From the Investors
First Round Capital releases their annual portfolio music video featuring parodies of music videos by Taylor Swift, Pharrell, Sam Smith and more in “All About Burn Rate“
Institutional Venture Partners uses an infographic to celebrate their portfolio metrics of 2014, with five new IPOs, fourteen new investments and more in “Success in 2014“
United Ventures notes an estimated $2.8 billion invested in 216 ‘fintech’ deals, dubbing it a ‘watershed’ year for the financial technology sector in “Fintech Key Trends 2014“
Angela Tran Kingyens of Version One Ventures reviews Version One Ventures’ portfolio metrics from 2014, adding eight new companies, eleven existing companies raised new rounds and more in “Our 2014 in Review”
Semil Shah of Haystack Fund on Strictly VC chats with Andy Weissmann of Union Square Ventures about their ‘engaged networks of users’ and early-stage investing strategies in “VC Andy Weissmann on the DNA of Union Square Ventures”
Kat Manalac of Y Combinator announces the second Female Founders Conference for ‘women interested in learning more about building startups and non-profits’ in “Female Founders Conference 2015 Applications Are Open“
Angel Investor Susan McPherson expands on how talent, visibility, connections, advice and moral support can be added value from angel investors in “What Angel Investors Can Bring to the Table“
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures and Bill Macaitis of Slack model four different scenarios where a SaaS company’s customer success team converts customers to evangelists in “How Customer Success Meaningfully Reduces Cost of Customer Acquisition“
From the Operators
John Sheehan of Runscope announces that Runscope has acquired Ghost Inspector, ‘the easiest way to automatically run cloud-based UI tests for websites, without having to write any code’, to build upon their common goal of ‘helping developers build better applications’ in “Ghost Inspector Joins Runscope on Quest for Better Software“
Suhail Doshi of Mixpanel reveals the full fundraising pitch deck that Mixpanel used to raise their latest round of $65 million in “Opening Our Pitch Deck That Helped Us Get Our $865M Valuation“
Dear VCs Blogger points out three ‘excellent reasons why founders should blog’ in order to experiment, ‘tell your own story’ and decompress in “Should Startup Founders Blog?“
Armando Biondi of AdEspresso encourages founders to ‘double-down on something that’s already working’ instead of trying things that may or may not work in “7 Counterintuitive Things We Avoided to Grow 10x in a Year“