the veil of mystery surrounding the start-up process while imparting to the reader a feeling of, “Hey, I really can do this!”
Rating: 5 / 5
This was a waste of money. The CD was about a 20 minute CD of poor quality sound and she didn’t really say much. The package included a brochure that was equally unimpressive. This was a very basic knowledge of Angel Investing.
Rating: 1 / 5
Venture Capital Cycle are full of questions why and how. For example: 1. How are Venture Capital Structured? 2. How are the Venture Capitalists compensated? 3. Does the capital structure matter?
On these questions, Gompers and Lerners gave you hypotheses from the experts, and in addition, they are proving those hypotheses. Which of those hypotheses are actually supported by the facts? The researches are very wide and valid. And the accomodate the hypotheses very well.
When I was reading this book, I was doing a research for my master thesis. And I realize that this book explain venture capital in a very good way, and straighten up problems on Venture Capital.
Rating: 4 / 5
This was one of the better books I’ve read on VC. Extremely well researched, very informative, though it took awhile to read. Recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is an awesome read for those who want to enter the world of Venture Capital. It explains more than what VC’s do, it elaborates on the “how,when,why” of the entire process. From mathematical and data support (which is a bit complex for the average reader), its value in the book substantiates it’s position on everything from timing funding, to VC experience (or lack of), and even firm or entreprenuerial behavior. Great first book in my opinion!
Rating: 4 / 5
I agree with Michael that this book is probably more suitable for the academic than the practitioner. I found myself ‘fast forwarding’ to the conclusions of each study rather than digging into the stats!
Rating: 2 / 5
I am forced to use this book for level 2 CAIA certification. Unfortunately, unlike the other titles in the curriculum, this title has little or no practical application for evaluating VC investments.
As stated previously, the book is long on statistics and ideas “for further research” but short on practical application.
This title was painful to get through and I will recommend it be removed from the curriculum for the CAIA.
Rating: 2 / 5
Spencer Ante has done a wonderful job writing the life story of General Georges Doriot, respected Harvard Business School professor, military general, and the father of venture capital. I had the good fortune to hear Spencer, who also writes on business for Business Week magazine, speak about Doriot’s story at the French Library in Boston before I started reading the book. His stories about the man who was so influential for U.S. business were fascinating. Here are a few of Doriot’s quotes that he pulled from the book to share with us:
* “A real courageous man is a man who does something when no one is watching him.”
* “If information is to be exchanged over whiskey, let us get rather than give it.”
* “You will get no where if you do not inspire people.”
* “Always remember that someone somewhere is making a product that wil make your product obsolete.”
From the stories about Doriot’s early introduction to entrepreneurship as the son of a Peugot engineer, to Doriot’s entry into Harvard Business School, to the importance he played with R&D during World War II which taught him how to become a venture capitalist to the part he played in the starting up of Digital Equipment Corporation, this book remains fascinating.
If you are in business today or would like to be, this is a must read from a great writer about a visionary business thinker. I think you’ll agree that Doriot really pioneered the transition of U.S. business to an economy built on entrepreneurship an innovation.
Rating: 5 / 5
Spencer Ante’s biography of Georges Doriot left me cheering my head off! He would look at the mistakes of today’s politicians and bank leaders and tell them exactly what they had done wrong and why and it would not be double talk. This is a great read about a true genius of business who came here from France and tried to teach how to be effective capitalists instead of idiot pretenders. It’s too bad we didn’t learn when we could have. We wouldn’t be in this mess now.
Rating: 5 / 5
In his book Creative Capital – Spencer Ante not only captures the amazing story of a French immigrant (Georges Doriot) and his profound contributions to the United States in business education, government service and launch of the systemic US venture capital industry, he also distills the essence of entrepreneurism and its pivotal role in innovation and the growth of the US technology industry. By embracing creative ideas and pro-actively managing the risk inherent in bringing new technologies to market, Doriot demonstrated that economic growth and wealth creation are at the heart of the venture capital model and two sides of the same coin.
At a time when the US economy is looking for direction and the keys to its future growth and sustainably, Ante’s book is a must read for every politician, business leader and investor who is genuinely looking for the levers through which we can grow and extend our competitive advantage in a global economy. After reading Creative Capital, the question that comes to mind is “how can we proactively encourage more of the innovation that Doriot helped bring to life”.
Ante’s style delivers a great story in an easily readable format punctuated with data and facts that draw clear comparisons to the economic challenges we face to day.
Rating: 5 / 5
Creative Capital is a great business book. It is a must read for anyone interested in stimulating innovation and motivating people. Spencer Ante’s solid biography of General Doriot and the roots of the U.S. venture capital industry inspire. Ante takes the reader from the infancy of the automobile era and tells us an amazing life story about “the General.” Georges Doriot, the father of the modern venture capital industry, should be discussed in every high school history book.
As president of the American Research and Development Corporation (ARD), the world’s first publicly owned venture capital firm, Georges Doriot demonstrated the value of seed capital to stimulate new businesse development. In this book, Spencer E. Ante describes well Doriot’s remarkable discipline, energy, charisma, motivation, and bold vision.
In the right cinematographic hands, this book would make for an interesting movie or documentary. Georges Doriot was as an innovative financier who added value, and helped transform the U.S.’s industrial economy. Men and women like this are again needed in this new age of economic transformations.
Rating: 5 / 5
Most people that have been involved in a VC-based tech startup have heard the parable of General Georges Doriot and his famous $70,000 investment in Digital Equipment Corporation. However, few people actually know the full (and very extensive) story of Doriot and the creation of the Venture Capital business.
Spencer Ante does an awesome job of telling this incredible history. As a former entrepreneur and now VC, I’ve read many books that touch on parts of the history and have heard many anecdotes. Spencer brings them all together in one concise, well-written, fast paced book.
Every entrepreneur and VC should, along with anyone that is involved in creating companies, should read this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The price is the only beef I have with this item. The material provides an excellent overview of the venture capital business but its a little pricy for 9 or so pages. I would have given it 5 stars if it had been $3.50 or less then again maybe I’m just cheap.
Rating: 3 / 5
I am a small business owner looking at growing my own business and have thought about using Venture Capital (VC) as an option. I really did not want to read an entire book on VC fundamentals and this article was definitely the ticket. I was able to learn what types of returns, companies and industries are typically sought by VC firms. I was also able to get some insight on downside risk and management concerns that are posed by VC investments.
I have been fortunate enough to run a profitable business for 10-years without the need for capital and have very little experience in capital investment. This artical is packed with very useful information on anyone considering using a VC firm to fund their company.
This book was written during the Internet Boom in the late 1990’s, but the author has some amazing insight to what would happen with the VC investments in inflated internet companies that went public. I am writing this review in July of 2006. This is a timeless article that will apply to any company who is considering working with VC in the current business era.
Rating: 5 / 5
This nine-page reprint from the November-December 1998 issue of the Harvard Business Review is an excellent introduction to the economics and operations of venture capital funds. It specifically and accurately describes the motivations of venture capitalists, their investors and the entrepreneurs in whom they invest.
It will be of interest to entrepreneurs seeking venture funding, persons considering a career in venture capital, and anyone else with a serious interest in the subject.
The article describes the author as “president of the Beta Group, a firm that develops and commercializes new technology with funding from individuals, companies, and venture capitalists. It is located in Menlo Park, California.”
Rating: 5 / 5
Bob Zider is president of the Beta Group, a firm that develops and commercializes new technology with funding from individuals, companies, and venture capitalist. This Harvard Business Review-article was published in November-December 1998, which was during the Internet/e-commerce boom.
“Contrary to popular perception, venture capital plays only a minor role in funding basic innovation.” Zider discusses the role venture capital plays: it “fills the void between sources of funds for innovation and traditional, lower-cost sources of capital available to ongoing concerns.” He then continues to describe the investment profile and the logic of the deal venture capitalists use to achieve their investors’ high expectations at an acceptable risk. Zider also explains the attractive returns for venture capitalists (in return for financing one or two years of a company’s start-up) and the reason why “seemingly bright and capable people seek such high-cost capital?” The article is complemented with some extremely useful sidebars to clarify this mythical industry.
Yes, I do like this article. This clear article kills some myths and fairytale stories about the venture-capital industry. It is primarily aimed at beginners, although some financial knowledge is useful for readers. For readers who appreciate this type of article I also recommend Justin Pettit’s 2001-article ‘Is Share Buyback Right for Your Company?’ The author uses simple business US-English.
Rating: 5 / 5
Oh to be Successful. Success What is it? How do you get it? How do you pursuit it?, What does it take to be successful? Having follow Micheal Gerber for 30 years, this book in my opinion is his best work. Micheal Gerber’s life long passionate pursuit of success is summed up in this book. Buy this book, buy an additional copy for a friend.
Get a cup of coffee, put your feet and read this book over a weekend. Monday morning if you apply the principles in this book you will be on the path to success. Being a business consultant for 29 years people come to me all the time and ask me. Is there one business book I can read that will help me right away? There is now!
Rating: 5 / 5
In Gerber’s classic, The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber wrote about the roles of the business owner (entrepreneur, technician, manager) and the importance of systems. Without a doubt, that was a great book. The principles were hard and fast and they were easy to believe, even if not easy to implement.
Since that book, Gerber has gone beyond the systems and has dug into the DNA of the business owner–the thinking, the feeling and the dreaming that makes great business owners. Some folks may not like this so-called “soft side” of small business ownership. Critics will say it’s fuzzy and unimportant. But for those of us who practice the art of entrepreneurship, we know how true it is. And we know that the dreaming Gerber refers to is not the clumsy daydreaming of a lazy wannabe. It’s the rigorous, disciplined dreaming of an ambitious entrepreneur who envisions greatness in her company. Yes, the dreaming Gerber is talking of is hard work.
You can’t build a great small business without following the advice Gerber gives–not just in his original book–but also in “Awakening the Entrepreneur Within” AND this book, “The Most Successful Small Business in the World.” Critics can mock it, but ambitious practitioners of entrepreneurship will appreciate the wisdom Gerber reveals here about the mindset and makeup of The Most Successful Small Business (Owners) in the World.
It’s definitely worth the read!
Rating: 5 / 5
I loved the book. I am not a book reviewer, or a professional business consultant. The professional business consultants that I consulted with could not help me with the establishment of my business. Michael E. Gerber has! Michael’s language is poetic, intentionally so, as to inspire the creative nature within each and everyone of us.
Before even reading the e-Myth Series I consulted with three well known business consultants. When I explained my company, and the services that we would provide, on all three occaisions, I was told by the professional 1. “what you are doing is too important to fail!” “I can’t help you”. 2. “what you are doing is too important to fail!” “I can’t help you, but I will think about it and call you”. 3rd consultant the most well known author and marketing professional, said “what you are doing is too important to fail”, “I can’t help you”, “but you should read e-Myth by Michael E. Gerber”. I called Michael Gerber, he said “What you are doing is too important to fail; I will help you”!
I am new to business, so creating a company that had even the most elementary of standards is at very least a direction, But to create a World Class Company, is Michael’s standards. Michael expresses and believes that world changing purpose must drive any Entrepreneural Venture.
I have participated “in the Dreaming Rooms” and of course nothing is free and yes everyone should go. Is it hard and foreign, trying to wrap your head around something etherial, it certainly is worth a try!
I expect that within a very few months the name of my Company and our services will be touching the very heart of our nation at least 10,000 times.
Michael mostely reminds us that nothing is impossible with God, especially in business we all need to know that.
Rating: 5 / 5
I don’t normally comment in these venues, but was taken aback by the nasty attacks on Michael Gerber. It wasn’t even about the book, but about the person. (Makes the attacker look very small, but that’s his problem.) I read the book and found it inspiring. Plain and simple. If you are offended by the mention of God, don’t read this book then, because Gerber is inspired. Yes, by God. Imagine that! You won’t find it over-done in the least, but there are some who actually bristle at the very mention of the Divine, and get very distracted from the main message. And the main message is actually in the title of the book. I always say that if you take away one thing, from a book or seminar, that will improve your life, it was well worth it. Twas a bargain to gain new insights from Michael Gerber for under 20 bucks. One example of what I walked away with was reading very specific guidelines for finding a market and creating a successful business that can sustain the nightmarish economic responses to the acts of our wayward politicians. (My political view, not his.) Go for it!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
I read the book, and didn’t find a heck of a lot of reference to G-d in it. I was looking for it because of “Dr. Toad’s” complaints in his review. Yes there was some, but hey, I’m inspired by that, rather than turned off. Glad to see Michael E. Gerber isn’t afraid to acknowledge G-d in this age of PC and narcissism. Even our Founding Fathers knew that we couldn’t do great things on our own … but I digress. As usual, Michael’s quips and easy writing/speaking style guide us through important concepts, unlike most of the business books on the market that can substitute for Ambient. This book will not only inspire you, but put big ideas into simple language. Repetition? More like “review,” which is what every good teacher does. And Michael E. Gerber is definitely the teacher I wish I had in business school!
Rating: 5 / 5
An outstanding read! Clearly written, I devoured this book in three nights, have since re-read it twice and constantly refer to it for reference.
I also bought the book as a gift for the CEO of an Internet Security startup firm. Interestingly, he left it on a plane by mistake and promptly bought a new copy so as not to go without!
Golis outlines the key elements for structuring the V.C. business plan, which takes a bit of effort to get straight but is well worth incorporating his elements in a formal Business Plan.
As a reality check for other buyers, I used this book as a constant reference source in building a submission for Stage 1&2 V.C. raising (which has now successfully been accepted and is in the ‘heads of agreement stage’ for $500,000 in funds placement).
The book does not present company management issues. Its focus is on the Entrepreneur and Venture Capital raising issues.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m looking forward to reading this book — Jim is speaking at the upcoming conference in Denver (The Capital Factor http://TheCapitalFactor.com) and I plan on meeting him there! I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about him from people who have heard him speak and you gotta admit, what the guy has accomplsihed so far is astonishing!
Rating: 4 / 5
I found this book on the syllabus of one of the entrepreneurial courses for Dartmouth’s MBA (a resourceful way to find good reading). It was far superior to New Venture Creation (timmons) which seemed to be the main reading on that syllabus. That book is good but full of a lot of superfluous info–I’m still wading through that one. This book is concise, packed, and speaks exactly to entrepreneurs seeking angel money or creative financing. It doesn’t wax poetic about starting a venture, but does give the down and dirty on where investors are, the history of angel investing, and how that has lead to current investor expectations. It includes examples of what a cram-down round looks like on a spread-sheet and more.
I was very impressed with this reading and highly recommend it. Every time I was reading and was wishing it had a resource, that resource popped up in the next few pages. Excellent info in a concise format. If you’re not looking for angel financing however, you’ll be disappointed as this book won’t speak to you.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is full of useful information for both angel investors and entrepreneurs seeking funds for any start-up. There are anecdotes, facts and figures describing the industry and trends, a comprehensive list of resources, groups and sample agreements. There are checklists for use in everything from business planning to due diligence. If you are interested enough to be reading this review you should just get the book, you will be glad you did.
Rating: 5 / 5
And I’m only in the 3rd chapter. I’ll agree I was disheartened when I realized at least half the book is an appendix and the first chapter is a bit repetitive, but….., the information that follows is well worth the $30 I paid. A little more work and $50 for the book would only raise an eyebrow or two. If you expect to get $1,000 worth of reference material or a bible for an industry insider, well…., forget it. If you’re really on the fence considering it, buy it second-hand at $15, don’t buy coffee for a month and I’ll guarantee you’ll be well ahead of the game. Is it for someone with previous experience in Angel Investing? No, go write your own book if you have that experience. Is it useful for the price and its’ stated intent? No question. There’s obvious experience being laid out in the book and that’s worth thousands more than any price I’ve seen asked for the book.
