In the last five years, OpenView Partners has gone from a fledgling company with nine team members to becoming a top-10 venture capital firm. Here are just a couple of the highlights from our short history.
Read Full Article about OpenView… We’ve Come A Long Way, BabyIn my last post - The Deck: Pitching VC’s and Looking Under Rocks, I talked about putting together a few meaningful slides that can frame a productive discussion about your business. Thinking more about the topic, I wanted to share some brief thoughts about a big part of that discussion — the elevator pitch. Yes, we…
Read Full Article about The Elevator Pitch: Describing Your Company in 4 Sentences or LessI just finished reading this post by Jason Goldberg about his process for raising Fab’s latest round of expansion capital. Pretty good approach. Goldberg set out to design a fundraising plan that would: Take up as little of his time as possible. Take up almost no time from his management team. “I needed them focused…
Read Full Article about Expansion Capital: How Fab.com Raised $40 millionI often speak with executive management teams looking for expansion capital and many of them seemed unprepared for this daunting process. Representing a Boston venture capital firm, here are are some simple tips for helping that process succeed: 1. Create several financial models and options. Show an option without raising at all…this will demonstrate your confidence in your…
Read Full Article about Some Simple Advice to a Startup CEOThe first key requirement for building a capital efficient company is having a profitable distribution model. The goal of a profitable distribution model is quite simple to conceptualize, but quite complex to achieve and maintain. In simple terms, a profitable distribution model is one where the cost of sales and marketing in any given quarter…
Read Full Article about Building a Profitable Distribution ModelIt is not often that there is a reported case for expansion stage companies that specifically addresses an exclusive software license, so I thought I would share 3 takeaways from this 2011 exclusive software licensing case (HyperQuest vs N’Site Solutions). This case identifies something all companies looking for expansion capital should know about. I will…
Read Full Article about 3 Things You Should Know About Exclusive LicensingYou may have already heard of this open source license, but if not, here are a few things every SaaS company seeking expansion capital needs to know about the Afferro GPL, or AGPL (at least from the perspective of an open source attorney). 1) If you use AGPL’d code or modified code in your SaaS offering,…
Read Full Article about Expansion Capital: AGPL and What Every SaaS Company Needs to KnowIt might be time to deploy your expansion capital in Twitter marketing We have been telling our expansion stage companies to invest in social media marketing for a few years now, and we have been active on various marketing channels ourselves for at least the last couple of years. It was not always easy to…
Read Full Article about Twitter Marketing Coming of AgeIf you have been following my blog over the last several weeks, you will recall that I wrote a series of blog posts to help start-up companies with designing effective company exit strategies. This series of posts is titled “Understanding Your Exit Options,” as it is intended to teach start-up companies how to plan their…
Read Full Article about Understanding Your Exit Options: Identifying Potential Tech Acquirers Part 3After years of fighting the urge to cave in and switch to an iPhone, I finally jumped in with both feet roughly 10 days ago. I was able to resist its allure for so long due to the horror stories I would hear from people about AT&T’s shoddy coverage, dropped calls, etc. Many, I’m sure, were overblown, but they were still concerning…
Read Full Article about I-phone Junkie….We've built our team around the idea that we will provide meaningful value to each portfolio company.
We devote every person, every skill, every advantage, and most waking hours into making sure that each and every one of our portfolio companies succeed.
We invest around the world and offer significant global expansion assistance to companies worldwide.
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