How to Find the Right Venture Capitalist for Your Startup!

This is one match that’s certainly not made in heaven — you’ve got to toil and woo several partners to finally arrive at one that best understands you and your business, and is ready to commit to you in the long term.

I’m talking, of course, about your relationship with a venture capitalist. You’ve probably heard grieving entrepreneurs who, after signing the dotted line, are quite unhappy throughout the relationship with their investors.

But there’s nothing wrong with the venture capitalist (VC) per se. You just made the wrong decision. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to choose the right VC to work with, because the right marriage can help define how successful your business will be and how happy you will be running it.

Here are 4 key points to consider for a happy and long-lasting marriage with a VC:

1. Expertise: Choosing a VC is just like a marriage — that is, it’s a long-term commitment. You need to court first to find out whether the VC is a right fit for you. Take the time out to research whether the VC has funded companies in the domain they are operating. Research to find out what companies they have invested in and what their level of involvement has been in each of those. Do they have potential conflicts (e.g., is the expertise a by-product of an investment in a potential competitor)?

2. Adding Value: Look for investors who can add value to your business and not just give you funds. The best marriages between entrepreneurs and VCs happen when the latter can contribute to the growth of the former and when it isn’t purely transactional. Entrepreneurs need to ask, when things get tough in my venture, will this VC be a part of the solution?

3. Term Sheets: This is where you really find out what the intentions are of the person putting in the money. Look out for exit clauses; if not clearly defined, ask for them to be. Although they are not cast in stone (I know of one venture where the exit was clearly defined, but deferred as the company entered a new vertical and that added to their top line immensely, adding to a bigger valuation), it helps to know what the person with the money is really looking for.

Term sheets are very carefully crafted to fool even the best of people into believing that they’ve struck a great deal, but in reality, for the entrepreneur, that’s not always the case. So if you’re at this stage, it wouldn’t hurt to have your term sheets validated by experienced entrepreneurs who’ve gone down this road and/or a lawyer who has the relevant experience.

4. Set Expectations: Many deals are left to ambiguity, either because of lack of clarity at the stage of getting into a deal or because of assumptions made by either party. It is very important to set expectations from both ends and be clear about it. Entrepreneurs need to build trust with their VCs and vice versa. If you don’t have trust at the beginning of the relationship, it is bound to cause heartaches at the later stage.

Whatever you do, do not take this relationship for granted. You are in it for the long haul, and giving up because of a failed marriage is the last thing that you want to do with your venture. So take caution before you enter into a contract.

That said, all the best with your pitch! If it has worked out well for you, I’d like to hear your experiences and what makes your marriage successful.

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Rahul Varshneya is a startup coach and the co-founder of Arkenea, an enterprise mobility and cloud solutions provider. He writes on starting up and mobile strategy at http://rahulvarshneya.com/blog.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Are VC’s Bypassing Early Stage Health Deals?

Healthcare startups,Venture Capital,startups,funding,seed round,series a

(image: policymed.com)

Success stories, like the one of Memphis’ medical device accelerator Zeroto510, where 80% of their first class received follow on funding, seem to be growing scarce on a national scale. In their first class of six startups at the ZeroTo510 program 5 of the startups received follow on funding, with one, Restore Medical Solutions, going straight to a $2.5 million dollar series A round.

Well national medical startup publication MedCity News, released two graphs this morning that may be alarming to early stage medical startups, who often need a lot more seed money than your social, mobile, webtech startups.

The data, published by CB Insights, shows a significant number of VCs are skipping over earlier stage “seed round” deals for healthcare startups. Conversely, the same data set shows that the “series A crunch” may not be as prevalent in healthcare startups.

As you can see clearly from the data set Series A and Series B seem to be the preferred stage for a VC firm to get into a startup business, at least over the last five quarters.

According to MedCity News VC Funding in healtcare was up over the last year, in fact reaching a “multi year high”. Also worthy to note is that the medical device category is eating up the most VC funds. That should be good for the next round of ZeroTo510, Rock Health and Health Box.

Restore Medical talks to us about their $2.5 million dollar Series A round.

I Know We Want Venture Capital But What Is It?

You may be shocked at the amount of startup founders and entrepreneurs that are too afraid to ask the question in the headline, “I know we want venture capital, but what is it”.

Well almost three years ago Silicon Valley Bank did a round table discussion led by Michael Hanewich, the East Coast Head Of Life Sciences/Venture Capital for Silicon Valley Bank.

