See below for a good description of what we like to see in deals at...

I'm a massive believer in the power of meditation and I'm far from alone. These...

A couple of weeks back I did an interview with Abadesi Osunsade from Product Hunt....

When I started in venture capital in the late 1990s VCs were regularly lambasted for...

Between 2006 and 2016, I wrote something on this blog almost every working day. It...

Ben Horowitz,founder of leading venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and a successful entrepreneur prior to that published a post over the weekend:The Case for the Fat Start-Up. In it he...

We all know that things get difficult when someone wants something too much. You might have had a needy boyfriend or girlfriend whose constant need for reaffirmation and over-reaction...

Earlier this week a friend was asking me whether her fundraising chances would be improved if she started generating revenues. She's a natural salesperson and she's wondering if having...

Let me start by saying that I'm a massive believer in the power of metrics. There's an old adage that if you don't measure something it doesn't happen and...

In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you...

Max Niederhofer recently published this chart showing European exits. As you can see there's been impressive growth in sub $100m exits, but the story with larger M&A exits and IPOs...

This week I've been at the SuperReturn/SuperVenture conference in Berlin. It's the biggest European gathering of venture capital fund managers, private equity fund managers and LPs, the institutions that...

I just read ‘Need More Time'? Guideposts For Tech Founders Going To Market When No Market Exists which is full of great tips for what they call ‘pre-chasm' enterprise startups. The...

Google is pushing hard to make artificial intelligence as easy to access as cloud computing, building services that reduce both costs and the technical skill required from users. To...

The blogosphere has transformed entrepreneurship. Twenty years ago there were precious few resources available for founders and most either had to find an advisor who had done it before...

One fear I heard expressed a lot post Brexit is that the London will lose it's place as the dominant startup centre in Europe. These fears were compounded by...

This chart (taken from a recent post by First Republic's Samir Kaji, data from leading venture investor Horseley Bridge) shows that to get the 3-5x return that most venture...

Two weeks ago I wrote about our Skill and Pace value. Another of our four values is Enjoy The Journey. This one is more axiomatic for me than the...

You might have seen that the week before last Balfour Beatty (here) and Mace (here) weighed in on the future of construction. Both are quite radical in the breadth...

Here at Forward Partners we are going through a process of rethinking our values. We have historically had seven, but found that was too many to consistently remember and...

The world is turning against tech. Silicon Valley is in danger of becoming the new Wall Street – public enemy number one. And it's easy to see why. Facebook...

From a recent Fast Company article about Satya: Invited to participate in a Q&A at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, a major annual event, he told...

This chart is from the UK government's recently published Patient Capital Review. I'm publishing it here because I often hear it said that the US startup ecosystem has a...

Earlier in the year, there were a significant number of victims who came forward to share stories of sexual harassment by investors. Some of those investors were prominent VCs....

Getting value out of board meetings is tough. Lots of VCs have written posts with great tips – this recent one by Mark Suster is a very high quality...

This is a long post (1,900 words). For those of you who are time poor here's the tltr: Forward Partners operates a focused investment strategy because it helps us...

As you may know Google has done an almost obsessive amount of research into what makes a high performing team. This post from Michael Schneider summarises what they found,...

Want to see the confirmation bias at work? Then read on. I just read Spending 10 Minutes a Day on Mindfulness Subtly Changes the Way You React to Everything...

This growth equation is brilliant in it's simplicity. I love that it forces the focus on a magic moment and core product value. Both are essential. Read more about...

I just read Andrew Chen'sAs Growth is getting hard from intensive competition, consolidation, and saturation.As His argument is that we are at a point in the cycle where distribution is controlled...

I've been thinking a lot about authenticity recently. The first thing to say is that it's a woolly concept. As an individual I am clearly me, and therefore of...

Growing from a founder to a scale-up CEO is challenging. Thinking up game changing ideas couldn't be more different to running a large business. Many transitions are required along...

A common mistake founders make at the early stages of a company is to put too much detail into their business plan.As Sometimes we see a level of detail which...

Consider the three charts above. They are all representations of the same exponential function where the Y value is equal to two times it's previous value. The first chart...

I am in the Elon Musk fan club. It's hard not to be in awe of what he's achieved – four multi-billion dollar companies and he's only in his...

As a keen observer of startups over the last 17 years, one of the most remarkable and welcome developments has been the application of scientific method to building startups....

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you will have noticed there's a lot of heat around AI as an investment theme right now. Octopus's recent announcement of a...

A couple of times recently I've found myself coaching people to stay positive. In both cases they very reasonably pushed back, saying great idea, but they didn't want to...

It's fashionable in certain quarters now to slate some of the billion dollar startups that haveAs been created recently and the investors that helped them get there. Zebras Fix What...

It's common for VCsAs to look at the market size for a potential investment from aAs top down and bottom up perspective. The top down perspective takes market research, often from...

We have been thinking about how to evolve our investment strategy recently. I will write about the full process when we're done and I've got a better sense of...

I've come across Kahneman's Peak-End concept before but only just grasped it's significance. As with much of his work Kahneman is highlighting an area where our minds don't work...

I've just read Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, a book lots of people seem to be talking about all of a sudden. It's a great book, and one I highly...

This chart, from First Round Capital's recent post Leslie's Compass: A Framework for Go-To-Market StrategyAs is super interesting. It's first use is for founders to work out whether they should...

For about three weeks I've been meaning to write about the amazing success that is Amazon. Back then it was when I read they were planning to create 100k US...

Around nine years ago I read Nicholas Taleb's seminal texts The Black Swan (2007) and Fooled by Randomness (2001) and I loved them both. For venture investors everywhere The Black...

I love the idea of Magic LeapAs and wish them every success in the world. Who wouldn't want to see whalesAs leaping out of floors like the one in the picture...

This is a chart from Atomico's 2016 State of the Nation report. As a UK investor and citizen it's pleasing to see that we're the top destination for tech industry migrants by...

Most VCs will say that to evaluate deals they look at the market size, the product and the quality of the team. Different investors place different weights on the...

Last night at FPLive I was chatting with an entrepreneur called Nick who has just closed his startup. He talked impressively about what he'd learnt and has an interesting...