Blog Profile / Thinking About Thinking
| URL : | http://larrycheng.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Business & Finance / Venture Capital | |
| Posts on Regator: | 21 | |
| Posts / Week: | 0.2 | |
| Archived Since: | February 18, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
Start With The Problem
After hearing dozens of company pitches over the last week or so, I noticed a common theme with how CEOs told the story of their business. They typically expended great energy explaining what their company’s product or service does. They will talk about features and functionality that no other player in the market has. Where [...]
Can Online Privacy Compliance Even Be Implemented? Not Until Now.
It happens every day. You visit a website. Information on your visit is passed to a third party (such as an ad network). That third party uses the data for purposes that is not something you’ve explicitly condoned. For example, go to Zappos and look at your favorite red shoe. Then go about your daily [...]
Behind The Scenes Of An MSNBC TV Interview
Periodically, some of the partners at Volition will do network television spots on shows related to business and technology. Today, I paid a visit to 30 Rockefeller and the MSNBC studios to participate in J.J. Ramsey’s show, “Your Business”. The show won’t air until later, but this will give you a sense of what happens [...]
Why Volition Capital Invested In Ensighten
Following up on my prior post, “What Is Tag Management”, this second post will be specifically about why Volition Capital invested in enterprise tag management leader, Ensighten. Often when we announce a new investment, like we did with Ensighten last week, people ask me why we invested. Hopefully this post will serve to help answer [...]
What Is Tag Management?
This week we announced Volition’s newest investment in enterprise tag management leader, Ensighten. I couldn’t be more excited to be involved with the company and to join their Board of Directors. I was sitting down to write a post about why we invested in Ensighten, but after some thought, I realized it would probably be [...]
Introduction to International Justice Mission (IJM) – 2012 Monthly Webinar Schedule
I am pleased to be co-hosting a monthly webinar to introduce participants to International Justice Mission (IJM). IJM is a human rights agency that works with victims of violent oppression among the global poor. Their clients are victims of bonded labor, sex trafficking, sexual assault, false imprisonment and other forms of violent crime. IJM works with [...]
The Trash Economy
They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Unfortunately, this statement is more reality than idiom for a large swath of the global poor that find their daily sustenance in city dumps. Perhaps the only shortcoming of this statement is that it leaves out the women and children that also scavenge city dumps [...]
The Mythical “A” Player and The CEO’s Real Job
Every venture-backed CEO wants “A” players at every executive position. “A” players are executives that are 10x more productive than their peers. They are equally excellent strategically and operationally. They are equally capableShow More Summary
The Rule of Law and the Global Poor
This weekend, I learned something fundamental and important about the plight of the global poor. I learned that for most of the global poor, they live in a world without the rule of law. What this means, quite simply, is that they live in a world where crimes committed against them go systematically unpunished. In [...]
What Happens After The VC Associate Cold Call?
An entrepreneur I really admire asked me for advice on how to handle associate cold calls from VC firms. I thought the best way to answer that question is to tell you what happens after the cold call so you can deduce for yourself how to handle it. I’ll describe what happens at Volition Capital, [...]
The Slowly Declining Relevance of the Venture “Fund”
The unit of measurement in the venture capital industry has long been the “fund”. A fund is typically a discrete pool of capital that a firm raises around a particular strategy, and then deploys by investing into companies aligned with that strategy. The fund has had longstanding significance in the venture industry because it’s how [...]
Why I Did Not Join Bain Capital
Coming out of college, without even really knowing what they do, my dream job was to one day work at Bain Capital. Their reputation was that they took the very best of the young investment bankers and management consultants a couple of years after college. Since I was headed into the management consulting world after school, I [...]
What To Do With Sudden Wealth?
Your company just went public and the lock-up period is over. Your company got acquired and your share of the proceeds just hit the bank account. (Or, you’re wealth managers from Greenwich, CT, and you just won the lottery.) For some fortunate folks, any one of these events can lead to a sudden influx of sometimes substantial wealth. [...]
When The Majority Is Wrong
Despite the fact that often times the majority rules, that doesn’t mean the majority is right. The most poignant example comes from a premier venture capital firm I once worked for. One of the opportunities they gave their investment professionals was the opportunity to invest personally and on a discretionary basis in each round of each financing the firm participated in. [...]
When Founders Refer To Their Company As “I”
Given Volition’s focus on bootstrapped high growth technology companies, we meet company founders every week that have built amazing companies with very little resources. It never gets old hearing stories of how founders put companies on their backs and will them to survive and succeed. Yet, in the process of meeting with founders week-in and week-out, I [...]
Child Sponsorship Isn’t Exactly Child Sponsorship
A number of non-profit relief and development organizations have adopted child sponsorship as their primary marketing vehicle. Child sponsorship typically involves showing some information and a picture about a single child, allowing the donor to “sponsor” that child through a recurring monthly donation, and then affording the donor an opportunity to get to know that [...]
Google’s Spidering Rate Is 3000 Times Faster Than Bing In The First Month
This is only one data point but I thought it was interesting. About a month ago, my wife launched a website called Activity Yard. It’s a website community where parents rate and review activities for their kids. The URL was submitted to Google and Bing on the same day in August. Out of sheer curiosity, [...]
Is Being Top Quartile Any Good?
Historically, the measure of success in the venture business has been consistent top quartile performance at the fund level. Each firm generally compares their fund level performance to funds that started the same year or vintage, and if they beat the top quartile threshold put out by Cambridge Associates, they feel good about their performance. [...]
How CSN Stores Is Educating And Transforming Boston
With increasing frequency, I hear about people in the Boston community going to work at CSN Stores. This is the mega furniture and home goods e-commerce company that everybody likes to describe as “the biggest e-commerce company you’ve never heard of” – even though now I think everyone’s heard about them. It used to be [...]
“Catch Your Kids Doing Good”
I had the privilege of spending this afternoon with the founder of a very promising educational software company. I was intrigued with the background of the founder as it’s not every day that I run into entrepreneurs with an accomplished and extensive background in child psychology. Given his expertise, I couldn’t resist asking the following [...]