Angel Investor Andrew Chen calls for an end of the term ‘unicorn’ and urges founders to build long-lasting companies ‘where wealth creation is a side effect of doing a great job’ in “Why We Should Build a Forever Company, Not Just a Unicorn”

Jess Erickson of 500 Startups visualizes 500 Startups’ success metrics for the past 5 years and announces their 1,000th investment in “Five Years @ 500 Startups – Oops, More Like One Thousand Startups!” (infographic)

Lou Kerner of The Social Internet Fund dubs public companies that fall out of the Fortune 500 ‘prunes’ and looks at why the number of ‘prunes’ is increasing in “Welcome to the Prune Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Innovation Laggards”

Paul Bennetts of AirTree VC dives deep into the history of Yahoo! to examine their performance leading up to 2000, during the bubble, and after in “Yahoo’s Journey Through the Dotcom Bubble”

David Norris of Forward Partners believes that ‘structured data-sets are essential to get right when building great marketplaces’ in “Marketplaces: Standardization of the Presentations of Supply”

Lee Hower of NextView Ventures guides founders in navigating their first board meeting and provides a template for their board meeting slides in “How to Approach Your First Board Meeting After Raising Seed Capital”

Josh Burwick of Sand Hill East outlines why he thinks the success of an early company is more about ‘the trajectory of the CEO/ founder’ vs. product direction in “The Golden Rule of Early Stage Investing”

Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures encourages startups to hire an ‘operationally-focused CFO’ and gives examples about ‘the role they play’ in “How Great, Operationally-Focused CFO’s Can Transform Your Business”

From the Operators

Jeremy Bell of Wattage reflects on his lessons learned building Wattage and discloses that Wattage is now shutting down in “Well, We Failed.”

Guy Kawasaki of Canva offers entrepreneurs a test they can give to potential advisors ‘to separate the contenders from the pretenders’ in “How to Pick Advisors”

Carrie Melissa Jones of CMX Media shares Francisco Cruz of Startup Grind’s insights about scaling and managing an event organization around the world in “How Startup Grind Serves Their Community with 170 Distributed Global Events Per Month”

Mike Roth of Bison details his ‘tell-tale signs of an inflated market’ and looks at the ‘downsides’ of unicorn companies in “Unicorns and the Next Venture Capital Crash”

Alberto Spinelli of Canon announces Canon’s acquisition of Lifecake in order to accelerate Canon’s digital consumer services business in “Canon Europe Acquires Lifecake”

Anna Garvey of WebRev Marketing & Design travels back in time to review the communication tools of the ‘Generation X’ (late 70’s to early 80’s) era in “The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech”

From Mattermark 

Sam DeBrule of Mattermark explores the problem of commercial real estate brokers prospecting for startups in “Brokers, Is This How You Find Startups To Pursue?”

To discover more high quality blog posts by investors and operators, follow@MattermarkDaily on Twitter.

Submit content for us to consider by emailing us: Editor@Mattermark.com