The panelists were:

Bryan Roberts, Ph.D. — Partner with Venrock, a leading venture capital firm
Judith Elsea — Co-Founder and Managing Director of Weathergage Capital, a fund-of-funds and limited partner in venture capital investing
John Mendlein, Ph.D. — Chairman of Fate Therapeutics, an emerging company backed by venture funding.

In a six part video series they explain exactly what venture capital is, where it comes from, how it gets to entrepreneurs and how an entrepreneur can benefit, not only from the funding but from a long term commitment as well.

Roberts explains the venture capital process early on. Venture capital firms raise funds every 3 or 4 years from limited partners. Limited partners can come in a variety of forms. Wealthy families, foundation partners, insurance companies, funds of funds and other can be partners in VC firms. Now keep in mind we’re talking about Venture Capital here, not an “angel” round which is something totally different.

Partners in a venture capital firm have a “very long horizon” on dollars. They want to make money,but are fine, and perhaps better off, doing it over a long period of time.

Now, granted, this video series was produced three years ago before super exits like Instagram. However, Instagram is the exception, not the rule.

The purpose of the VC dollars is to get a company’s product developed and to market, and eventually to liquidity. Venture capitalists will then make money on their initial investment commonly through the company going public or a merger or acquisition of some sort. In rare instances the venture capitalists can make their money back through the company generating revenue.

Here’s the first video in the series:

See the rest of the video series here.

Google Ventures “We Will Never Invest In A Company That Tanks” Gets Fund Upped To $1.5B

Google’s venture arm, Google Ventures, is the proud recipient of $1.5 billion dollars in capital to invest in startups through 2017. Google Ventures has been the venture arm of the search and web giant since 2009. A mix of great entrepreneurs are involved with Google Ventures including Rich Miner one of the co-founders of Android and Kevin Rose (or is he).

While Google is known for their acquihires to bring talent from strategically related startups into the Google umbrella, Google Ventures is investing in startups for financial reasons and not necessarily for strategic partnerships. Some of their investments to date include HomeAway, Nest Labs and 23andMe.

The $1.5 billion dollar commitment is $100 million dollars more per year than Google Ventures has had in the past. Traditionally they’ve had $200 million a year to invest. That brings 2012 to $300 million, along with 2013 and the remaining years after that through 2014.

Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris told the Wall Street Journal’s, Venture Capital Dispatch, that it took about 30 minutes to convince the powers that be at Google to up the ante. Maris is also very confident in the fund, telling the Journal “We will not invest in any company that tanks”

In addition to the investment Google Ventures now offers their portfolio companies a whole suite of services like design, marketing and technical recruiting. Of course all of these are resources that Google is very good at already.

The increase in funding was announced via a tweet last Thursday at a gathering in Mountain View of 100 Google Ventures portfolio companies.

Linkage:

Source: WSJ Venture Capital Dispatch

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Minnesota Venture Firm Tells Startups: Stop Reading TechCrunch

Four business partners with roots in Minnesota, came together earlier this summer and announced the formation of a new venture firm called AMP Partners. Minnesota has seen a recent boost in startups and entrepreneurism spearheaded by JumpStart Inc and then quickly taken over by Minnesotans.

Darren Marhula, Brad England, Mark Donahoe and Chris Palm pooled their own money together from investment banking, Wall Street, and property management, Marhula told tech.mn in June. “We’re interested in the right entrepreneur with the right plan more than the exact market. We’re not exclusively focused on any one type of business, but definitely interested in local technology startups.”

Now as the summer season comes to a close and AMP’s been on the ground running for the last few months or so tech.mn checked back in with Marhula who echoed a main theme that we continually hear on our sneaker-strapped nationwide startup roadtrip. That theme, simply put is, valuations are too high.

In the follow-up interview Marhula said “we continue to be surprised by the unrealistically high valuation expectations by many entrepreneurs out there, which has prevented us from making more investments.”. So again in line with markets their size like St.Louis, Cincinnati and even Washington DC, entrepreneurs are pricing themselves out of an investment. This can be a lethally hard lesson to learn.

To date, AMP has invested into two companies, presumably with more modest self-worth. HomeVisor is an online Realtor referral service and the first to receive funding from AMP. Their second investment , BuyWafers.com sells silicon wafers and other materials for semi-conductors. That company will be launching shortly. AMP didn’t reveal how much money was in either deal.

