Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a small panel discussion between Jason Green (General Partner at Emergence Capital and investor in companies such as DoubleClick, aQuantive, and Ask Jeeves) and Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn, EVP at Paypal, and angel investor in over 60 startups such as Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, and

While the topic of career counseling is not the focus of this blog, I get enough requests from people who want to break into the VC industry, I thought it was worthwhile to write a blog entry about it so I can refer people to my viewpoint. There are plenty of articles (Seth Levine has

I was at a Dealmaker Media event the other week and was asked a question about the role of entrepreneurs dealing with partners vs non-partners at venture capital firms. Its a very interesting and relevant question for many entrepreneurs starting out who are unfamiliar with the fund raising process. Since I've been in both roles,

One of the most confusing and misunderstood concepts to entrepreneurs is around valuation – not only in how it is determined (that is an entire post itself which I won't try to tackle right now) but more importantly, what should the goal be? I think for entrepreneurs who haven't been been through fund raises already, the

Having seen many different start-up situations from both the VC side as well as the start-up side, the importance of investor and entrepreneur alignment is often under-estimated in its impact on everyone involved. For inexperienced entrepreneurs, this issue is not well understood and often leads to some of the biggest areas of disagreement and tens...

In meeting with entrepreneurs, especially those that I haven't met or heard about before, I often ask them to give me the 5 min overview of the business before we dive into any details or the formal presentation deck. I typically ask for this before I ask for the entrepreneurs backgrounds – for reasons which

http://socaltech.com/interview_with_peter_lee_baroda_ventures/s-002185 8.html Thanks to Ben Kuo for taking the time to chat. He's done a great job reporting on Southern California and helping to build the community here.

This recent NYTimes article is worth a read and sparked some thoughts. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/start-ups/25startup.html With the market tanking, the pendulum for consumer internet space monetization, which has largely relied on advertising as their primary business model, is quickly swinging the other way – to direct user...

With the recent expansion of Baroda Ventures and my efforts to help build the Southern California entrepreneurship ecosystem, I am going to be testing an open office hours format for anyone who would like some advice for 30 min by phone. This should be used as a way to get feedback on an idea or