Just my 2 cents, go to get back to that next chapter now…
Rating: 4 / 5
I did, so I bought five books. I will review them from worst to best.
“Finding an Angel Investor In a Day,” by The Planning Shop (2007), told me nothing I didn’t know, and I didn’t know anything about business plans or angel investors. The title is ludicrous and the advice is obvious, e.g., “Your business plan should be concise, compelling, and irresistible to investors.” 1 star.
“The ABC’s of Writing Winning Business Plans,” by Garrett Sutton (2005), walks you through writing business plans for a lawn mowing business and buying a pizza restaurant. If your business is more complicated, this is not the book for you. 1 star.
“The Ernst & Young Business Plan Guide,” by Brian Ford, Jay Boorstein, and Patrick Pruitt (2007), is a good book but hardly inspiring or insightful. If you follow this book your business plan will be competent but won’t grab investors. 3 stars.
“Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs,” by Susan Preston (2007). This book doesn’t explain how to write a business plan, but it explains how to make a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation to investors — a presentation that will grab investors. For example, one question is “How is your product or technology scalable?” I also learned some of the financials that angel investors look for, such as what IRR is expected. This book helped and inspired me to write an excellent presentation, that became the basis for my business plan. 5 stars.
“Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur,” by Dermot Berkery (2008). This is a textbook for a business school course about venture capital. This book is full of insights. Every few pages new ideas would compel me to go to my computer and add stuff or rewrite my business plan, for example, Berkery emphasizes the need for clear milestones. Preston mentioned milestones but didn’t make it clear why they are so important. The financials that were briefly presented in Preston’s book are thoroughly presented in Berkery’s book, for example, what gross margin investors look for (80% or more) and why they need such extremely profitable products or services. Plus you learn the jargon or key phrases of venture capitalists, e.g., “a large but well signaled market,” the importance of “market power” and an effective “route to customers.” I feel that my business plan now speaks to investors in their language, with the numbers they are looking for. 5 stars.
Rating: 5 / 5
as an entrepreneur and VC investor tfor more than 20 years, i higly recoomend the book. extremely useful insights for both roles, which indicate how experienced these authors and their advisors are. the book covers all important aspects of the business, along with useful tips and watch outs known only the most experienced people in this business. By far the best book in its category.
Rating: 5 / 5
by far the most comprehensive and concise book on entrepreneurship and venture capital investment. The book takes a rather unique approach of introducing fairly complicated issues in a straighforward fashion. The authors are looking at all aspects of VC investments and businedd development with a ‘value investing” approach, something I liked a lot. warning of fads and bubbles and legal pitfalls, they provide excellent insights that only experienced investros and entrepreneurs know
how important they are. As an entrepreneur and VC investor for more than 20 years,I highly recommend the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The authors need to learn how to write a real introduction to their subject matter as the 3 1/2 pages in this book is inadequate. The title is also mis-leading in that the material that is really covered well deals with entreprenuerial finance. The rest of the material dealing with 1) innovative idea, 2) core team, 3) business plan, 4) employee recruitment, 5) entrepreneurial law and 6) intellectual property are summarized in five all too brief chapters in part I of this book.
I suggest the authors re-title the book to “Entrepreneurial Finance for High-Tech Start-Ups” as that would accurately reflect the content of the book and that they retain the content of section I, but that they recognize that the material offered is but a short summary and that readers need to be directed to other sources to fill in the gaps.
A resource bibliography needs to be built into each chapter in section I. My suggestions go as follows: 1) John Nesheim’s soon to be released book “Unfair Advantage” for the chapter on innovative idea, 2) Nesheim’s book on High Tech Start-ups for the chapter on the management team, 3) a number of resources are quite good for the business plan chapter:
Rhonda Abrams’s “Six-Week Start-Up”
Rhonda Abrams’s “The Successful Business Plan”
Bovee, Thill & Mescon “Excellence in Business”
Cunningham, Nikolai & Bazley “Accounting: Information for Decisions”
Terrell & Terrell “Survey of Accounting: Making Sense of Business”
4) A good set of job descriptions on an industry by industry basis would really help most companies here. I suggest looking at “Labor Market Information: Industry Report Archives” at novaworks.org , 5) Bagley & Dauchy’s “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law” and 6) for IP go to the real experts at Nolo Press. “Patents for Beginners”, “Nondisclosure Agreements”, and “Patent Searching Made Easy”.
“From Concept to Wall Street” is a good book when you get to the entrepreneurial finance stage of your start-up, but in the meantime you really need the help from the type of resources that I mentioned earlier. Otherwise you’ll probably never make it to that stage.
4 stars for the entrepreneurial finance material (authors are much too condensed in their treatment), 1 star for misleading title and for the lack of pointers to the material you will need in section I. Overall rating of 3 stars.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book starts off slowly but when it gets rolling it is very helpful ,giving good infromation where and when you need it.
Rating: 4 / 5
“Angels” are private financial supporters and other professional underwriting entities who provide more funds to business entrepreneurs than any other source, according to authors Mark Van Osnabrugge and Robert J. Robinson. This book offers ways to bring together those with imaginative ideas and those with the funds to “finance” those ideas, for a profit, of course. Do you have an innovative project? a new toy or software product? Looking for investors? Read this book, there may be something in it for you. A matching service is also included in the book.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book seems good when you read the 50 first pages but then…the same ideas…again and again. I started to writte on a piece of paper some of the ideas cause I was making a study of the venture capital industry for my MBA. But there were so many repetitions in this book…really annoying sometimes!
In addition, the book is a little bite disorganized sometimes. It starts from A, jumps to J, comes back to D, go to W, …. hard to follow sometimes.
The content is not strong! Contrary to what you could believe about the presentation of this books (the two authors make a lot of references to [previous researchers in that field, which is however useful if you want to go back to their main publications), this book has been made for a large public…a very large one.
I believe this book has been made very quickly during the boom of the so-called new economy when business angels and venture caqpital companies were at the apogee. This book is a little far behind the new trend. It even misses some strend that were occuring when this book was written…so, very disappointing.
However, the book is still affordable and I think that people who are still impressed by the words Business Angels and that still don’t know what it is about should buy this book. It gives a simple but still interesting pictures of the Mysterious investors. If you want a comparison about Business Angeles and Venture Capitalists, that is also a good book.
Conclusion: Good for the large public.
Jusr OK for those that have some insight about the VCs and other Business Angels
Avoid it for all the other ones…it’s ot worth the price.
Rating: 2 / 5
This was a delightful read, easily the best in a trio of books that I bought on the subject. Lucid. Well-researched.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is full of quality information to help those seeking start-up funding. After reading it once, I was inspired for my search for funds. If you are out weeding your way through the jungle of financing, get this book as a quality resource.
Rating: 5 / 5
My motivation for purchasing this book was to gain a deeper understanding of the legal aspects for start-ups, venture capital investments, and buyouts. I was pleasantly surprised to read how clearly the points were made (I am not a lawyer) and thoroughness of the different sections. This book covers popular topics like start-ups and buyouts in addition to more esoteric topics including industry consolidations and turnaround investments. Furthermore, each topic discusses various ways to structure the transaction (e.g. business entity, financing) and the implications of the decision (e.g. liability, tax impact, regulations). Although the book is targeted to business lawyers it really is an invaluable source of information for entrepreneurs and business owners. For example, techniques for VCs to negotiate deal terms with entrepreneurs are covered. Entrepreneurs should be familiar with the options to make sure they are getting the best deal for their situation.
Anyone looking for a quick high-level read should skip this book as there are a lot of details. However, if you are looking for a comprehensively detailed reference book, then I highly recommend “Structuring Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Entrepreneurial Transactions” by Jack S. Levin.
Rating: 5 / 5
“Attracting Capital From Angels” does a great job of explaining angel investors”
Luis Villalobos
Founder
Tech Coast Angels
Rating: 5 / 5
“You’ve created a great resource for entrepreneurs. I’ve added ‘Attracting Capital from Angels’ to a short list of books that I recommend to companies who are raising funds to take their business to the next level. Congratulations!” –
I would recommend this book only to the complete novice to angel and venture investing. I was hoping for more details regarding the angel investing process. One thing it teaches, though, is that angel investors are much less sophisticated and organized than professional venture capitalists (the way I understood it). What it feels like is a collection of experiences with the interpretation left mostly to the reader. Great if that’s what you’re looking for.
Rating: 3 / 5
“The complexity of business in economically demanding times makes finding constructive angels that much more challenging. The advice and tips in Attracting Capital from Angels are, therefore, invaluable. The wisdom offered here is not just for start-ups or neophytes, but is a well-timed companion to already existing resources and approaches to helping a business in all phases of development. It’s also a great manual for people who want to share their knowledge (and invest capital) as an angel. I plan to recommend Attracting Capital from Angels to every entrepreneur I run into in the future who asks for mentoring sources. Great job!” (Bob Bozeman, General Partner, Angel Investors, LP)
Rating: 5 / 5
A new, uptodated and expanded edition of this book is available here at Amazon
Rating: 5 / 5
The approach taken for “Attracting Capital From Angels” is unique. The authors depend not just on their own areas of knowledge, but also on the opinions, and knowledge of others in the field through surveys, short questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The reader gains a sense of how the game is played from the players themselves.
Enjoyable to read with lots of true life anecdotes from both entrepreneurs who have obtained venture capital and the angel investors themselves.
A must read for entrepreneurs on the hunt for investors.
Rating: 5 / 5
Everything I needed to know was in this book. I didn’t wastetime calling tapped-out funds or people who didn’t care. They also offer an electronic version delivered via email. They say don’t do it, but I used the database for a personalized fax campaign Friday and Monday and received 13 reponses from cold calls in about 15 hours isn’t to shabby. This is a whole lot cheaper than the directories that cost over $300 bucks.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was disappointed in the quality of the directory. Kennedy Information’s Gold Book of Venture Capital Firms and Pratt’s Venture Capital Directory are much better.
Rating: 1 / 5
For the reader with a bright idea of a new company, but who lacks capital, this book is recommended. It has much practical advice for soliciting so-called angel capital. This is seed money, typically from $50 000 to a few hundred thousand dollars, that can be used to carefully finance a modest initial operation.
The text describes several organisations scattered throughout the US, that are venture forums. This is the preferred term for a group of well heeled individuals, and some venture capitalists, that regularly meet with prospective company founders. You, the founder, give a short presentation and they bombard you with questions about the viability of your idea.
Along these lines, the book helps you prepare your presentation. By giving questions that you should have some answers to, beforehand. These act as a preliminary assessment. Other aspects covered here include the crucial issue of valuation. How much is your idea worth, if it is to be instantiated in a company?
Despite the book’s title, the text also explains other possible sources of funding, like asset-based loans or incubators. The only problem with the description of the latter is the absence of a warning that you could be selling yourself short. Some incubators ask for more than 20% of equity, in return for providing little more than office space for a couple of years. If your idea truly is good, an incubator could be a very bad deal.
Rating: 4 / 5
John May and Cal Simmons spell out the steps, but more importantly give insight into the relationships, that allow businesses to get their initial capitalization. If you have a business in need of capital or a business plan, you should read this book. In the examples, pay attention to the the sub-themes of who introduces new companies to the investor group and who endorses the concept.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have the pleasure of being a member of one of John May’s groups, Active Angel Investors (http://activeangelinvestors.com/) and I am extremely glad I joined this group.
And now for a one sentence review of the book:
Just the first three chapters (How Angels Evaluate Entrepreneurs, When to Dance with an Angel, & Finding Angels and Making your Pitch) are worth the price of the book and if you are a successful entrepreneur, they can be worth millions!
Some other good books for angel info can be found at the Angel Capital Association’s website – http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/dir_resources/books.aspx
Here’s the list for your convenience:
* Benjamin, Gerald A. and Margulis, Joel B., Angel Investing – How to Find and Invest in Private Equity, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000.
* Benjamin, Gerald A. and Margulis, Joel B., The Angel Investor’s Handbook: How to Profit from Early-Stage Investing, New York: Bloomberg, 2001.
* Gompers, Paul and Lerner, Josh, The Venture Capital Cycle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999
* Hill, Brian E. and Power, Dee, Attracting Capital From Angels: How Their Money and Their Experience Can Help You Build a Successful Company, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2002
* Keeley, Robert H., Cooper, Jeffrey M. and Bloomer, Gary D., Business Angels: A Guide to Private Investing, available from the Kauffman Foundation, Kansas City, 1998.
* May, John and O’Halloran, Elizabeth F., State of the Art: An Executive Briefing on Cutting-Edge Practices in American Angel Investing, Charlottesville, VA: Darden Business Publishing, University of Virginia, 2003.
* Moore, Karl and Coveney, Patrick, Business Angels: Securing Start Up Finance, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998
* Osnabrugge, Mark Van and Robinson, Robert J., Angel Investing: Matching Start-up Funds with Start-up Companies – The Guide for Entrepreneurs, Individual Investors, and Venture Capitalists, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
* Simmons, Cal and May, John, Every Business Needs an Angel: Getting the Money You Need to Make Your Company Grow, Washington DC: Crown Business, 2001.
* Williams, Kelly, Working with Angel Investors for Community Development, New York: Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, 2003.
To the entrepreneur with the next idea that will change the world & make you a billionaire:
1) Read Every Business Needs an Angel (or better yet all of the above referenced books).
2) Contact me & send me your compelling executive summary!
NOTE: By compelling I mean that your executive summary is going to have me calling you before I finish reading it. Good luck to you all! (…)
Rating: 5 / 5
This is the best book I’ve read about how those individual investors make decisions with their own money when facing start up companies – entrepreneurs. Maybe the authors are right – every business any where needs angels.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have read several angel books as well as having spent 5 years running a large fund in the Valley, and I just don’t feel that Cal and John have their views correct. The investment world has changed and those who can be to the point and have a good idea with good management have a shot. However, I hope for these folks that Cal and John are not on the other side of the table evaluating.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is a fun, easy-read on the subject of angel clubs – which are valuable but should not be confused with real individual angel investing. John and Cal’s writing style is case-book and easy to read. This is a business book that makes you smile … a little bit because the stories are fun … and a little bit because there are a lot of not-so-happy stories that they don’t tell you about. But being the perpetual optimist, I like reading about the nice stories.
Rating: 3 / 5
If you are preparing a business plan to sell the merits
of your business to an outside investor, this is the book
you should use for guidance. BUY THIS BOOK TODAY!
Most business planning guides do not address the investor,
in fact, they often ignore the
investor completely. In addition to preparing a sound plan, this book tells you how to value your
business, communicate this value to your investor, and
demonstrate to the investor how he/she will get their money
out.
Rating: 5 / 5
unlike many books coming out, which are more like reworked thesis papers from dried up PHd programs, this book was readable and enjoyable.