It’s evident that AMP, like most investors, are looking for viable startups and businesses and they’re not holding a business plan competition. AMP is also seeing a lot of buzzword happy entrepreneurs who are the same entrepreneurs being poked fun at by Vooza in New York.

Marhula said: “Stop reading TechCrunch and focus on building your business; get your valuation expectations in check and when you come in to pitch your idea, we don’t want to hear about exits, pivots, and MVPs…we want to see results.”

AMP Partners would love to hear your realistic pitch, drop them a line here

Linkage:

Source: tech.mn

Check out AMP here

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Chicago Funds 25 Startups For $188 Million In Q2 2012 Smashes Q1

Chicago recently played host to a great regional tech and startup conference called TechWeek 2012. Judging on the activity at the conference and the legendary after parties it should be no surprise that startup activity in Chicago is big. How big? Try $188 million dollars big of 25 startup companies. Two companies; Dealstar and Tribeca Flashpoint Acacdemy also exited in Q2 without disclosing financials behind their deals.

GoHealth received the most money in Q2 2012 with $50 million by Norwest Equity Partners. Valence Health came in second place with $30 million. In the tech space Singlehop led with $27.5 million. Total Attorneys was second in the non health space with $15 million.

Chicago’s startup de jour, Belly, pulled in two rounds of funding in Q2 for a total of $12.5 million. Lightbank Capital and Silicon Valley Bank teamed up for a $2.5m round for Belly in April and Silicon Valley powerhouse firm, Andreesseen Horowitz invested $10m in May.

The bigger story for Chicago is that in Q1 2012 there was just $33 million in funding split between 17 companies.

Here’s the complete list of companies funded in Q2 from BuiltinChicago.com

Arroweye $3 million
Belly $12.5 million
BenchPrep $6 million
BrightTag $15 million
Dabble $140,000
Elevate Digital $2.7 million
Future Simple $6.8 million
GoHealth $50 million
gtrot $920,000
Journatic $3.2 million
Kapow Events $700,000
Mediafly $200,000
MentorMob $150,000
Monthlys not reported
Neighborhoods not reported
New Futuro $1.3 million
Open Kennel $440,000
Restaurant.com $8,000,000
Singlehop $27.5 million
SocialKaty $300,000
Tempo $750,000
Total Attorneys $15M
Unmetric $3.2M
Valence Health $30M

Linkage:

Source: Built In Chicago 1 2

Check out Nibletz’ coverage of Chicago TechWeek 2012

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Cultivation Capital Invests In Two More St. Louis Startups: Yurbuds & Systematic Revenue

Two weeks ago we got a chance to meet Rick Holton of Holton Capital, Arch Angels, and Cultivation Capital among other things. We talked about the thriving tech scene in St. Louis and the synergy created when a meeting at Holton’s office formed VentureSTL.

Cultivation Capital is back in the news again as they’ve announced their two most recent investments. Cultivation Capital’s principals include Holton, along with Square co-founder Jim Mckelvey, Brian Matthews and Peter Esparrage. Back in April we reported on Cultivation Capital’s first three investments, including a $250,000 investment in St.Louis favorite, LockerDome.

In the latest round of investments Cultivation Capital invested $219,000 in Yurbuds a company that makes sports headphones. The company makes earbuds that can withstand the heaviest of workouts. In fact at the International Consumer Electronics back in January, Yurbuds had acrobats walking on their hands while the earbuds stayed firmly in their ears. To prove that there was no PR hocus pocus on-lookers were encouraged to open brand new packs of the earbuds for the acrobats to use. Yes they were awesome.

The other startup to receive funding from Cultivation Capital was Systematic Revenue. While not as sexy as earbuds that won’t fall out of your ears, Systematic Revenue is an online automated marketing solution to help track potential clients. Back in May the startup reported that they had 25 businesses signed up in their beta test.

Systematic Revenue received $100,000 from Cultivation Capital.

“We look forward to assisting the vibrant Yurbuds team and the calculated Systematic Revenue teams as they continue to define St. Louis as an entrepreneurial hub,” saidCliff Holekamp, a general partner of Cultivation Capital, in a statement.

Cultivation Capital plans to invest $500,000 in the most promising startups in the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 classes of Capital Innovators.

Linkage:

Here’s Cultivation Capital’s website

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St. Louis’ Rick Holton Jr Charged Up By VentureSTL

Rick Holton Jr. And his brother Rob Holton are no strangers to the St. Louis startup scene, tech scene or business scene. The Holton brothers come from a long and historical pedigree in the St. Louis area. Their mother Lotsie Hermann Holton is actually the granddaughter of August “Gussie” Busch from the Anheuser-Busch family.

