From the Investors
Woodside Capital Partners releases an extensive 64 page report that covers 2015 technology trends, a software industry M&A overview, a hardware industry M&A overview, and stock market performance metrics in “Global Technology M&A Trends and Analysis – 1H 2015”
Bruce Booth of Atlas Venture notes, ‘the last five quarters are amongst the largest record-setting quarters in ten years’ and describes four things the current market is not in “The Venture Funding Boom in Biotech: A Few Things It’s Not”
Erik Rannala of Mucker Capital declares, ‘VCs are hardly on the demise’ and provides four reasons why in “Venture Capital Is Dead. Long Live Venture Capital.”
Semil Shah of Haystack Fund expands on five changes he thinks founders and current investors can expect in the on-demand sector in “Aftershocks from the On-Demand Fault Lines”
Paige Craig of Arena Ventures shares his tactical critique of Airbnb’s seed round and the key lessons he learned in “Airbnb, My $1 Billion Lesson”
Chris Quintero of Bolt details a list of ‘non-obvious’ product categories that Bolt wants to find and fund in “Hardware Startups We’d Like to Fund”
Jonathon Triest and Brett deMarrais of Ludlow Ventures carpool to work every day and decided to record their calls with entrepreneurs and VCs as a new video series called “Carpool.vc”
From the Operators
Sam DeBrule of Mattermark analyzes the fastest growing startups that raised rounds of $500k or more on AngelList in “Top 10 AngelList Funded Startups, Ranked by the Growth Score”
Jitha Thathachari of Rouse Digital outlines four ways in which multi-sided platforms like Uber, LinkedIn and Square solved their chicken and egg problems, and what we can learn from them in “How Uber solved its chicken and egg problem (and you can too!)”
Geoff McQueen of AffinityLive warns SaaS founders about the fundraising ‘Death Zone’ for SaaS startups between $50K – $200K in MRR in “The SaaS Fundraising Death Zone”
Francesco Paolini of TransferWise concludes that calculating the valuation of a company ‘all depends on assumptions’ and offers a common valuation framework in “Valuation of a Start-up: How Deep Do We Choose to See Into the Future?”
Rob Leathern of Optimal reflects on the trouble he went through in securing an add-on round from his seed investors and the two lessons he learned in “When an Investment Disappears”
General & Administrative
This section digs deeper into the challenges and lessons learned in facilities, finance, human resources, and more.
Camille Ricketts of First Round Review features Kevin Scott of LinkedIn who boils down his experiences to offer four pieces of wisdom for engineering leaders to live by in “How I Structured Engineering Teams at LinkedIn and AdMob for Success”
Nat Disston of EquityZen educates startup employees on the complexities of equity compensation they should have figured out before leaving a startup in “So You’re Leaving Your Startup Job…”
John Fazzolari of Revivn announces the new location of the Revivn headquarters and their consolidation of a warehouse and corporate office in “Revivn Moves to Brooklyn”
Gregory Mazurek of Gilt tells the history of the whiteboard and his thoughts on the impact of whiteboards on the interview process in “Stop Whiteboarding”
In The News
Carmel DeAmicis of re/code dives into the data that reports ‘there have been over 100 rounds over $100 million’, in 2015, totaling $16 billion in funding in “2015 Is the Year of the Mega Fundraising Round”