Fifteen Years Later
Fifteen years ago, in 1996, while I was still a student at Carnegie Mellon University, I wrote an article (blog post in today’s parlance) about the future of computing. The article was really a...
View ArticleCongratulations IndexTank!
IndexTank (@IndexTank) has been acquired by LinkedIn! Huge congratulations to the entire IndexTank Team and especially to IndexTank’s founder Diego Basch (@dbasch). Diego and I first met in 1997. I had...
View Article‘Capital Efficiency’ doesn’t exist
When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around...
View ArticleFounder Liquidity
Note: The content of this post is part opinion and part observation/speculation. Before you read it, please note that I AM NOT A LAWYER and I AM NOT AN ACCOUNTANT. This is by no means legal advice, or...
View ArticleOn Geography
One of the investment criteria that I set for K9 Ventures is based on geography. Specifically, K9 only invests in startups where the entire team is located in the SF Bay Area. No distributed teams, no...
View ArticleTorbit Insight – Real User Measurement of Web Performance
Over a decade ago, the big bottlenecks for web performance were server load and network bandwidth. Lots of companies sprung up in the Web 1.0 era to help resolve these problems. The most well known...
View ArticleBoomerang Calendar — scheduling done right
One of the downsides of being an investor is that you spend a lot of time in meetings. What’s worse is that most of these meetings need to be scheduled. And yes, in 2012, we all still mostly schedule...
View ArticleHope and Numbers
[I often end up repeating the same things to different founders. Some things I've said often enough that they are probably worth committing to writing in a blog post.] One of the questions I get asked...
View ArticleThe Curse of Over-Capitalization
I’ve written before about how Capital Efficiency doesn’t exist and is an oxymoron. However, there is an important corollary to the non-existence of Capital Efficiency and that is The Curse of Over...
View ArticleAnnouncing K9 Ventures II – A $40M technology-focused micro-VC fund
I am pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures II, L.P. – A $40M technology-focused micro-VC fund. K9 Ventures started investing in 2009 with our first fund, K9 Ventures, L.P., which was a...
View ArticleProducers and Consumers on Social Media
I’m making a concerted effort to start blogging again on a more frequent basis. It’s not that I have suddenly discovered lots of free time. However, I’ve decided that it’s time to change priorities....
View Article4 Rules of M&A for Startup Founders
The following post was written by @TomioGeron for ExitRound based on an interview with me and was published on the ExitRound blog on January 9th, 2014. It is being reproduced in its entirety here with...
View ArticleA VC trick and a related startup mistake
There is a fundamental information imbalance in the startup world that stems from the fact that most founders are raising money for the first time, but most investors are not investing for the first...
View ArticleIf I had a hammer…
If I had a hammer,I’d hammer in the morningI’d hammer in the evening,All over this land. So goes The Hammer Song by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays. Well, most VCs have just one tool in their toolbox. And...
View ArticlePartner, Partner, Partner
Shortly after wrapping up our PhDs from Stanford CS, my peer group had a running inside joke. Whenever we would meet at an event, we would greet each other with “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor.” It’s hard to...
View ArticleThe New Venture Landscape
In May 2011, I wrote the post: Investor Nomenclature and the Venture Spiral. That post got a lot of attention because back then all the buzz was about “Super Angels.” The venture landscape was...
View ArticleMaking Moves
For all the stuff we hear in the press about Venture Capital, one thing that you don’t hear about as much is that operating a (small) venture fund is really similar to operating a “small business.”...
View ArticleThe Ingenious Osmo
Ingenuity. Ingenuity is a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful word. It is at the heart of engineering. It is also something I strive to have in every company that K9 Ventures invests in. A lot startup...
View ArticleStrong (Math) Foundations
When I was an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, I took a class in Linear Algebra. The class was taught by a visiting graduate student, not by a Carnegie Mellon professor. The instructor of this class...
View ArticleWhen Vinod Khosla answered my question with a non-verbal
No, not that kind of non-verbal gesture. I believe this was in April 2010 and if memory serves me correct it was an event hosted at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos by Sand Hill Angels, where...
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