Rating: 4 / 5
Finally! A practical, hands-on guide to raising venture capital. This step-by-step handbook gives an entrepreneur a clear, real-world roadmap to the fundraising process. I only wish I had a book like this when I started my company.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book illuminates the vital role played by Business Angels in today’s venture capital markets. I think writing style is as important as content when you are addressing a professional audience. This book gets A+ on both counts. The Informal Venture Capital Market by Moore and Coveney should be required reading for entrepreneurs and private investors. William E. Wetzel, Jr. Director Emeritus Center for Venture Research University of New Hampshire
Rating: 5 / 5
This book by Gerald Benjamin contains solid information on raising capital for new ventures and young companies. It’s a keeper. As someone who has worked on many, many capital raising projects for new emerging growth businesses, I would personally advise you to get this book. The advice is priceless! — Principal of a Venture Financing Firm
Rating: 5 / 5
Castillo describe en forma cándida, simple y directa su propia experiencia como emprendedora e inversionista en empresas. Su estilo personal genera un sentimiento de camaradería cuando comparte abiertamente errores reales con el fin de ilustrar un punto. El libro es un resumen práctico y un “abrir de ojos” para aquellos que recién se inician en el mundo empresarial o se dan cuenta de que necesitan un cambio en la manera de manejar sus negocios.
Rating: 4 / 5
Creando Empresas …fabulosas”, es un libro , realmente fabuloso, diferente, es una delicia leerlo, porque es ademas ameno e inspirador.
Me parecio muy practico, y lleva en forma muy directa a la reflexion y a la accion.
Es un libro basico para todos los que sonamos con crecer, nos aclara muchas ideas, y ayuda a dar giros a conceptos importantes,que antes nos hacian quedar en medio camino.
Realmente lo recomiendo…….. para todo el que quiera realmente ampliar su vision empresarial.
Rating: 5 / 5
As the Dot Coms become Dot Gones…its hilariously obvious that the modern VC is the equivalent of the Junk Bond Trader of the 80’s. Reading about their exploits as “Masters of the Universe” in investing huge sums of someone else’s money in money losing ventures and vapid startups with no business plans makes one wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place – true entrepreneurs have build companies by hard work, vision and determination. The short term, get rich quick results, fad driven, something for nothing mindset of the VC is the embarassing legacy of the .Com Disaster.
Rating: 1 / 5
There are many books in the marketplace that target different types of entrepreneurs with different types of approaches. Respectively, none of them work unless you are starting a mom-and-pop business. Believe me, I’ve gone through most of them! I have found that they are either based on a fandango “boilerplate business plan” model or written by beings from outer space, with grand delusions that your idea will rivet the attention of a venture capital firm or an investment banker. Forget it, those days are gone.
If you are serious about finding and raising private equity for your start-up company, this book will give you plenty of facts, stories and anecdotes. Angel Financing will also give you the methods and processes to get it done properly.
Promote your idea into a practical one. This book is pure common sense. Write a business plan to attract financing. The blueprint for operating your company is the next step. Look around and discover that Gerald Benjamin is a pioneer in this field and his views about how to raise private equity is gaining a foothold and turning heads. Recently, I attended one of his seminars and the people sitting next to me were simply top-caliber entrepreneurs.
There are very few companies that will ever make it to the public equity markets. For example, many large companies such as SAIC (headquartered in San Diego) are employee-owned. Just look at the facts presented in his book and reconsider your options, especially if you would like to retain control of your start-up.
There is one suggestion. Carefully review all the how-to-do a business plan material out there. Make sure it is suitable for your exact needs
Good luck!
Rating: 5 / 5
All the basics of VC, but more fun to read and much more likely to stick with me over the years as compared to some other “Intro to VC” books you’ll find. This book comes across as VC 101 from the true practitioners perspective.
Rating: 5 / 5
Para mí el libro “Creando empresas fabulosas” ha sido una enorme
herramienta. Yo me dedico a trabajo holístico, terapias alternativas con
energí y demás.
El tema de empresarial siempre me había parecido inalcanzable,
complicado, confuso. Por primera vez, gracias a este libro, entiendo
claramente la diferencia entre una empresa y un negocio, y más aún, sé
que hacer y que dejar de hacer para crear mi empresa fabulosa y no un
negocio temporal. La lectura del libro es sencilla, clara, específica,
nada de conceptos complicados y teorías engorrosas, y además me
fascina el buen sentido del humor que tiene.
Considero que cualquier persona, que en verdad quiera crear una empresa
fabulosa DEBE leérselo. Este libro se ha convertido en mi biblia
empresarial.
Fe Bailey
Certified Quantum-Touch Therapist and Instructor
San Francisco
Rating: 5 / 5
Venture capitalists have developed their own lingo, and this book cracks the code! Whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, or just amused by VC-speak, this book captures the spirit of silicon valley. If you’ve ever heard a clever saying and written it down, well, this book is chock full of witty sayings — “The first man gets the oyster; the second man gets the shell” and “In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.”
Rating: 5 / 5
The book reveals incredibly insight into some of the key fundamentals which drive the modern VC business.
The literary content helps frame those principles and puts them into practice, but in an fun and easily to read way. It will help those who aspire to enter the VC business truly understand what he/she is getting into.
Rating: 5 / 5
Sadly, this book is similar to most on venture capital in that it is based on interviews of VCs. The weakness behind this approach is that it provides unorganized content that lacks depth and utility. In short, while it doesprovide some important insight, these insights are neither unique or critical and can be found in other books that provide a much better resource to the entrepreneur.
Rating: 2 / 5
I’m pretty familiar with VC and entrepreneurship in the US, but have no experience in Europe. This was a good history, primer and cultural reference.
Rating: 4 / 5
While the author did present good sound background and structure to understanding the angel financing market, I wish I had known beforehand that much of the information was based on experiences in Britain, not the U.S. I would not have purchased this book — especially at its price. Many of the tables and references were in pounds, not dollars, and entities British, which required translation. I just couldn’t relate beyond the basics. Sorry. Not my cup of tea!
F.Lee
Rating: 2 / 5
This book is the most comprehensive description of Venture Capital as it is practised today!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
I was expecting a book discussing and employing actual valuation methods for different stage start-up companies, rounds of financing and maybe, the valuation of the different classes of stock that get issued in the subsequent rounds.
Instead, the book talked in generalities about how difficult valuing start-up entites is and how VCs focus on the product, the market and the management team. There was only one page where exit multiples and time to exit were discussed. In another section, there were some numbers presented regarding the effect of per share round on the price, but it was so poorly written and the exhibits so badly laid out, I could not follow what they were trying to say.
Each chapter was written by a different VC and reflected their own opinions and experiences, which was good.
There was good information in the book, but not at all what the title implied.
Rating: 2 / 5
I think anyone interested in investing in private companies or anyone who wants to understand the process of angel investing should read “Angel Financing”
Many wealthy investors are turning to financing small businesses due to the huge potential return. Benjamin and Margulis tell us that the angel investor who put $100,000 into Ciena Corporation saw the value of his investment grow into $285 million in three years, when the company went public. Further, knowledgeable business people can enhance the value of their angel investments through their experience, knowledge, and contacts. Unless you’re extremely wealthy, this ability to add value to your investments isn’t available when you invest in large publicly-traded companies.
Angel investing isn’t for everyone. Benjamin and Margulis say angel investors expect about one-third of their investments to fail completely. Further, many bad deals out there must be avoided. So, anyone considering angel investing should have business experience. And, there must be good chemistry between the investor and the entrepreneur.
To help new investors ask the right questions and avoid bad investments, Benjamin and Margulis provide a detailed due diligence questionnaire which will help investors understand what questions they should ask before making an angel investment.
“Angel Financing” is also a good book for entrepreneurs seeking angel financing. It helps entrepreneurs answer the questions: “Is my company financeable? Am I financeable?” And, “Angel Financing” helps entrepreneurs understand the private equity market.
We learn that the average angel investor is 48-59 years old, has a postgraduate degree, has management experience, and, typically, invests between $25,000 and $250,000 per deal. Many angel investors are self-made millionaires with a net worth between $1 million and $10 million dollars. Eighty percent of angels have previously started a company and have small business experience.
Benjamin and Margulis tell us that seeking private investments from people with a net worth below $1 million, or an annual income below $200,000, isn’t usually desirable. These people do not possess the discretionary income to make angel investments and are usually not classified as accredited investors. This could create legal problems for the entrepreneur if the investment fails.
Benjamin and Margulis point out that many of the wealthiest families and individuals have their wealth managed by conservative trusts or professional advisors. So, seeking an angel investment from an ultra-rich person may not prove successful, because the trust administrator often kills the deal because of the high risk involved.
Because angel investors don’t need to invest, Benjamin and Margulis tell entrepreneurs to be flexible in structuring the deal to meet the investor’s needs. Many entrepreneurs do not listen adequately to what potential investors are telling them.
“Angel Financing” contains a good appendix about private placements, discussing such things as exemptions from full securities registration under Rule 504, 505, and 506, although much of this information is also available free from the SEC.
Benjamin and Margulis say that entrepreneurs should expect to budget about 10% to 15% of the amount to be raised as fundraising expenses. We learn that costs of a SCOR offering average about $30,000 nationwide. (SCOR, Small Corporate Offering Registration, allows companies to raise up to $1 million and is highly state-specific. Some states encourage SCOR while other states are more hostile to it.)
Overall, “Angel Financing” is an excellent book for entrepreneurs and angel investors.
Peter Hupalo, Author of “Thinking Like An Entrepreneur”
Rating: 5 / 5
I decided to buy/read this book after reading the review. Interesting read for anyone who sees the Internet as everywhere….
[...]
Rating: 5 / 5
Zook demonstrates that physical geography continues to be a paramount factor in where a startup is located. His study is from the dot com era, and shows the striking correlation and clumping of US startups. Silicon Valley dominates, unsurprisingly. But then there are also major clusters in Seattle, New York, Austin, Los Angeles and Boston.
The book shows the prediliction of people in any industry to aggregate, even, or perhaps especially, when there is intense competition between companies in that industry. Ultimately, the clumping benefits the industry, by permitting an easier transfer of ideas and people. So that successful ideas and companies can grow.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is the most comprehensive description of Venture Capital as it is practised today.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a must read for anyone looking to learn about VC. The problem with it is that the content is extremely basic so anyone who is interested in working for a VC should already know that a a lot more. But it give a good background for everybody else and especialy entrepreneurs.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is an example of a new type of rip-off sometimes found on Amazon.com.
- An impressive book title indicates a specialist book on a niche subject
- A detailed book description with all the rigt words
- A high price tag signals quality
And then, when the book arrives, the reader discover that the text is very short and very basic, and could have written by a school boy. But he cannot complain, because the book is about the stated subject.
The perfect rip-off!
Rating: 1 / 5
I picked up this book in a bookstore expecting the typical rhetoric and was enlightened. It explained not only the typical demographic of an angel investor but also descriped the thought processes of several different types of angels. A must read for startup executives if you’ve never done a startup before. Should be a required MBA course.
Rating: 5 / 5
Want to make obscene amounts of money without having to run the company yourself? Become a venture capitalist! This book assembles the stories of some of the brightest names in the business and shows how they made their mark on the industry, usually with a smashing success but occasionally by changing the way venture capital works. An inspiring and useful read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was VERY expensive. It took a while to get to me. I really looked forward to it. Then it arrived. It is SMALL. Look at the published physical dimensions in the description. I read the book. It is THIN. Look how few pages are in this book. Then I noticed that an ENORMOUS chunk of this book is NOT articles by famous VC persons but rather just BOILERPLATE legal contract language. This leaves several TINY articles of GENERIC, NOT SPECIALIZED information about the venture capital market. If I had READ the description more closely to see how small this book was (physically and page length) I might have had some idea how disappointed I would be. But I would NOT have figured out just HOW LAME THIS BOOK IS without owning it and seeing how much of it is WASTED SPACE in my opinion. You could learn more (at the moment) by visiting Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneurship program online and watching the videos of real venture capitalists and real businesspersons discussing IN-DEPTH the thinking behind their moves. DON’T LET YOURSELF FEEL TAKEN. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. This book is a terrible waste of money that could have gone to print business cards or take a train to a meeting or anything better to promote your entrepreneurial ambitions.
Rating: 1 / 5
you can find the information found in this book via the internet… the only thing i found this book good for is to convince the obvious: venture capital business is big business.
also get to know who the big-wigs are in the business… which can be discovered on the internet… check out redherring.com and subscribe to the VC p.s. newsletter.
Rating: 3 / 5
Very detailed look into one case study and insight into how the industry started.well written and easy to follow. I would recommend this to anyone curious about the world of Venture Capital
Rating: 4 / 5
very good and very original book ! the only book talking about “corporate venture capital”: the venture capital made by great companies.
Rating: 3 / 5
This brief book offers a sound introduction to the fundamentals of venture capital investing. Though it emphasizes the United Kingdom, it illustrates the state of the venture capital business in other nations as well. Richard Thompson gives a straightforward explanation of what “real venture capital” is. He distinguishes venture capital for new business development from private equity, or refinancing, for established companies. Case studies and anecdotes from the author’s own experience support his plain, commonsense recommendations. While this book will be particularly appropriate for readers in the U.K., getAbstract also recommends it to any reader seeking a short, practical guide to the business of investing venture capital.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been a limited partner in venture firms for over twenty years. Karen Southwick’s “fly on the ceiling” view of actual general partners meetings was an eye opener. She pulls no punches such as a general partner’s comments on one firm, “I’ve basically given up on the company. They did everything I told them not to. There’s no CEO. They’re going to run out of money and I don’t want to write another check”… “I’ve totally lost confidence in the team”. This honest reporting of behind the scenes action makes the book a must read for anyone interested in venture capital and Silicon Valley.
Rating: 5 / 5
I can’t say enough good things about this book! Gompers and Lerner provide a crystal clear explaination of the role venture capital plays in the economy and offers an insightful view of how venture capital will change in the future.
Anyone who is launching a new venture should bypass the “How To Write A Business Plan” books and pick up a copy.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book captures the true essence of private venture capital investing and shows the importance of the venture capital investor taking a hands on interest in the investee companies as opposed to the reputation of venture investors as short term exploiters who are investing for the profit only. All future venture investors and entrepreneurs can greatly benefit from Mr. Thompson’s experience and successes outlined in this book. An excellent read!
Rating: 5 / 5
This well written book gives you the whole story: What’s in for entrepreneurs raising funds, for VC investors, and how the industry creates value as a whole. It will give you insights that may be valuable if you haven’t been a player or gone through financing rounds before. A must read!
Rating: 5 / 5
Gompers and Lerner have written the best book on venture capital thus far. The authors have done a great service to entrepreneurs, VCs, and the entire business community with this work.
It is written, organized, and executed at perfect pitch and should be read by anyone considering taking the plunge into entrepreneurship, pursuing a career as a VC, or simply wanting to know more about the complexities and true nature of venture capital.
As venture capital gradually becomes more plentiful in the next 24 months, reviewing this work should be required of serious-minded professionals.
Rating: 5 / 5
You will find the quite difficult to follow, but it is interesting to read and you will find new information on each page if VC is stranger to you.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is good if you are looking for a somewhat decent introduction to terminology and processes. However, I think you will find other books a far better investment in your time. I would say this is a high school level course in VC.
I question some of the motives of the author through the book. At one point he says that the best way to meet a VC is to have an introduction by a broker. In my experience taking three companies through VC, I have found this is the absolute worse way of dealing with them. All of my friends who are partners at Chicago based VC firms say they would rather the entrepreneur come directly to them. You can tell the author is an attorney, because his advice is to use an attorney to find Venture Capital. Also, the author touts the fact he is a lecturer at Wharton. Lecturer and Professor are worlds apart. It isn’t that hard to get an invitation to speak at a business school, so I don’t put much weight on his using this as a claim to fame.