We met the Holton Brothers on Friday when the Nibletz sneaker strapped startup road trip pulled into St. Louis for a quick overnight stop. We were there to meet with our friends at LockerDome. We had asked Gabe Lozano to introduce us to someone very influential in the St. Louis startup scene, preferably someone part of the Arch Angels, angel investor network.

Rick Holton and Rob Holton, through their investment company, Holton Capital, are members of the Arch Angels. Rick Holton is also one of the principals in the fund that came out of the Arch Angel group, Cultivation Capital. Notable St. Louis alum Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square is also a principal in Cultivation Capital, as are Brian Matthews, Peter Esparrago, and Cliff Holekamp. Together the fund is backed by $20 million for funding startups.

But the story here doesn’t lay in the background of St.Louis’ growing tech startup community. The story is about what Rick Holton Jr has been very excited about lately, and that is synergy.

When we arrived at Holton’s office Cameron and I were under the impression that Holton had expected to hear a pitch from us. Yes we absolutely need money but we’re not sure VC money is the way to go. We were at Holton Capital’s offices to get the story. The story about how and why, all of the sudden St. Louis keeps popping back up in the tech and startup news.

We are hearing about Arch Angels, Cultivation Capital, BonFyre, LockerDome, and countless other companies, funds and investors on a regular basis. Heck St. Louis is so hot that Edward Domain moved tech.li to St. Louis from Chicago after a $50,000 grant from Arch Grants.

It’s not like the Holton’s or any of the other partners in Cultivation Capital or angel investors in Arch Angels, are strangers to investing. Holton Capital has been investing in companies for over a decade.

Rick Holton explained that with their company they had invested heavily into a variety of companies. They have a classic car company, a framing company, investments in several life sciences companies and of course technology. Rick quickly confirmed with his brother and then told us that Arch Angels has $30 million invested so far.

St. Louis is an extremely loyal town. Earlier in the morning Jim Enright and Mark Sanders at L ockerDome told us that if you went down the street in downtown St.Louis 9 out of 10 locals could tell you everything that happened in the most recent Cardinals game. After a quick test they were right.

But even as loyal as St. Louis can be Holton was concerned that some people may have the perception that St.Louis is a dying industrial town, rather than the thriving tech town that it is.

Holton’s other major concern was that all the startup and tech resources weren’t talking to each other. Through Holton Capital and his work with FinServe Angels and Arch Angels Holton is extremely plugged into the tech and startup ecosystem in St. Louis but he kept finding that not many others were.

Holton explained that he would hear about one deal from someone and suggest another possible investor that would be perfect for the opportunity but they didn’t know each other. “People weren’t talking to each other and because of that they were competing with each other when they didn’t have to be”.

At this point in our discussion Holton has moved from reserved to completely animated. If you don’t know Holton personally, he stands at a towering 10 feet, ok not really but he is very tall. He’s talking extremely fast and moving his hands around explaining to us, with the excitement that you’d expect when Mark McGwire was still belting them out of the park.

You can tell that this non-communication between tech influencers in St. Louis was something Holton was becoming passionate about. So he called a meeting.

Holton invited 15 of the top tech and startup influencers in St.Louis to the meeting in his boardroom on January 26th. Among the invitees were other venture capitalists, influential local tech blogs, partner resources and entrepreneurs.

Of those 15 people invited only 47 of them showed up. Holton Capital has your average modest sized conference room. Holton was fitting all of these interested tech folks wherever they could. At one point, as Holton actually showed us, they moved every chair in the office into the conference room.

“What I expected to be a 45 minute to an hour meeting of introductions and handing out business cards turned into a strategy session that lasted over two hours” Holton said.

Out of that meeting new partnerships were formed, new friends were made, and VentureSTL was born.

VentureSTL is a new web portal connecting everyone in the St.Louis startup and tech community to each other with news, discussions, links and profiles. Holton believed so much in VentureSTL that his own holtoncapital.com forwards to the site.

Holton is very optimistic about the companies that are growing right in St. Louis. Two of the more notable startups are LockerDome and BonFyre. Holton and the others involved in VentureSTL, the meeting that VentureSTL was born out of and everyone affiliated with Arch Angels are doing what they can to keep St. Louis startups in St. Louis and attracting new companies, like tech.li to St. Louis.

