Another Giant of Venture Capital is Dead – Don Valentine

I just learnt the death of Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia. For those of you who may not know him, you could visit my previous posts that mentions him, either through tag #sequoia or even better search Valentine. Just be aware he invested in Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Electronic Arts… Or you may just […]

The Power Law and Venture Capital (part 3), planners and improvisers, betting big or diverse

Mallaby is a marvelous storyteller – thanks to his team probably as he mentions at least 15 collaborators in his acknowledgments. This is part 3 of my posts about the Power Law, following part 2 and part 1. You will discover so many figures of venture capital and entrepreneurship that it would be impossible to […]

Apple and its first investors : hilarious!

This morning, I was participating to a workshop about startups and one question came about the relationships with investors entrepeneurs are trying to attract and invest in their company. I told them it could be frustrating for many reasons, often because VCs never say no but decline too often to invest too. The best illustration […]

Founding Angels

I was interviewed last Thursday by Martin Würmseher, a PhD student at ETHZ working on the concept of Founding Angels [0]. “Founding Angels help bridge the so-called gap, which exists between academic research and the commercialisation of the new technologies. Together with inventors, they found start-up companies to further develop the research and commercialise the […]

The Entrepreneurial State: the important role of government in innovation (part 2)

As I said in The Entrepreneurial State: the important role of government in innovation (part 1), Mariana Mazzucato has written an important book even if I do not agree with all her arguments. We agree on the issue of funding of technologies, inventions and innovations. It has been generally understood that the commercialization of products […]