This book is good for terminology, but not good for advice. My recommendation is that you do not follow the guidelines here, only use the book as an introduction to terminology.
If you want a real book on advice, listen to someone that has taken a company through the process. Get Rob Ryan’s book “Entrepreneur America”. You will find it is a much better investment of time and money.
Rating: 2 / 5
This seems to be a bunch of lecture notes for a Venture Capital course masquerading as a book. Like lecture notes, the material presented is spotty and uneven, but interspersed with enough factoids to keep the reader interested. As a text, it would have benefited from an outline and a good editor. About 45% of its 368 pages are appendices (course handouts) of sample contracts. If this is your first venture into venture capital, find the course text or read something like Linda Chandler’s Winning Strategies for Capital Formation. Then read this to add some depth.
Rating: 3 / 5
10,000 years ago there was a civilization where people would throw money onto the street and it would turn into huge castles and fat bank accounts. Then there was an unknown worldwide catastrophe and that world completely disappeared. Later on a book was discovered where the people throwing all the money around told their stories, oblivious to the coming world catastrophe. Its fascinating to see inside the minds of these primitive humans.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is a must read for every entrepreneur and VC. The snippets of information in it are very valuable even after the downfall of the Internet economy-most of the text is more focused on timeless vc/entrepreneur related issues. I would highly recommend this book…
Rating: 5 / 5
As I read this book, I had to keep flipping back to the start to convince myself it was actually a true story. While the author has cleverly kept names out of the tale (”to protect the guilty” he says), some of the stuff these investors did is incredible. If venture capitalists are half as bad as this guy found them to be, the economy is in trouble.
The story is a set of diary entries charting the rise and fall of this startup company in “Silicon Valley”, USA. You can really feel for the author when things start to go bad, but even from the first entry you know he’s worried because the investor is trying to chat up teenage girls during a business lunch. Between the company ’sponsored’ trips to France (apparently for sex for the investor), and bringing in a collection of scam-artists to suck money out, these investors really screwed this guy. What’s great about the book is you can see things going downhill, but there’s never really a moment where you see how the company could have stopped it, even though they realized they were being had.
The big mysteries of course are: who exactly is Karl Capita, what was the company, and most importantly, what’s being done about dodgy VCs now?
I totally recommend this as an entertaining and shocking read. I’m sure this kind of story is exactly why the stock market crashed and all those ‘dotcom’ millionaires disappeared so quickly. BTW, it’s not a typical boring business book at all. More like a movie plot! Very funny but touching moments too (like the 11th September 2001 entry).
[I read the hardback, but adding my review to the other versions since it's the same book and it's a bloody excellent read.]
Rating: 5 / 5
This is an extremely unique and exciting book. I have always had questions for venture capitalists, and reading this book answered many of them. The style is clear, and it is very easy to understand. The interviews have obviously been conducted meticulously, and very good questions are asked. If you run an internet business or are going to have any future interaction with venture capitalists, you would be silly not to pick this up and read it.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is truly unlike anything I have read so far on venture capital. It definitely contains true insights from the VCs featured-instead of glossed over “how to” comment in other venture capital books. A very interesting and educational read for anyone in the Internet or technology industry.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a well-researched and written guide for anyone interested in a VC career. It is primarily targeted at MBAs exploring their options after business school and puts a career in VC in context with the typical MBA alternatives – investment banking and management consulting. Even though as a mid-career executive I am not within that target group, I found this a compelling reading with helpful tips on how to get one of those elusive entry level VC positions through networking and aggressive self-marketing. I ordered this book directly from wetfeet.com and I was charged a whopping $15 for surface delivery.
Rating: 5 / 5
O.K. Standard HBS fare, many pages of text and charts devoted to simple concept
Rating: 3 / 5
This is the first book that I have read on venture capital that actually covers “real” topics. The individuals interviewed in the book really know their stuff and because it is in an interview format there is no “glossing over” of any topics or terms. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the venture capital world-it is really a very different type of book than anything else out there.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is very brilliant and I can definitely use it in London, where I have a small consultancy business and use the internet for E-Commerce.
Secondly, because of the low interest rate of 6-7%, I can secure a loan to buy PCs for my office.
With the usage of an accounting application and spreadsheet, I can make quick financial statements and be in control of the business.
I cannot be that lucky in Ghana, if I were now starting up.
I run an application software development company, and I have connected by PC to the internet.
In Ghana, interest rates are high at about 45-50%
Internet technology is available but skilled labour is limited
Incomes are generally low; the minimum daily wage is about 70 cents and limits the market
The majority of Africa faces similar situations to that of Ghana.
In conclusion, I wish to suggest that a chapter is added to the book to discuss business planning in technologially disadvantaged economies like Ghana, to formulate a business planning manual without the use of the relatively expensive PC so the potential African entrepreneur can also have something to read from.
Rating: 4 / 5
Dense read. Definitely not a book you can “skip” through. However, after having read many books on VC, I can easily say this is the best historical overview (up to 1991) of the US VC industry I know. A must-read if you’re serious about understanding the VC industry, its past mistakes, and where it’s going.
Rating: 4 / 5
With the exception of Japan, all now industrialized East Asian countries were poor in the 1960s – well, nearly all poor. In a brief time period to-date, S. Korea has moved from traditional industries to semiconductors; Taiwan graduated from PC accessories to wafer fabrication; and Singapore from electronics to semiconductor manufacturing. Through tenacity, and emphasis on the domestic “invisible market” made up of low-income consumers, these countries have moved from low-tech to high-tech, and transformed poverty into (potential) wealth. How did that happen?
” Rice and Chips” asserts that countries that succeeded first developed their own technological ecosystems based on “Silicon Valley rules of [fostering] innovations.” The rules require venture capitalists to finance the incubation of technologies and “technopreneurs” to take those technologies to market. The goal of the book is to explain the rules that successful Asian countries have followed to get where they are today, and which other developing countries aspiring to technological advancement can emulate. The explanation ends up in eight rules of thumb. Without further ado here they are:
Rule 1: Build a powerful team of experts: researchers, scientists, engineers, suppliers, and even hobbyists.
Rule 2: Locate ecosystems near research institutions and universities, just like Silicon Valley is located near Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and similar institutions.
Rule 3: Beep the horn loud for role models by telling the stories of successful entrepreneurs to encourage others.
Rule 4: Develop an innovation culture by inspiring your people to think creatively – provide public lectures, plays, concerts, and the like.
Rule 5: Take advantage of economies of proximity that allow knowledgeable people to interact, exchange ideas, and for the ideas to flourish.
Rule 6: Turn the “brain drain” into the brain shower – tap into the Diaspora.
Rule 7: Develop effective financial and legal systems that would permit venture capital markets to emerge.
Rule 8: Take risk, fail, learn, take risk again, …, and eventually succeed!
This book is great: well written, economically written, and powerful message!
Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465
Rating: 5 / 5
I knew I wanted to work in venture capital but breaking into the market in these tought times was pretty intimidating. A friend of mine suggested these guides as a good resource and I’m glad I followed his advice. I now have a much better idea of the challenges facing the industry right now, and how to leverage my background to get where I want, despite the tough market. This guide also provided insight into which firms are staying afloat and which ones are struggling. I feel like I definitely have a cutting edge now.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m currently looking into interning at one of the VC firms in and around Silicon Valley and was happy to find a guide that could give me the skinny on what’s going on with the industry in general (ok, it’s tougher than ever!) and which firms really appear to be viable options for my personal and professional goals. The glossary of VC lingo was an amusing and informative read as were the Likes and Dislikes of various insiders. I was thinking this could be the industry for me, but now I really feel enthusiastic about trying it out. Thanks, WetFeet, for confirming my hunches and helping me figure out my immediate career path.
Rating: 5 / 5
Very to the point and direct. An easy to follow read.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book, knowing very little about going about getting a career in venture capital. I would compare this book to the Dummies or Idiots series of books – a good introduction, but by no means comprehensive.
You will be more happy with this book if you are more concerned with information about venture capital firms themselves. The book devotes a large portion to an overview of a number of prominent VC firms in the US. This will help you select what VC firms you may want to try to get hired on with, if you are unaware of the specialties of each.
What the book does not devote much time to is the “day in the life” type of discussions. There are a couple entries by people employed in VC that are at different stages in their careers. But I believe that more of these types of journals would give a more comprehensive overview of a career in VC.
I think this book is a good place to start if you are interested in learning about a career in VC. After reading the book, you will be able to decide whether or not you are interested in learning more about the industry, or whether it’s not for you.
Rating: 4 / 5
This report has everything you could need as an entrepreneur looking to raise venture capital. The chapters by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists provide incredible insight, while the term sheet and other documents are incredibly useful, and will help you get the right deal on valuation. Having been in venture capital related fields for over 10 years, this is the best resource I have found – I recommend this to everyone I know that is raising venture capital or interested in the true workings of venture capital.
Rating: 5 / 5
Steve Harmon’s reputation as one of the brightest stars in the stock world is well deserved. Steve has a gift for uncovering real value in this Internet age. I follow Steve’s Broadband Report and my portfolio is up 220%.I rate Steve’s new book with five stars because it’s even better than his first…and I learned volumes from that book. I always say, the proof is in the pudding and I happen to be enjoying a rather large bowl thanks to Steve Harmon.
Rating: 5 / 5
Steve has presented an in depth look at the venture capital world in this release of Zero Gravity 2. I appreciate his no-nonsense approach and his willingness to expose what goes on behind the scenes. Very good insights!
Rating: 5 / 5
Steve Harmon knows how to get to the heart of the matter. This book has given me very helpful insights and has helped me make sense of the recent investment arena.
Rating: 5 / 5
I just purchased a copy of Harmon’s book Zero Gravity 2.0.
I am new to the investment arena and found this book extremely useful. In fact, I have already acquired backing for my venture.
My hat is off to you Mr. Steve Harmon…
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is pure rubbish. Even worse than the first Zero Gravity book (I should have learned my lesson). If what you want is mindless anecdotes, shameless name dropping, and little substance, this is the book for you. For shame.
Rating: 1 / 5
.
This book is more of a collection of articles written by practicing VCs/PE professionals.
Many of the articles discuss either geographical, structural or practical issues in either LBO or Venture capital.
A good collection.
Borrow it from the local library rather than buying it.
Rating: 4 / 5
Twenty-five case studies of businesses that started without venture capital on the Internet, how they grew and what sorts of problems they ran into along the way.(Case no. 19 is about MSEN, the ISP I was involved in in 1991-1995, and I was interviewed for the book.) A well-researched book on lots of issues facing the small internet business, made even more relevant by the drying up of venture capital.
Rating: 5 / 5
The author shares many lessons learnt over 20 years in the PE business.
Would be very helpful to many, including PE investors looking to avoid investing in PE funds that will not make them money (most, unfortunately, after fees) and PE funds that make many of the mistakes the author so clearly explains.
Ken Fagan
traducteur private equity
http://www.privateequitytrad.com
Rating: 5 / 5
Arnold Kling is right on.
The examples and suggestions provide business guideposts to starting and growing an innovative company on the Internet. Under the radar is that vast space of million and multi-million dollar niches that don’t qualify for the VC or IPO. This is the space where we can do well for others, make money, and not get trampled by the elephants. The area that Arnold Kling describes is even riper since the dot com bubble broke.
Buy this book for the chapter about the economics of VC financing alone. It is a clear short demonstration of why VC financing is unsuitable for the majority of startups (and perhaps is a quick way ruin a good thing).
Get some experience without having to live through it all.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am one of the featured case studies in “Under the Radar,” so you could say I’m biased. That said, I *really* wish this book had been available when I started my first Internet company. It has lots of great “from the trenches” advice, from developing your strategy to recruiting the right people to courting investors to designing your web site to… you get the picture.
The only quibble I have is at the very end, when the author suggests that technology and statistics may open up the investment pool to “Under the Radar” companies by allowing investors to better manage risk (i.e. make investment decision on more than just “gut feel”). That may be so, but his examples — a computer that can beat the world’s best Othello player, automated underwriting of consumer loans — are less than persuasive because they deal with relatively simple problem sets (winning a game based on probability, making a loan based on a few easily defined credit characteristics). The profile of a successful startup contains many, many hard-to-quantify attributes (including luck) and they are often mutually exclusive. For example, as an investor do you look for a charismatic CEO like Steve Jobs or a reclusive techno-genius like Seymour Cray? The answer is both. I suspect we’re a long way away from a reasonably reliable system for predicting startup success. (Witness the stock market, where the majority of professional fund managers fail to outperform the averages even though they have a wealth of data and modeling technologies at their disposal.)
But this is just a quibble, and an irrelevant one at that. The focus of this book is how to start a successful business, not picking winners and losers. Whether you’re already on your third Internet business or just thinking about making the leap for the first time, this book is a must read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was well organized, easy to follow and written by a knowledgeable author. It lays out the basics of what private equity is (venture & buyout considered separately), how returns are generated (at a very high level of detail), historical return analysis of PE, and a very brief overview of how to set up an investment program as an LP.
As someone who works in finance, I find it very hard to believe that someone who is a professional money manager (e.g. LP) would need a book like this – yet that is the supposed target audience to which the book is addressed. If there truly are LPs out there who have never invested in PE before (nor have their employers or co-workers for that matter), this book would still be of no use because there isn’t enough information in the book to spell out exactly how to construct an investment strategy step by step. Yet if you do have any prior exposure to PE the book is interesting, logical, but disappointingly basic. I am surprised how little info was packed into 250 pages.
This book is probably a great intro for people who don’t already work in finance, or a quick (disappointing?) read for those who do.
Rating: 4 / 5
As a business owner, I am quite pleased with the information I was able to extract from this book.
It will not make you rich overnight, but it will explain patiently the unique challenges of starting and operating an Internet-based business.
Not all ideas are VC-worthy and this book describes the basic VC premises.
The case studies are quite in-depth and definitely will help you avoid same mistakes. The author does not shy away from early failures and fatal choices of wrong business partners.
In short, you’ll enjoy the book and learn many things. I highly recommend it to any enterpreneur.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a really great resource on venture capital deals. Viewed it on my computer, which I prefer a lot more than to reading hundreds of pages in a book. The DVD is great and features 100 minutes live with the VC, Alex Wilmerding. Highly recommend this product….
Rating: 5 / 5
Private Equity is the most “underpublished” asset class. Meyer and Mathonet provide a thorough and comprehensive guide into private equity, which it is more valuable when books of this kind barely exist. A must for investors in the asset class!
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a very good read for students and practitioners. It is easy to read, well laid out and a very useful reference document that you will consult regularly.
Rating: 5 / 5
The best thing about this book is that it’s written by someone who has succeeded at the internet and yet kept his success in perspective. This is very refreshing given that the typical business/internet book is written by someone who has not succeeded on the net but thinks they know exactly how to do it. The book is very accessible to the casual reader yet substantive enough that serious practioners of the internet and business in general will find it highly instructive. The author has lots of interesting stories that help to chronicle the development of the net and how businesses have struggled to harness it. The book is somewhat textbook like in its explanation of key concepts but is never boring. It’s very funny at times and always makes you think. It’s like having a class with a good teacher. You enjoy yourself and learn at the same time. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5
The production values of this video (from ReedLogic Executive Seminars) are abysmal by today’s standards. It appears to be the result of transferring an old analog video tape to DVD with minimal editing and has a grainy, digitized appearance. The setting is what appears to be the corner of a small conference room where the presenter, Alex Wilmerding of Boston Capital Partners (a man in his early 40’s casually dressed in an open-collar, button down blue shirt), sits and is flanked by two mostly empty bookcases. He appears to be responding to a series of unspoken questions by an off-camera producer whose voice does, unexpectedly, break through twice near the middle and end of the video. The presenter himself is clearly not practiced in public speaking or well-rehearsed, as his answers are frequently interrupted by pauses and “huhs” and the delivery is emotionally flat and monotonous. The whole thing is poorly scripted and very repetitive.
