We were excited to close the sale of our Consumer Insights business last week to Edison, as I blogged about last week on the Return Path blog. But it brought back to mind the great Yogi Berra quote that “it ain’t over ’til it’s over.” We’ve done lots of deals over our 18 year existence. Something like 12 or 13 acquisitions and 5 spin-offs or divestitures. And a very large number of equity and debt financings. We’ve also had four deals that didn’t get done. One was an acquisition we were going to make that we pulled away from during due diligence because we found some things in due diligence that proved our acquisition thesis incorrect. We pulled the plug on…
Archives / November, 2017
How Venture Capital Firms Work, for Entrepreneurs and Startups
A couple of months ago, I was doing an internal lunch & learn for senior managers, and the topic came up as to “how do our VC firms work?” In the spirit of deeply understanding our customers’ businesses in order to better serve them, I thought the same would be true of our investors and Board members – that educating our team on the inner workings and economics of our investors would lead to greater empathy of one of our other key stakeholders. So with no small amount of help from my long-time investor and director Brad Feld and his colleague Jason Mendelson, whose book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist I contributed to in a very…