Databases
Two weeks ago MongoDB, formerly known as 10gen, announced a massive $150M funding round said to be the largest in the history of databases lead by Fidelity, Altimeter, and Salesforce.com with participation from existing investors Intel, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia. This brings the total capital raised by MongoDB
SaaS
If you've ever wondered what drives the valuation of a SaaS vendor, then take a look at this chart that a banker showed me the other day. The answer, pretty clearly, is revenue growth. The correlation is stunning. Taking some points off the line: * 10% growth gets you
Boards
Last week a scathing post by Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, entitled Dear Dumb VC, generated some stiff controversy in the blog- and Twitter-spheres. Serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Mark Suster, author of the superb Both Sides of the Table blog, weighed in with a long, fact-filled response, entitled
Management
Everyone knows the old joke about the new CEO and the three envelopes. I thought I'd take a moment in this post to talk about the new CEO and what I call the three doors. I think most people fail to grasp the commitment that hired (non-founder) CEOs
VC
I’m often asked by entrepreneurs: when is the right time to raise money at a startup? I invariably say two things in response: * Whenever you can * Right now Whenever You CanMost startups typically go through ups and downs. Say you’ve just completed 4 consecutive quarters above plan. You
VC
Let's go back to July of 2010. Imagine you're having coffee with Endeca's CEO, Steve Papa, a brilliant guy and someone for whom I have great respect. But let's say we're having a coffee with Steve in July, 2010 and
Strategy
When asked why he won so many matches, chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer would reply: "all that matters on the chessboard is good moves." That is, winning is all about the moves. And moves, in turn, are all about the situation. Contrast this to today's Silicon Valley
Management
While I've blogged before about Palantir Technologies (e.g., Beware the Spectacular B-Round Valuation), this will probably be my last post about them because, since leaving MarkLogic, I am no longer terribly involved in the Intelligence Community space nor engaged against them as an indirect competitor. I initially
Management
Everyone’s aligned in a Silicon Valley startup, right? Give everyone some options so everyone has skin in the game and then everyone wants what’s best for the share price: one for all and all for one! Not so fast. In this post, inspired by a chat with longtime
Management
If I had a dollar for every time a venture capitalist said "world-class," I could start my own venture fund. But rather than dismissing world-class as a tired cliché, in this post I'll spend a few minutes trying to understand what VCs mean when they say
VC
Visualization tools startup Palantir announced a follow-on financing round yesterday, raising $90M at a claimed $735M valuation. Since most people aren't familiar with either finance or VC math, this can generate confusion so I thought I'd do a post explaining a few things. The first is
Strategy
As I sit here at Palantir's Govcon 5 conference at the lavish Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner (Virgina), I can't help but think about the recent "fit or fat" startup debate that hit the blogosphere a few weeks back. The debate started