Regarding the content and organization of this “seminar,” it is a series of 18 sections preceded by a short introduction. The sections are:
1 Term Sheets
2 The Wording of the Term Sheet
3 The Management Team
4 Red Flags in the Term Sheet for the Entrepreneur
5 Red Flags in the Term Sheet for the Investor
6 Valuation
7 The Role of the Term Sheet
8 Negotiation Strategy for Investors
9 Negotiation Strategy for the Management Team
10 Important Sections of the Term Sheet for Investors
11 Important Sections of the Term Sheet for Entrepreneurs
12 Where Executives Get Confused
13 Strategy for Establishing Valuations
14 Factors in Establishing Valuation
15 Financial Tools/Ratios
16 Case Study: “NewCo”
17 Key Players and their Motivation
18 Advice for the Management Team
Looks good, no?
There is no navigable menu or table of contents here. The only way you can navigate to any of the sections is by using your fast forward, pause and reverse controls like on an old-fashioned VCR. This video is only a little over an hour long meaning each of the sections is very short and consequently superficial. And did I mention that they’re very repetitive?
I found the actual content to be modestly informative but strange because the intended audience is advertised to be “C-level executives” (CEO, CFO, etc.) yet the presentation is clearly for “beginners.” That being so, the content is lacking for this audience as well since a number of VC jargon terms (e.g. “pre-money,” “post-money,” various kinds of ownership dilutions) are not defined. The main take-home message is self-promoting and seems to be that VCs are important because they “protect the downside while maximizing the chance for high [10x] multiples of return” (in exchange for 30-40% ownership of your company). What a surprise. Rather than being a good investment, I view the 99 bucks I paid for this video as a “sunk cost.”
Perhaps Mr. Wilmerding’s various books on these subjects (and similar ReedLogic products) are more substantive and better produced and one might be tempted to give them another chance. But, as George W. Bush has advised: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Rating: 1 / 5
I have had the advantage of reading the manuscript of this book in advance, and one of the comments on the cover is my own.
Unlike other books on the subject, this one does not dive straight off into complicated areas such as return analysis, nor does it deal with such nebulous matters as the GP/LP relationship (indeed, the writer states that he considers this last topic to be something of a red herring). Instead, the book sets out to be a comprehensive account of private equity from first principles onwards, and will guide you steadily through the intricacies of the asset class until you find yourself quite happily using very complex analysis models to look at buyout and venture returns. More importantly, it focuses on explaining the principles which underlie all of this, so you will actually understand what you are doing, and why. As the writer says repeatedly “don’t just look at the figures – try to think what lies behind them.”
Fraser-Sampson has twenty years experience of the private equity industry, and the depth and range of his knowledge shines through every page. I was a great fan (and a reviewer) of his first book “Multi Asset Class Investment Strategy”, and ideally they should be read together. The first explains why you should be allocating 25% of your portfolio to private equity, and this one explains how you should actually go about it. Just as the first one came up with a whole new way of looking at investment in general, so this one makes some very innovative points, not all of which will make happy reading in some quarters. For example, he believes that private equity performance should be judged across an investor’s whole allocation (what he calls Total Return investing) rather than, as presently, on just that small part of it which may be invested at any one time.
Both books are brilliantly written and make very easy reading out of what are very complex issues.
Rating: 5 / 5
Hello, My name is Mervin Evans, I am the author of this title.
In this title, Mervin Evans, president of the Evans Venture Partners, a California-based firm that invests in commercializing new technologies, presents an analysis of present-day venture capitalists and shows why its practitioners have a lot more in common with investment bankers than you might think. The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Today’s venture capitalists are more like conservative bankers than the risk takers of days past. They have carved out a specialized niche in the capital markets, filling a void that other institutions cannot serve. They are the linchpins in an efficient system for meeting the needs of institutional investors looking for high returns, of entrepreneurs seeking funding, and of investment bankers looking for companies to sell. Venture capitalists must earn a consistently superior return on investments in inherently risky businesses. The myth is that they do so by investing in good ideas and good plans. In reality, they invest in good industries–that is, industries that are more competitively forgiving than the market as a whole. And they structure their deals in a way that minimizes their risk and maximizes their returns. Although many entrepreneurs expect venture capitalists to provide them with sage guidance as well as capital, that expectation is unrealistic. Given a typical portfolio of 10 companies and a 2,000-hour work year, a venture capital partner spends on average less than 2 hours per week on any given company. In addition to analyzing the current venture-capital system, the author offers practical advice to entrepreneurs thinking about venture funding.
If you need investmnet Capital – You need this title
Rating: 5 / 5
This book does a competent job of giving an overview of private equity sufficient for the stated purpose of helping investors understand where it might fit in a portfolio of investments. The book won’t prepare you to start your own private equity fund, but it will prepare you to fend-off investment advisors that want to push an unsuitable investment into your portfolio. The writing style is a bit “British” – wordy by American usage standards – but it’s their language, isn’t it? That being said, the book overall is concise and mercifully short.
Rating: 3 / 5
This item is not 19 pages. Outright misstatement. It is actually a 7 page agreement that only deals with one issue- transfer of shares by the selling shareholder. It allows the company a first right of refusal. It does not acccount for possibilities such as retirement, death of a shareholder, or disability. Worst of all – there is no language defining how the shares will be valued. This agreement is useless at best.
I am an attorney. I was very disappointed with this CD and ended up buying the Nolo press Shareholder agreement with CD. Nolo’s agreement was much better and accounted for all of the eventualities that I needed. However, Nolo’s CD language is not correlated to the test boxes in the book. I ended having the secretary retype the entire agreement out of the book, quite time consuming.
Rating: 1 / 5
As someone mentioned in the book, I’d like to nominate it for a World Fantasy award – as fiction it’s wonderful. The Digg part of the book is full of fake history, lack of fact checking, and, in one particular glaring instance, bald-faced dishonesty in attributing to me something I never said (no attempt was ever made to contact me to verify actions or words attributed to me). Calling this shoddy journalism would be too forgiving.
Rating: 1 / 5
The “thoughts” and “insights” here are about as passè as Crystal Clear Pepsi while bringing a perspective as fresh a jug of milk that has sat out in the SoCal sun for a week or so.
This book also represents several hours of my life that I won’t get back.
Read a book penned by a grownup
Rating: 1 / 5
Once your lucky, twice your good…by Sarah Lacy…. A MUST READ, for any internet start up!
I LOVE this book i am only half way through but had to share my feelings about it thus far. As an online web entrepreneur, i speak with thousands of potential “mega stars” each year and listen to ideas, dreams and plans on how to “make it”, this book easily shares insights into a world most of us business types only dream of as well as gives you a glimpse into the lives of some of the internet’s brightest starts. This book has ignited by passion for what I do. Thank you Sarah!
sandy rowley
http://www.megastarmedia.com
custom social networks
Rating: 5 / 5
[...]
ONCE YOU’RE LUCKY, TWICE YOU’RE GOOD, a great motto for the post so called collapse of the Internet bubble silicon valley. Authored by Sarah Lacy, who reported around and in the circles of people making and giving birth to our generation.
History as we must know, conceives the paths of the future. Written in this book is basically a bible of the events taking place causing the largest mass collection and connection of people in the history of the world, via and called simply WEB 2.0.
Taking off from the leading footsteps of some of the valley’s first veterans, in the like’s of M. Levchin. Then we are lead into steps of the revolution which many felt coming but only a hand-full knew. R. Hoffman and P. Thiel to M. Zuckerberg, these are some of the names who are a part of the genius and the gift of WEB 2.0. Exploring through a biographical view of the silicon valley’s rebels who refused to give in to any of the conformities from the Venture Capitalists; And mutually helping to pull through a great generation.
Concluding the book, one of the things ironically can be considered that the dotcom crash was the hammer which broke-through the dugout rock (WEB 1.0) concealing inside it a diamond (WEB 2.0) in the rough. Lets not miss out on this next one.
[...]
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a fast and entertaining book, I highly recommend it for all those in the valley and beyond curious about the personalities behind the Web 2.0 scene. Well researched and full of unique insight.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have always been leery of purchasing these types of books. This one just reinforces the suspicion that they are over priced and poorly written.
Rating: 2 / 5
I cannot stress enough how uncomfortable I am while listening to Mervin L. Evans talk down to his audience on the CD’s. He addresses his audience with anger, a condescending voice, and makes the listener feel less then and ignorant. I have never run accross anything like it.
Personally, if this man gave his money away I wouldn’t take it as I would not want to deal with him on any level.
I am going to see if I can get a refund. I simply cannot listen any longer. He probably has something valuable to say but I can’t hear it past his attitude.
I personally am totally repulsed by this speaker and I think any intelligent person would feel the same!
SW
Rating: 1 / 5
settle down, Denmark.
I was about to say that.
How is Twitter a force of good, when all they are doing is selling retards’ tweets to Google and Microsoft for profit?
I think it is a very successful experiment to make people speak their mind.
You should employees of other companies to freely and anonymously speak their mind too.
Twitter should stop being such panzies so afraid to make a mistake and release some real profit-generating features already. I did like with Evan had to say about creating a win win that doesn’t make customers go around you get their needs met (i.e. which is a lose to Twitter cuz it means some people are pissed with their service). But to be so afraid to provide to add some advertising is a joke. Just try something already. I know if my job was to do nothing but think of Twitter advertising models, I would have thought of a shitload already. Scoble had some good ideas with all the meta data associated with tweets and the popups that they generate. Twitter already started that with the location marker. Just stuff a frigging ad marker already that leads to a popup. Using up 7×11 pixels for a market that leads to an ad is surely something that wont clutter their interface and make them a few bucks. It would be a nice test for them too. Basically they gotta stop this pussy fake ass shit. It’s a front that won’t last long and is bound to break down at some point, as Michael was saying. And really, it’s just dishonest. If that’s the plan become a non-for-profit already. I rather someone do professional honest business with me than someone lying to me. They’re creating this stigma like there is something wrong with making money. Just say it like it is: they dont wanna make money now at the expense of possibly slowing down growth. It’s as simple as that, not this goodie two shoes circus.
do you know that research show that Denmark is the world happiest country? we should tell them that socialism is not the way to run a country… maybe they should stop paying 90% of salary as unemployment benefit (for four years) and terminate their completely free healthcare system.
or they are confused, thinking that they are happy only because back in collage, they got laid plenty.
I would be yelling too if my company was slowly falling off the social network map into teenage obscurity.
The only thing keeping them going is the hope they offer to up and coming artists.
Other than this, why would anyone use Myspace?
Great stuff! Congrats guys.
I always thought twitter was doing good as they are.Hope they don’t change things and become “goodtwitter”
What I’d like to see is a company adopting a “Don’t Be Stupid” slogan instead. Arrington, if you can find a way to auction this one off to the highest bidder, we’ll split it 50/50.
We run a small shop with Magento on a very modest dedicated server and it runs ok but for sure, performances are really not there.
Also it stills not a lot of work to make it more non-US friendly.
But it still a solid software and with php and Zend Framework you can crawl on the code quickly.
I’m very disappointed in this release. At the very least I expected the ability to switch between paypal accounts (I have several for business and home use). Yes, some welcome functions like request payment and transfer to bank, but to miss multiple accounts is a big FAIL IMHO.
*lunch
damn freud
Err, I think that’s what you called, “SquareUp” App.
One thing that I only wish for this paypal app is its security… the last thing a user would like to happen is to find someone sniffing his credit card details without being aware.
There are some companies that pretend to act good like Twitter and Facebook and Google, but they’re really evil.
On the other hand, you have a company like dirtyphonebook.com that is outwardly evil but is actually a force for good in that forces people to do nice things to people or face real consequences.
Anyway, I’m just trying to figure out how chatroulette figures into all of this.
[...] PayPal Launches Revamped iPhone App, Teams With Bump For Phone-Tapping Money Transfers [...]
Tim lets go out to launch, your treat of course
Right on the money Mike….Couldn’t agree more with “Let others use Twitter to do good things” statement.
You should provide a damn good service/product and whether or not it’s gonna be a MEANS for GOOD, will be mostly up to people using it.
Agree, Paypal should wake its eyes now, seeing that open-source banking isn’t much of a bad idea at all.
If you don’t park actual cash in there, then there is no problem… Every paypal user should be using credit cards anyways, or at least their debit number to pay for stuff… Problem solved
Did you have to say “play” in the title? Why not leave it at “e-commerce platform”?
God I fucking hate this jargon bullshit.
Its a good thing and Congrats to the Magento team.
Great idea and execution, but in some sense its pointless.
Can’t accept credit cards (there goes your Square arguments again)! Works only with peeps that run PayPal. That’s not everyone. Nice try though guys.
Still…they are focusing in the wrong area. Why don’t they have a mobile web optimized landing page for people to enter in login and or information when I send them there. (as in I really will). Google and Paypal still are completely deficient in this arena. For small vendors we rely on such services, so how will mobile transactions ever take off if you can’t buy a shirt on the fly from Gap or specialty chocolate from a small business who is so savvy?
[...] | TechCrunch Más información | Magento Blog Enlace | Magento Comparte este [...]
the second to last paragraph couldn’t be more true. unfortunately there are investors who are riding up twitter’s ass about expansion and growth (need. profits. now.) luckily they are private investors… so they hopefully know a little about long term investing which is why they should never go public (and I commend Zuckerburg / Facebook very much so for his adamancy about not doing so – twitter should certainly follow suit on this).
Anthony spree looks very good. we are settling with php after 10 years, how many will learn new programming to switch platform, also with Ruby its still like CF, few developer you can find.
I agree with server resource issue, we have done 85+ ecommerce sites mostly on oscommerce/creloaded platform but we like magento and wanted to move many sites, now most clients cant afford dedicated server and it takes so much resource. why cant they come up with less featured version.
Hi there !
When I try to work with PayPal at the first time, I’m going to be frustrating about how PayPal takes fees.
I spend more and more times to try understand how this all staff working…..
The are more then ten books like “PayPal for dummers” on Amazon, I read it and nothing changed. May be I’m not very care reader. But I only try to understand how much money are all this hidden fees: Merchant rates, currency conversion, transaction fixed fees, transaction amount fees,…. ugh!….
In Appstore I found great apps named PayPal Transaction Fee PRO Calculator (may be too long as for me
.
But it is extremely easy, fast and correct for my payments in USA shopping, eBay items, and some international staff.
Just look in AppStore http://bit.ly/aoClNB. Native PayPal application are there https://www.paypal-labs.com/iphone/
Bump Technologies builds mobile applications and APIs that allow two smartphones to identify one another and connect by simply being bumped together.
I can’t wait to have this installed.
I thought I banned Singapore IPs from this site. hm.
[...] http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/15/paypal-iphone-app-bump/ Tags: apple, BUMP, bump technologies, iPhone, paypal, paypal mobile « Windows Phone Marketplace for Windows Phone 7 Series unveiled, the only way to get WP7 apps [...]
