'Super Angels' Shake Up Venture Capital

Just read a good article in BusinessWeek titled "Super Angels Shake Up Venture Capital" about how new, smaller venture capital funds are filling the gap in early-stage venture funding. The article focuses on Josh Kopelman's First Round Capital. The "super-angels" are basically just early-stage venture funds that are near or under $100 million. Kopelman argues that the economics of large venture funds ($1 billion+) aren't sustainable, particularly in this economy. Most of these funds need to return 3x in three years (for a 20% annual return). With a $1 billion fund, that means you need your investments to have exits in excess of $15 billion (assuming you're invested at 20%). Given there are no IPO's these days, it's tough to have those kinds of exits. Makes sense I suppose for investments that don't need much capital to get going (IT, web, etc.). But it seems the mega-funds still have their place. To get an alternative energy start-up off the ground, for example, takes hundreds of millions of dollars. The exits might be further out, but they'll likely be bigger.

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Green VC Stars

There's a lot of VC money going into "green tech" projects these days - $2.2 billion in 2007! I read an article in Forbes about the next generation of VC's leading the charge. The bios of these folks is truly ridiculous. Here's an excerpt: This trio could get hired anywhere. Aileen Lee was president of her section at Harvard Business School. Trae Vassallo learned to program when she was 7 and at 28 cofounded a wireless e-mail company that Motorola bought for $550 million. Samir Kaul led the effort to sequence the genome of the arabidopsis plant and then built three life sciences companies from scratch. He's only 33. These three are among venture capital's new guard. That's kind of humbling.

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history. But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are. The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile. This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...

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