I am of the belief that business can indeed make social change happen. So yes, do no evil is a valid ideology.. At the minimum it should remind the business of its great purpose when tempted to do worldly evil… Over here in Singapore you get many slogans like that.. “profit without ethics is just a figure” , “do no evil” , “dignified capitalism” are things you usually find here… Its OKay to be a little philosophical nah ?
Roy too
PayPal does have a app for android. However some of these feature will be rolled out in the coming months for other platforms
PayPal Mobile
Ray – wow! Much deserved.
congrats jake and team! Bump deserves all this!
“Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society. ”
hahah… EPIC!!
How do people plan on using these in FB? I’ve only ever used them to get to the Android Marketplace.
Congrats Roy!
This is a real copycat move by Twitter. In an effort to differentiate ourselves, Wordnik.com is rebranding itself as “the evil dictionary.”
Magento liked the ecommerce “reward system” concept that http://www.vyoom.com had, which was about 10 months ago.
Magento posts once a month about “performance improvements.” But it still crawls.
It’s kinda embarrassing that “performance improvements” are even considered an enhancement. Shouldn’t they have thought about performance from day 1?
Magento is great if you have no clue about how to develop on your own. Of course, if you have no clue, why not just rock Shopify?
Seriously, you’re dead on about that. We looked at Magento that decided Spree.
Spree flies. I’d be kicking myself endlessly if we weren’t using it.
If you haven’t play with it check it out. Just clicking around the demo you can instantly notice the performance difference.
There’s such distrust of Paypal. I don’t see how this is going to work (in the mainstream) unless they clean up their act *tremendously*.
Paypal is like putting your money in bank where Hugo Chavez is the CEO.
No sign for me yet..
That sounds like too much cash for this type of company. It’s a decent offering but in a very crowded place with no one making much dough. Miva dominated the market at one point and sold for a couple mill (which was too much!).
Any one knows if there’s something similar from Paypal for Androiders’?
I can’t find anything in the market place.
I totally agree. The self proclaimed righteousness should be left for good and companies march in the direction that is best for them. We all know this is business so stop talking about love for humanity and shit stuff. Make good stuff and let people use it for good. Humanity has lots of “goodness” left yet before it becomes a nice venture opportunity.
+1 – I love the post – Being a college student myself I get pretty tired of the self-righteous idealism, and it only makes it worse when well known companies parade the ridiculousness around.
Also, I am excited to get something from Ev’s appearance today other than bashing Haque or “Hack” or whatever his name is.
Gay
This is exactly in line with PayPal’s original mission. Peer-to-peer transfers is their home run space, but I’m waiting to see them really innovate against larger B2C payments – i.e. bill pay. PayPal oddly has stayed away from giants like CheckFree (now Fiserv), where real innovation is needed.
Electronic bill payment and presentment is in real need of innovation, and PayPal has the consumer pull to innovate against payment. As a tangent, presentment is also in need of innovation – to learn more about we are doing at Zodah to fix this, go to http://zodah.com to sign up for an invite to our beta.
Cool ! Cash is dead.
The video about the app is quite funny
Yeah, that def ain’t a good stat they should be telling people.
“Be a force for Good”
Whose Good??I think Mike you misunderstood there..
“Be a force for Good” for Twitter – This is the real motto..
Congratulations Magento.
I am so going to love this!
I have been using from past 2 years for my e-commerce. It is easy to use and works fine.
Magento is amazingly slow and bloated. Investors should do a bit of technical due dilligence before investing.
I hope they make Magento a lot less server resource hungry. It’s telling that it’s been downloaded 1.5 million times, yet there are only 60,000 active merchant sites.
Not feeling this site. It was sluggish when I tried it and not enough content to be useful. Sorry guys but this is likely headed for the deadpool already.
Mobile to Mobile transfers was the idea for the original PayPal, except using Palm Pilots and not iPhones. This is a natural progression for each company, although I don’t see this being widely used.
Square is still fine, VeriFone is ever safer.
funny, this is what Paypal originally set out to do back in 98 (only with PDAs).
Well, that may be the case when/if the Paypal + Bump app is cross platform. So, I can bump my iPhone to your Blackberry Bold, for example, and exchange funds. Soon enough we’ll all have smartphones so this has got to become cross-platform.
(Ignoring for the moment that in many cases we’ll all still want to review the transaction, sign for legal reasons, etc.)
If you remember, PayPal was originally a service that let people beam money to each other through their Palm Pilots. Nice to see them return to their roots with the help of Bump!
Am I the only 1 that thinks Spree dominates Magento?
The Magento team will have some serious competition will Spree hits 1.0. Of course, I’m sure there’s room enough for 2 major open source ecommerce apps.
No wonder my kids keep bumping our iPhones together!
Seems like a much better alternative to Square:- Paypal can link to a Credit Card, no dongle required and just a bump to securely transfer cash.
We just started customizing our Magento theme and we can already tell that it is going to help take our small business to the next level. It has all the tools necessary to manage our products and I’m excited to learn more about the software.
Yes, this is going to avalanche. No need for anything but your phone.
Merchants will just need bump on the register.
Wow.
Not good for Square.
If anyone using the T-Mo N1 on EDGE on AT&T wants to sell me theirs… just let me know.
I think Iphone and Nexus users should vent there issues on an open fourm together so att can see all of there vents at on place! http://www.ventnation.com
Congrats to Roy and a great team, Magento is a fantastic product that we’ve referred to a number of startups.
so whats the point of square?
Oddly enough, this is pretty much exactly the app idea that I submitted to PayPal’s “Developer Challenge”.
Chances are good I forfeited my soul by submitting the idea anyway.
true, but how many people are going to pay $500 to do that?
how many U.S. consumers do you think even know what a SIM card is, let alone how to take one out? maybe google should do another one of those “what is a web browser” videos
That’s the stuff I’m talking about. This is what we need.
“this new Nexus One is only being sold as an unlocked phone that can work on AT&T if you get a SIM card on your own (something which most consumers will never do in the U.S.)”
But it’s trivial to take the SIM card out of another AT&T phone (such as the iPhone) and insert it into the Nexus One.
Still waiting for a Verizon Wireless version of this phone. I will definitely not switch to TMobile or AT&T.
Considering the phone was released on T-mobile, is there anyone REALLY surprised that sales numbers would be low?
Sweet. I just bought one. AT&T works great in my area.
i see!
I agree! Most of the ads are irrelevant and extremely annoying! Makes you not want to use YouTube, but it is the place to go to find just about anything in video format so it’s a conundrum!
I will no longer use YouTube. Mostly because they are now making money off of my content without me being paid. That’s not right and there should be a lawsuit involved.
Just my opinion, I’m not an expert on business but unless the content creator makes any money off of YouTube’s overlay ads, then it’s just not right. I’m moving to Vimeo, they look better anyway.
The Facebook iPhone app is “just an excuse” for Facebook to do your social networking on their site.
The Spotify iPhone app is “just an excuse” for Spotify to supply your music needs.
Google Desktop is “just an excuse” for Google to get me to use their search and show their own ads.
So why the stupid and kinda-aggressive title?
I totally agree that viewers will get fed up. These ads are nothing like the text ads used in AdWords ads. These overlay ads get right in the way of what you’re watching which makes them less effective.
I thought up a few ways Google could make some money on YouTube but I guess they haven’t read my blog post yet http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/how-google-can-turn-youtube-into-another-adsense/
Mossberg Solution review here: http://solution.allthingsd.com/20100316/xobni-review/ (“If you use a PC, Microsoft Outlook and a BlackBerry, Xobni offers a smart solution for automatically organizing all of your contacts into one place and allows for your contacts to be stored somewhere other than just in Outlook or just on your mobile device. If it was a little easier to access on the BlackBerry, I’d like it even more.”)
The overlay ads are not near as annoying as the Commercials they’ve been playing before videos. I don’t have time to sit and wait for commercials to play when I’m trying to quickly play a video and move on. I think this is a bad move. I don’t run ad blockers on Chrome and I’ll put up with overlays, display ads and even full page background ads, but please don’t make me watch commercials. They’re the main reason I don’t watch TV anymore.
This is exactly why Adblock Plus is a beautiful thing. I never even knew Youtube had ads in its videos until I had to reinstall my OS and forgot to install Adblock for a while. Needless to say I installed it immediately afterwards and I’ve been back to awesome video-watching ever since
Erik, I agree the overlay ads are already getting annoyingly recurring/in the way, although this is still a very interesting development.
Any data on clickthrough rates on those YouTube ads? I guess Visible Measures would have that.
Interesting choice of pic for article. Big Data is a big concept and big reality. Corporate structure takes big data and transforms everything into a language construct of automation. Good? Bad? Does it matter?
That pic reminds us of the Matrix; an idea drawn out to the extreme wherein corporate structure, profit driven managerial efficiency mixed with global and one day universal scales of competitive advantage will take the leverage of Big Data to the extreme.
At that extreme, humans cease to be human creatures bound by time to evolution, transcending limitations as bits of Big Data. We already see and feel the consequences of this when dealing with credit agencies, the IRS, Verizon and ATT, etc.
What part of your human experience do you own? You arrive from a womb, for the time being, and what belongs to you? Your DNA is Big Data. Your citizen status is Big Data. You are a small part of Big Data. So where is the freedom the title of this article eludes to?
No one seems to be worried about freedom anymore. Its as if everyone thinks money will just buy it for them. Problem is, if you don’t own that which you actually should be regarded as the owner of before you are incorporated into Big Data… you never will. Not really. Not in any way that matters. Thats Big Data slavery, and we are already being exposed by it here and now in the Facebook era of our Big Data lives.
You may think you have control… but you dont.
Having been in venture capital related fields for over 10 years, this is THE term sheet to use when doing venture capital deals (as entrepreneur, lawyer, or venture capitalist). The document is ready to use, so you can literally just plug in your numbers and alter minor wording where necessary. The other documents, such as the non-disclosure agreement are also incredibly useful.
Rating: 5 / 5
For those who like me enjoyed this video (which I am not reviewing here), I thought I’d provide an update on the author:
Walter Wright is now practicing at Trinity Law Group LLC. (www.trinitylg.com)Trinity Law Group is a greater Boston corporate law firm which practices the broad range of business law throughout Massachusetts, the United States and the world with well-recognized attorneys of stellar academic and professional accomplishment who leverage technology and relationships. Started in February 2007 by former President of the Boston law firm Rich May, Dan Clark, and former Managing Director of Rich May, Walter Wright, the Trinity Law Group has over 55 years of experience combined helping clients from a broad spectrum of business backgrounds. Critically acclaimed as “Super Lawyers” and described by their clients as the “most experienced corporate lawyers practicing today,” the Trinity Law Group is dedicated to provide competence, commitment and communication to all of their clients.
Rating: 5 / 5
Yes and no.
Spotify can launch where they want, but the Eu are (and should be) working on blanket licensing for the entire Eu.
Currently I believe Spotify has to negotiate deals for each country they want to operate in. Naturally this costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. For smaller countries it may not even make financial sense to move into that country if it costs too much to negotiate a deal.
[...] Live Blog: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says Music Service Now Has 320,000 Paid Subscribers [...]
Well, I know for a fact they have an licensing agreement with EMI after the latter sued them sometime ago. I’m guessing the service legitimized itself as it evolved (and got sued along the way).
I am not based in the US and both are available in the EU country where I live. I would have to agree that Spotify’s quality (on average) tends to be better than Grooveshark’s, but I find the difference to be negligible.
I am primarily using GS because they have a BB app (Spotify doesn’t so I can’t use it on my mobile) and are significantly cheaper from user perspective (35 USD/year vs 170-200 USD/year depending on VAT/FX rate).
Piano improv guy is hilarious.
Interestingly I never said white. And, actually, this is also true of the number of latin americans I came across. For them it wasn’t so much “ching chong chang” as it was doing the slanty eyes gesture.
It’s no biggie but I doubt they would do this if they were walking down the street.
So I guess it’s just cam trolling.
Riiiight.
Notes from Daniel Ek’s keynote via the medium of a Spotify playlist : http://open.spotify.com/user/abril_fou/playlist/6HP9bDApjsyPwfi5GVJmqZ
I would never vote for Mitt Romney, and I hope he does not win. He is so full of himself and will lie just to get votes.
Rating: 1 / 5
Mitt Romney made his fortune by buying companies, breaking them up, firing their employees, and selling the assets. Now that he has his eyes on national office, he is trying to re-make himself into a kinder, gentler person.
Don’t be fooled. According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, Romney was able to turn a profit on the Winter Games by not tapping its reserve account. Had, for example, it snowed more, the organizing committee that “ran” the Games would have had to spend money on snow removal. It didn’t, and they didn’t. So should Romney be called a wonderkind because the weather cooperated?
You decide.
I think it’s more important to look at what the organizing committee did, rather than what it didn’t have to do. For instance, the skating arena was subject to shoddy development, cost over-runs and a roof collapse. Romney, however, has never accepted blame for this construction disaster.
The Winter Games were a great event. But their success came at the expen$e of the federal government.
Romney simply showed up and took the bows.
Color me unimpressed, both with the man, and his book.
Rating: 1 / 5
Yes listening to Rock music on Spotify increases you pagerank.
I see biz opp for phone sex operators..
http://www.techwankers.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-gayfest-business-opp/
[...] to those nice people at TC, the stats look like this: 89% male, 47% American, and 13% [...]
That has nothing to do with the European Commission.
Spotify decides where it wants to launch.
Robert, can you please explain to me how the data form ChatrouletteMap works? I’m quite obsessed with Chatroulette and have spent a few days returning to the map application to view the changing data points – of which there are NONE! It’s merely a static grab from a single point in time.
HEY:
“If you go into any Telius store in Sweden, you can go in and pick out a smart phone that comes preinstalled with Spotify. 3-6 months included.” <– the name is Telia, not Telius.
Interesting that the reported American userbase is 47%, when Alexa.com reports 29.3% (and this is up only a bit after about a month from 25.%, which I reported here: http://www.webecologyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/WEP-chatroulette.pdf). Obviously a sample of 2k isn’t much compared to the overall size of the site, but I wonder if this informs us a bit as to the true randomness of ChatRoulette (eg., perhaps it skews toward IPs closer to home)?
Smart move, talk about creating a series for your target audience. Hopefully it will live up to its huge potential.
Can Spotify boost search engine ranking for online businesses?
HOW CAN I GET A US ACCOUONT? i PAID FOR THE PREMIUM version but 9.99 euro is a lot for a very limited music catalog
Chatroulette has got to be for the most desperate sexually people ever………..! You can’t get on when ANY age children are near for fear some sick dude with a little dick will pop up. Give me a break, that’s what porn is for! SICK FUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!
test2
been using it for a few months now (free account in the US) and I must say I like it. I don’t know if I’d pay for a pro account simply because the music catalog just isn’t quite there yet, but if they increase the size of their catalog I’d consider it.
We’re pretty excited about it too. We have more ‘pretty awesome’ stuff on the way
You can see what we’re up to by following us on twitter, @EpixHD
I wonder why such a great service is not available in all EU countries, namely I simply cannot use the service in Czech Republic, even though I would like to..
Interestingly, why EU Commission does not do anything with it?
test
Should be bleeding excellent if it’s anything like as good as Dan Lyon’s FSJ blog!
Does ‘no person’ include the furries ?
Thanks, I noticed that in the email they sent to welcome me, should read my emails before I post!
Egnyte is awesome! My office uses their solution.
For what it’s worth, I think ZumoDrive is a great product — I just think they should admit that security isn’t what they’re about. Many people don’t need or care about security, and for them ZumoDrive is fine.
Oh, and it’s Tarsnap, not TarSnap. I hate camelcase.
[...] ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android … [...]
[...] during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On [...]
EPIX is a great service, I was testing it out when it was first mentioned here at TechCrunch. Received a BETA invite via Twitter.
Wow, this dude got talent. He should appear on TV some talent show or pair up with Terry Fator in Las vegas.
I would love to learn some improvisation from this dude. man what was awesome!!!
Grooveshark is not even close to Spotifys quality, do they even pay the artists or record labels?
With a title like “turnaround” I was expecting Mitt to explain why he has reversed all of his positions on abortion, sexuality etc just in time for the Republican nomination.
Unfortunately not.
This book is about a simpler time when Mitt did not have to reverse or hide all of his principles in order to seek higher office. It tells the story of his rescue of the Olympic Games. It is actually quite good (although Mitt takes a LOT of the credit for things that others did). Unfortunately, it also reflects on the “old” Mitt rather than the Mitt 2.0 who is running for the nomination today…
Rating: 2 / 5
You need to get your black belt at the Dojo (http://www.zumodrive.com/dojo).
It would be even better if it was fake Steve Jobs and fake Larry Charles working on a fake comedy series.
Hey! Just installed the windows versions and it only gives 1gb FREE? Everywhere it mentions 2GB Free? Any Ideas? Thanks.
thank you post
We put indie music on Spotify and a bunch of others. Most Us bands havent figured out how important thsi service is in Europe yet. I guess they will if Spotify survives. HAving your tracks on Spotify is a matter of course if you want to be available in Europe. If they survice and Apple does nothing Itunes could easily loose their number one position in the eyes of musicians. Nto that they would really care I guess.
I tried them both. Mog is way better! I don’t get all the Spotify Hype!
Spotify is quite nice. Those in the US may want to give Grooveshark a try as the two are pretty much the same. Grooveshark is cheaper $3/month for mobile access while Spotify is €9.99/month … Spotify really needs to decrease the price!
Come on ladies, this gender disparity in junk displaying is unacceptable.
But in seriousness, chatroulette is a fascinating phenomenon. It would never exist without the internet, and reveals something profound about the human condition. What it reveals exactly, I’m not sure, but it is brilliant.
Interesting. mobile reading is a big deal since more and more people are using smart phones, there is another name coming out today, that is TidyRead. Very cool.
[...] ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android … [...]
lol, that must be funny and I am waiting eagerly to watch fake Mr. Steve Jobs.
American-Asian
The basic concept of this story was interesting. The Olympics are exciting… unfortunately, 150 pages dedicated to a line-by-line analysis of an Olympic budget is not exciting. Nor is the constant name-dropping of international CEOs and executives. Nor is the re-affirmation every 40 pages that Mitt sacrificed a lot by leaving his multi-billion dollar private equity firm to work for the Olympics and the accompanying statement that he was blessed enough in his life to be able to afford to make that sacrifice.
I gave this book two more stars than I wanted to because a) Amazon won’t let me give a book zero stars and b) I like the Olympics.
This book does accomplish one thing: It’s a 400-page long example of just how detached from the average voter Mitt really is.
Rating: 2 / 5
Yes… What he said!
Colin Percival — FreeBSD committer and security guy, and author of TarSnap (a sort of competitor but not really) takes a hard look at the ZumoDrive security model:
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-03-11-zumodrive-rolls-a-hard-six.html
Also available for iphone. Just downloaded it – works well.
“..will offer localized TextApps for these countries.” (India, Brazil) – Hence apart from Portuguese and Hindi, can we also expect to see the major languages like Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi etc.? For that to be possible, the phones will need to support these scripts first, and I’m not sure if we’re there yet.
I think it’s just the collaborative playlists that other people can make changes to.
HAHA! That does sound pretty awesome. Can’t wait to watch.
That’s some funny stuff, I’ve a feeling soon there’s gonna be a TV show about Chatroulette, already its very popular on Youtube!
I’m waiting for the day that product reviews are provided through an API, for free… with monetization on the portal side.
Leena,
Nice post. It seems like cloud companies see smartphones as a big piece to the puzzle. I use Egnyte on my blackberry and I believe it is accessable with iphone and android. Have you heard of their solution?
I totally agree, I get ‘white boy’, ‘cracker’ ‘must be racist’ whenever an Asian pops on
phone + text > niche apps + hype
Shorthand Mobile looks like they have a really well positioned product with expansive reach.
[...] Shorthand Mobile Launches TextApps To Bring Web Content To Basic … [...]
Sounds to me like they were burning cash too fast, the insiders ponied up the $ to clean the house & get somewhere in time.
Is there still a US beta going on? I’d like an invite as well. Thanks
The smartphone is the computer!
This seems like cool tech that will bring the mobile web to the planet’s 6 billion even faster than I would have assumed.
Oh, and in 10 years, (still PC centric) Microsoft’s stock will be what it was 10 years ago. If they’re lucky.
Check Moible4Mumbai, Mumbai city bus on your mobile without SMS, without GPRS. Mumbai-Bombay is Asia’s second largest and Asia’s largest city bus hub with daily 42,00,000 (yes..42 lakh!) people travelling.
Thanks Roger, that was funny
The new entertainment medium- on demand no less- ad a rapper, comedian and get rid of the f’g perverts so folks can have a good time.
Imagine if Skype got in the middle of this to offer up scenario- 5 at a time no less
Dear Entrepreneurs:
Please be aware that this “CD-ROM” includes ONE poorly formatted 600k .doc file and its .pdf copy. This file consists of four variations of “Venture Capital Term Sheet”, 34 pages of explanations and obvious “Summary of Terms”. The page size is 5.5″ x 8.5″ which is exactly ½ of the regular page. Despite of the most of this information could be freely found on the Internet, I would gladly pay for this document $10. Editorial Review is misleading. I’m sending it back.
Rating: 2 / 5
I use Spotify almost exclusively for my music. I haven’t bought any music in a long while now. (Sorry iTunes). I especially like the way I can load my phone with my playlists and listen to the music I have downloaded when away from home or any internet connection. Best thing to happen in music for years and the application leaves all web based services for dead when it comes to speed of searching or playing music. Cheers… Ish
How do I get a US beta?
Slightly different #s than we reported last week ( http://answerguy.com/2010/03/11/chatroulette-add-maps-and-caputured-pictures-uh-oh/ ) based on someone else’s anecdotal work, but only slightly.
And the real point remains: With Chatroulettemap now running (again, see above link) , WHO would still be doing this?
I was not aware of this service. Will try to get beta invitation.
I first used Spotify ages ago and it was great.
Now though, it has become like MySpace — crazy ridiculous backgrounds that make text unreadable, absurd numbers of adverts, and pop-ups even outside of the damn player. The government ads in between songs are probably the worst… they make me wanna slit or something.
For that reason, I hope Spotify dies a painful death and nobody pays for it.
I really like spotify
surprised benchmark, DST and Ron Conway haven’t invested in this phenom.
I also believe there statistics are flawed. 13% is low. From my observations, I pressed play and saw some dudes junk, pressed next and saw another dudes junk. Chatroulette makes me question how we made it as far as we did as a society, if man’s best ideas to use a communication service is to show them pleasuring themselves.
Twitter data is what is important, this company needs to focus on Twitter data and they will be golden.
Actually, the pervert here is TechCrunch. What seems like a legitimate research about Chatroulette is actually a shameless self promotion of RJMetrics.
Welcome to the internet sir.
Yelp is a service but they need to find a way to exist without charging restaurants for advertising or pay for play. Good food will sell itself.
all kidding aside, it’s NOT a waste of time. it’s an analysis of a new technology–what do you come here for?
hear something once–take it with a grain of salt. hear something a few times–start to believe it.
If Yelp is doing anything illegal, I definitely do not support this. But I think the focus should be more on solutions. With such a large sales force, there’s got to be some bad apples. So how do other large institutions regulate handle these issues?
“The tool works with Exchange 2033 and 2007…”
What about versions of Exchange between 2007 and 2033?
Thank For That post
This had to be an asset sale for a company heading for the deadpool. Anyone else have a clue? Never heard of this site and can’t find much activity about it anywhere.
good acquisition hope it goes well
Congrats to Mike, Jeff, and the Citizen Sports team.
Good job Citizen Sports! Salary Cap Baseball for the win!
wow……that’s great news………
Cool! Do they have an iPhone app if so will we see it at http://www.appgiveaway.com ?????
Non techies use the internet too.
Yeah the site definitely contains some spyware. With $3mm in funding, you would have thought they could hire a designer to improve the site. Ugly!
11 million? Really? That’s a crazy number for a userbase that isn’t engaged in technology. How are they acquiring members? Where are their members coming from?
Very skeptical.
Although I agree that smart phones are trending strongly upwards, I think there is still massive room for Mocospace to dominate.
Where everyone else is rushing to supply smart phone apps, these Mocospace guys are going for the kill on non-smartphone devices. I think it is a clever move. Mocospace mobile social network
[...] Mocospace is a surprising mobile social networking application that is looking in a strong position as an advertiser. Firstly it is one of the few [...]
Site looks like the “BoostMobile”, of online communities.
Great run Ash. Enjoy the break & good luck figuring out what’s next.
Funny. Moco means buggers in spanish. Pretty much BuggerSpace. Nasty, slime in yo face!
Whew, adding yourself as a contact? Give the guy a patent!
I didn’t think it was possible for something to look worse than myspace does, but congrats Moco, you win.
Rod Bahat is a ego driven blowhard…
Bahat’s email has the distinct tone of “I hope two weeks severance is fair for a valued employee such as yourself.”
Hey, Techcrunch, your link to Mocospace tries to install spyware on my computer. Check your links before posting them.
To anyone laid off, my company can help you get new careers. We are working with some of the hottest startups talked about here in TC every day.
Feel free to email or call, info on our website, my email is Dirk AT elevaterg DOT com
“The startup prides itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device.”
thats not sustainable, its impossible to keep peeople engaged in social behaviour without multimedia
Congratulations to Gist and to the Learn That Name team! I thought this app was brilliant the moment I heard about it and it’s a great fit for Gist.
<3 Eric Koester
I like how it is also listed in order of relevance. FourSquare rules them all!
again, exactly. used google translate
Did you guys use them to translate you post tittle? It should say “necesita traduccíon?”
Lol. Got it backwards.
Thanks.
exactly
You mean: “Necesita Traducción”. ¡Saludos!
This book is an excellent overview of business development valuation and great for those who want to catch up on some techniques and tools. It gives an accurate picture of BD in pharma. For those in the business, you may have to skip some easy parts but it remains a very valuable tool.
Rating: 5 / 5
Dear Leena,
What you are talking about and what these guys are doing are quiet different in context. As correctly pointed out by Bernard above, this is a PPC (or commonly known as SEM) crowdsourcing platform. SEO is a different ball game altogether and I’d really want to see someone coming up in SEO space with the same concept.
Cheers
Actually, it’s SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEO is organic search, SEM is paid search.
It’s not SEO but PPC marketing.
SEA you mean? SEO has got nothing to do with Search Engin Advertising…
Well done Opera!
And they were the 1st ones pushing this issue with the European Commission, so I guess they deserve the increase.
What about other browsers? Did Chrome, Mozilla and the smaller players reveal their numbers yet?
They should have listed it as the only browser developed in Europe….
Not to nitpick, but I’d hardly call them Web users when they essentially have access to an enclosed network. That’s like saying my company has 7000 “web users” because we use the same Exchange server.
If the hardware/network bank rates are as suggested, we can soon have street buskers, coffee house poets, local bands, anyone or any group accepting SQUARE (or paypal bump) payments.
In the future, everyone will be an entrepreneur!
Really its Awesome , this is cool and pretty excited to see what will happen when people have on the fly connectivity
Is it actually impressive that two political fundraisers are using Square? Almost with any new product there will be some people that try it out. This means nothing.
Chinese consumers are taking cell phone as a fashion product, not only a communication tool. People are very likely to be affected by others who have a fancy cell phone. The number there maybe over optimistic, but the trend is imperative.
=== popurls.com === popular today…
yeah! this story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…
When I visited China last month there was a cell phone store about every fifth shop.
the 957 million subscribers is the TOTAL mobile penetration and NOT mobile Internet penetration, right? i think this post mixes up this very important distinction.
140bets.com/tweetbracket
I find this numbers highly suspect. 1.3 billion mobile subsribers by 2014? That means, keeping with current population growth in China, a 95% entry to mobile phones. That’s impossible, really. Every villager? Every eldery over 80?
Over 20% of china’s population is under the age of 14. Even if every kid over 8 will get a phone, that’s STILL less then 95%. Not to mention I cant’ imagine every family in china could afford phones for all, especially in poor, rural china.
Lots of traffic for Godaddy now
The site’s still parked, or may be the DNS changes haven’t propogated everywhere!
Weird. Meh.
Can you say burn?
Based on population in China, it is not surprising to see this coming soon. Mobile apps future is in Asia.
YAY! for GoDaddy Parked Domains!
-_-
That’s why it’s ridiculous of Google to try to make us believe that they really consider quitting the Chinese market.
Just too bad they don’t have an access to the not-censored-internet there.
I totally agree with mg..love google and all it’s branches but some how buzz seems the weakest of them all…
INteresting trend,
china ……… a must visit nation lol.
care to elaborate. you’re literally the first non-google person i’ve heard from who isn’t frustrated by many parts of the user experience.
This is interesting. This only happens because our economy is draining and our improvement is lacking.
“Overall frustrating experience”? I’m sorry but “overall” is quite a general term here. I love Google buzz and I’ve no frustration with the service.
Awesome
, this is cool and pretty excited to see what will happen when people have on the fly connectivity 
i have a feeling that even if they release a full version of this plugin that we’re not hearing the full story here.
Perhaps consumers will have to pay for the plugin?
And, as someone mentioned above, there will be interesting data to emerge about who is opting out of the service (geo and demographics).
I think privacy is as important as free speech, and we can make this a win-win for everyone if we compromise and listen to the entire story, as it develops, to understand the true caveats of this possible release.
The tin hat and freetard brigade already have this blocked with adblockers and javascript disabled etc.
Not sure I see the point. Unless Chrome will soon not support any adblocker.
I get some users’ point. I use noscript myself, just because I don’t like stuff executing randomly without asking. I guess one could use something like that to block GA altogether as others have alluded to above.
HOWEVER, I guess nothing precludes content providers from making their content opaque to those that block GA; or at least trying. Something like: “Sorry, to view this site’s content you must allow Google Analytics.” And if a major player does that, it’ll be fair game for a lot of others web sites too. Then the only ones who will have been served by this feature Google plans to add are those who would think this is good riddance anyway. And if you’re that against GA, you’ve likely already fixed your problem.
So what’s the need being fulfilled here?
“People who opt out of ads and tracking, but still go and get free content that web sites, editors and publishers put a lot of time and effort into are really hypocritical.”
No we’re not. If content providers (of which I am one) don’t like it, they can, how shall I say it, GTFO.
Hypocritical would be me demanding content, but also demanding that it be free, which admittedly also happens. But if they give me a free or pay option, I’m taking free all the way.
Oh, and I’ll be installing this plugin as soon as it’s released.
I have to pay for my web site somehow.
FAIL
Content provider/merchants are the customers of Google Analytics, not the browser. Did they ask for this feature?
I am sure they did not. And if they did, I am sure it was a small portion of them that have interest in such a feature. Allowing this type of exclusion should be optional for the GA account holder.
Otherwise, as someone said, it devalues GA and people will just start to use a different service for analytics.
This seems like a feature dreamed up entirely within the engineering team. 99% of the web has no idea they are getting tracked by GA. The other 1% does not care or is using the hacks described in the comments here.
Why build this add-in?
(+/- 100% accuracy on my statistics, just like the accuracy people will have if this gets implemented)
Agreed – but I think scale plays more into that. Nielsen was monitoring you, just through sample vs. actual data. At the time when most people were watching over the air analog TV, the Nielsen sample was relatively accurate and something the marketers were willing to trust enough to fork over the money and the producers got their cut.
Our media options are so wide spread now, and include producers who build a product for a very niche groups of people (i.e. bloggers).
An internet sample might be somewhat represented for a Facebook, Google or YouTube, but when it comes to the majority of online content the impressions they receive are so small when compared to total impressions on the internet most would be overlooked by the sample.
And thus, media partners wouldn’t pay bloggers and content creators for the ads showing up on their sites, and those creators would likely not exist to the extent they do today.
Not disagreeing with you at all – I just feel most people take the huge amount of free content available to them for granted some times.
Naa, put all the audience on stage and then the panelists out in the audience. No wait.
If you don’t have your DVR connected to a telephone line DISH charges $5.00/month but it still works the same. I pay the fee.
It’s crazy enough to work. Seeing people present (or try to) can be mindnumbing. Getting some regular Joes and Janes up on the stage to liven things up would be a great way to help fight off the snoozes and feel better about paying $1500 to join the fun.
(
Good for them! Nice to see a company from the central valley to make it.
that’s stupid because every website owner has in house simple web analytics ….. No more tracking? that’s the plan ? … online Ads just get useless without tracking…..
I have Analytics blocked already too. And, btw you misspelled “Explorer” in “Internet Exploerer”.
Ha! That’d be pretty smart. Sabotage your free offering to make sites upgrade to a white label version.
I don’t think that’s the point of the plug-in and I think Google would get too much flak for doing something like that, but who knows.
As Jeff says below, block the analytics domains in hosts file by directing to 127.0.0.1 (above)
When I had over-air analog TV, AC Nielsen didn’t monitor my television habits, either. Now that I have cable, I’m sure cable company stores stats on my viewing habits for marketing purposes.
I recently found today on several of my sites that IE8 has a setting seemingly turned on upon download that does not allow GA to track user visits as well.
Is I am the only one that that is news too?
Brest topfl sheep and lemings rapandt in the-money and black revenue split conform requesting investment capital. Top Tier. If you get my meaning…
I just have google analytics blocked in /etc/hosts… Whaddoo I need a plug-in for? *shrug*
I’d have to guess because they sold their company for over a billion dollars but I’m not really sure. Just a guess.
just redirect domain names to yourself:
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 googleanalytics.com
Applause for experimental approaches with information presentation – and for people who help the community get answers – it’s a role we’ve found ourselves taking in addition to curation, collaboration, moderation … But re: that last word, I am sorry to hear they have decided against comments, for such a cliché reason. If you set rules and enforce them, you can have civil discourse. That’s what we do. WITHOUT “real name” requirements or registration. Certainly you might not consider some of our commenters perfectly civil and enlightening, but the discussion is VITAL. It happens during breaking news. It happens when new business owners ask for opinion on what their shops should stock. It happens when weather/utility crises require information-sharing. If Peer has some perfect new system to facilitate that, great – but the comment section works most excellently for that in our view, and we have avoided the racism, the hate, the overt insults, by setting rules and enforcing them as best we can. If ugliness you don’t want on your site – “not in my house” – erupts, you delete it. Simple. I wish more large media concerns would have and enforce rules, but I don’t think the solution is “we won’t have comments, because some people misbehave.” You’re penalizing the majority of people who participate with help, enlightenment, sometimes even humor and good spirit.
I would assume it at least tracks opt-out users, otherwise that makes the entire product worthless especially when this will inevitably be widely used by the ad-block crowd.
Because bad writing doesn’t mean you can’t build a billion-dollar company.
I believe the role of the free press in a democracy is to report on the news and give the facts, as well as opinions of experts. I do think we have too many people out here who don’t know what they’re talking about influencing the people. Some even say the media is like a fourth branch of the government. I think his idea of having pages like Wikipedia is a very great way, and something that could be very useful, because it could organize all the information in one place. I agree with not having comments on newspapers like that, because people put their opinions in their comments, and if they were an expert, they probably wouldn’t be commenting, so it’s just an amateurs opinion, which isn’t at all what a news paper is trying to do.
I highly support this idea and hope it spreads further,
This is disappointing.
People who opt out of ads and tracking, but still go and get free content that web sites, editors and publishers put a lot of time and effort into are really hypocritical.
I know this is a lot to ask – but understand the environment you play in before you demand changes.
Why in the world do people give VC money to people who can barely write?
This sounds like a great new attempt at local reporting.
I just got back from SXSW where we tackled the topic of the “Future of Context” with Jay Rosen (professor from NYU), Matt Thompson of NPR, and Staci Kramer from PaidContent. John Temples discussion of re-orienting news away from being “episodic”, and instead towards topic pages that act as re-usable “building blocks” is almost exactly the proposal Matt and Jay and I had promoted in Austin.
Check out Jay Rosen’s discussion of the “Future of News” as context here:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2010/03/07/what_i_plan_to.html
Matt’s here:
http://www.newsless.org/2010/03/the-case-for-context-my-opening-statement-for-sxsw/
and mine here:
http://blog.apture.com/2010/03/context-the-future-of-the-web/
We also have a website up for people who want to further the idea of re-orienting the entire news model around context, here:
http://www.futureofcontext.com
I dunno, to me this just seems to be making the fire hose of information bigger. Do we really always need just more information? Does that make life better?
With some things, yes. With many, no; as that seems like we are hamsters just running on a treadmill of digesting information with no destination.
The paid version is already there – Google’s Urchin Analytics. Not sure if this new opt-out will affect that or not.
[...] the original post: More News about Omidyar’s Peer News (TechCrunch) peer news announces new editorbut little elsePierre Omidyar, eBay founder and philanthropist, held [...]
[...] Arrington / TechCrunch:August Capital Bets Big On Blippy — Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people are enraged by its [...]
Could this be the first step toward a “premium” for companies to get a branded analytics platform that’s separate from Google but uses their technology? In other words, Google Analytics = free but can be disabled globally or you can take the option of paying to have “ACME Analytics” which can’t be disabled but can still be used “in aggregate” by Google.
You can see where all this is going. Blipmeme.com, ReBlip.com, Blipster.com, Blipdeck.com, Blipper.com, BlipStream.com, BlipWiki.com.
Problem: nobody trusts the credit card companies and with good reason. EX: Blipper uses card and nears the limit and blips that he dont care as long as hes at the concert. CredCo’s flag his account, drop the limit and raise the interest rate. CredCos can and will use your blips against you.
Won’t this make wen developers choose a different tracking service other than google? I would, why would I want skewed analytics?
On the other hand, using both google analytics and another service could help shed some light on what the “paranoid internet users” market does on your site.
“Not only I’m still following you, now I can see you in the middle of the flock muahaha”
“Pud, I love that you’ll comment on my iTunes purchases but you won’t take my fucking phone call to talk about the funding round. ” (via http://blippy.com/arrington)
You always make me laugh, Mike
If this comes into play, there’s a good chance I’ll stop using analytics to track my stats, what’s the point.
It’s amateur hour. Give a kid a php for dummies book and flash and their first project is a creating a site like that. I wouldn’t pay a 100 bucks for a complete site that look like that, let alone one hour.
I hope you get lucky with that pickup line app. Good luck.
I admit 50% is not exactly worth it-
But you charge $100 an hour for your services!!
But thanks to guys like you my company is pulling in 5300+ hrs of paid development at $35 an hour in February.
Thanks James
These guys are absolute morons. They’re giving ideas away for 50%. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about the execution and that’s what they do. Who gives a shit about the idea. And the ideas that were listed sounded budged game ideas for kids anyway. What’s wrong with these guys. I hope to god they have something up their sleeves for why they are so desperate to get other people’s ideas.
James from FaceySpacey.com
of course if they murder you, you won’t click on ads anymore an produce content for their websites .. so no they don’t want to kill us. But yeah ! hell yeah ! it’s a knew kind of imperialism. The only differences with empires is that you choose by your own will to be ruled by their law. by google law … but still I don’t find so bad since the failure of politics to respect ourselves.
i look at this link , and it gives me even more reason to ask what is the appeal of this service from a user perspective. Why would you want to tell people how much you are spending and where you are spending it everywhere ?
I can understand leaving ratings on amazon, and discussing your purchase their.. but this is not a rating service, and not even detailed reviews of products.
i see darth vader?
As with any large company, the initial desire to grow and expand into other markets is driven by self preservation. The area Google is moving into has the potential to become scary many years down the road. Futurists like Bruce Sterling have illustrated the conundrum we will find ourselves in when we effectively document and organize “everything on the planet”.
Although this could make for some amazing interactive experiences with the world we live in, it could also become a self-made prison depending on who has control of the steering wheel.
This is why Open Standards for information, government and source code are imperative for this new wave of technology to work long-term. People will disengage and lose trust eventually, and videos like this are a prime example of that dystopic view.
So this guy pud is now sucking on the same vc teat he used to criticize and tear apart on f*ckedcompany.com
I always knew he wanted to play the game, but hated on it because he couldn’t get on.
Now we know.
I think Facebook will use this so that shop and bar owners can print out stickers that people can use to ‘become a fan’ while in the building.
I just saw a comment pud made on one of the purchases on Blippy that says Amazon is actually coming soon:
http://blippy.com/t/a2s6
[...] August Capital Bets Big On Blippy [...]
I am sorry but I don’t see anything wrong with this video, they don’t say that google is doing anything wrong just pointing out what google are doing.
And to be honest the video is built quite well I think…
If you’re going to argue against hype and exaggeration MG Siegler, take a look in the mirror.
Wow, this is really entertaining! But ridiculous!
Methinks you might need Soocial. Cross-platform addressbook sync with same functionality. Works with Gmail, Facebook, iPhone, Mac, Blackberry, Office etc.
The thing the producers of the vid are trying to underline, I think, is the danger of monopoly. In one market, or over all markets.
Unless pud can fix the search…
If Facebook would come to their senses and stop their locked-down ways, they could do this better than anyone!
This is great fodder for Anti-Google privacy advocates.
Do you hear it? Its Google inside Darth Vader’s costume breathing down my neck…scanning my Gmail account..Do you hear that menacing breathing sound…..?
Oh Get over it. If you don’t like Google use other services, or you just can’t resist Google’s dark charms? Sheesh…..
Congratulations to Blippy. Makes me wonder if we should make our ShoppingNotes.com like Blippy… We have data of exactly what users are shopping for, and better yet, right before they make the purchase (vs. after the purchase in the case of Blippy). Of course this should be done on an opt-in basis so existing users don’t worry.
With this title are you comparing Google to China? I think Google’s intentions are not evil, but in the wrong hands a lot of evil can be done.
http://f2bbs.com/bbs/show_topic/202886
Check this link out to see some of the down side to using Blippy..
because as michael says it’s controversial. Not so much because of privacy issues (after all, you opt IN) but because it’s kind of a huge show-off and you run the danger of being nominated “douche” for using it. Plus investors seem to invest on anything as long as it’s “social”
I think they should introduce badges for buying stuff (or spending money). I want the “douche” badge [and a share of the profits if you implement my idea]
Good for them. It’s always nice to see startups get some attention from VCs…Personally I think its a bit of an information overload, I never really cared what other people buy, but thats just me!
Its not on Youtube, so I can’t watch it right now on my Android phone.
Wait, OH GOD GOOGLE OWNS ME.
you gotta read past the headline.
Great and all, but what is their business model!? How will they be making money?!?
It creates conversations around purchases. You can ask a “trusted” person what they think about something they actually purchased.
About the valuation, there is no other place to put the money, that is what investors do they invest. Also I can think of at least 20 ways to monetize it.
here is my account http://www.blippy.com/eradke
Labor as a service. HA.
Seriously? Isn’t “labor as a service” or LaaS generaly been known as a job or work for quite some time?
Kudos to the person who came up with this for their buzzword generating prowess.
Time for me get back to work…Oops LaaS.
Hey folks. Before you all get on the bandwagon, LEMMING style, can someone please tell me how much money Pud has returned to his investors so far?
this video is just exposing the reality…
Think about the value of those shopping market cards every major chain gives out. They are probably making millions each year based on all that data. Sure they give you some deals here and there, but ultimately they use it to predict inventory needs and the best price points to maximize revenue.
Now imagine you have data like this across 1000s of retailers.
They would be sending mails without user’s consent?
High valuation or not, I see this being a great investment for anyone. Go David!
I just do not understand the appeal of this service. Nothing to do with privacy, just… why is getting so much buzz? And $50M valuation? PUH-LEASE. These VCs are insane.
They do seem to have had a head start over other similar players. Interesting to see whether they become the Overture or Adwords of real time search.
thats two big losses from yahoo this week, whats going on over there.. bartz must be doing something wrong.
Loving that I’m right in line with the big boys here at TechCrunch – since I posted a similar article earlier on THE Tech Scoop: http://www.thetechscoop.net
“Hanging with the big time”
the WePad is BETTER than iPad since 90% of the iPad/TabletPC users want a MULTITASKING OS as shown in this international POLL: http://alt-pad.blogspot.com/
meant to say: according to Google, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Google Chrome talks back to Google.com without it being very clear that it does & why is it done. I had to Google the term to find an explanation: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
According to Google, it’s a bug, not a feature.
THey should make the developers pay the prize out of their salaries.
Figured it be a Russian. Better finding bugs than creating the next virus or spamming us with phishing scams.
Excellent, thanks.
It is precisely because it sounds so obvious that Murthy’s advice to entrepreneurs is a golden mantra worth repeating over and over.
Proofread!
You unprofessional hacks.
Both Narayana Murthy and his wife Sudha are amazingly inspiring couple. They truly changed many Indian lives.
?
Maybe they did include it! But the result is located somewhere outside of your screen…
what about IE 6 what the hell is wrong with you people leaving out IE 6
I would not be surprised if the check never gets cashed. XD
I always loved Opera – this was the only browser + tools that allowed be to properly debug AJAX/javascript.
Kudos to the whole team behind it.
Without much buzz they delivered exceptional product!
Gleb,
http://www.memberwing.com/
That’s the case of Opera 10.50 which brings native GUIs in each operating system… instead of Qt only like it used to be.
You should check out Opera 10.50. It looks a lot better now (not as nice as Chrome though, imo).
Like a new option to fail Adobe- hate having my computer crash or freeze because of.
This is a great idea
I don’t think Operas GUI fits in nicely with any operating system it always seems so foreign. If they sorted that out I’d be more interested as they’ve always been very innovative.
Really can’t see how people still use IE8 though, it’s not that it’s bad it’s just Chrome and Firefox are just better.
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“Crocodoc sets it’s sights on Acrobat”
Heh. That target is so big even Kim Jong Il could hit it with one of his “ballistic missiles”.
What about the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview? I did not get the test to run on it. Anyone else?