St. Louis has some big stars in this web 2.0 wave. Most notably would be Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Square and Jim McKelvey, also co-founder of Square. McKelvey loves St. Louis and is committed to helping Holton and company with the St. Louis mission, Dorsey, not so much.

Linkage:

Connect to VentureSTL here

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Foundry’s Jason Mendelson, Now Bullish On Michigan Startup Scene

The Michigan Growth Capital Symposium was held this past Tuesday and Wednesday in Ypsilanti. Xconomy’s Sarah Schmid reports that over 450 founders, entrepreneurs, VCs, and others in the Michigan startup community showed out for the event.

Among them was the managing director and co-founder of Foundry Group, Jason Mendelson who gave a keynote address entitled: “The Velocity of the Midwest Venture Capital Ecosystem: Sleeping Giants or Momentary Blips?”

During his speech he was very positive about the current startup scene in Michigan. Mendelson is no stranger to the state of Michigan. He was born in Detroit and graduated from the university of Michigan. While this weeks talk was all positive, it wasn’t always that way for Mendelson and his native state.

After graduating from law school at the University of Michigan, Mendelson wanted to stay in Michigan but he quickly found that the state, so deep rooted in the auto industry, didn’t care if someone had the next million dollar idea. At that time no one cared about anything except seniority.

So like any aspiring entrepreneur Mendelson made a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley, an experience he doesn’t speak to highly of.

Mendelson said that the competition in Silicon Valley was so harsh that the only pleasure in life came from relishing in others’ failure. Mendelson described Silicon Valley to Schmid as “toxic” ultimately causing him to leave in 2006 and head for Boulder Colorado.

Kansas Startups: Student Angels Is A Student Run Angel Fund

In most of the stories that we report on involving angel funds, venture capital, incubation, investment, or competition, the student is the recipient. We cover student startup challenges all the time. In Kansas, they’re doing things a little different.

At the University of Missouri in Columbia, fifteen students are running a $600,000 venture fund appropriately named “Student Angels”. The purpose of the fund is for the students to find, identify in and invest in potential high growth startup companies in Missouri. The fund is entirely student run and the money is real.

EternoGen was the first recipient of an investment from the Student Angels. The Student Angels invested $30,000 in the life-science/biohealth startup. EternoGen produces a product called Demelle which is a human tissue filter used in cosmetic, cardio-vascular and orthopedic procedures.

Student Angels isn’t a class, it’s more of an extra-curricular or a club. The students met twice a week in William Allen’s classroom. Allen serves as the faculty adviser for the program and is also the assistant professor of finance. The students in the program are a diverse mix. The team includes law students, MBA candidates, a journalism student, a biology major and a student from the psychology department, reports KansasCity.com

Even with their diverse roots though, the students unanimously decided to invest in EternoGen even though it’s not likely that the fund will see a return on that investment for a few years.

The seed money for the fund came from alumni donations as well as the Shelter Insurance Foundation. Allen is hoping to see the fund increase to a couple of million dollars so that the student run fund can invest in the six figure amounts that most startups need.

Missouri Student Angels aren’t alone there are similar programs at the University of Michigan as well as Washington University in St.Louis

Linkage:

Source: Kansascity.com

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Denver Startups: Castrol 20/20 innoVentures Crops In Denver To Hear Pitches.

20/20 innoVentures a venture capital arm of Castrol Oil/BP stopped in Denver Colorao this week to hear pitches from up and coming mobile/mobility technology startups.

Crashboxx a Fort Collins based startup was one of four companies that made their pitches. David Byrne, Crashbox’s CEO said that this was his first time pitching to a vc firm.

Crashboxx is a technology geared towards fleet. The Crashboxx functions much like the black box on an airplane and records data that can be recalled in the event of a crash.

“This is really the future of fleet management and something every parent of a teenage driver would want,” said Byrne to the

Denver Post

Lightning Hybrids out of Loveland pitched as well. Their technology uses a hydraulic system to store the force from braking and re-applies it to accelerating.

According to Lightning Hybrid’s Founder Dan Johnson, their technology boosts mileage efficiency up to 30%

Fort Collins startup VanDyne SuperTurbo has made over 300 pitches according tp founder Ed VanDyne. They’ve raised over $14 million dollars so far.

They need to raise more capital for their technology that uses exhaust waste heat and torque from an engine’s drive train to increase an engine’s energy efficiency up to 30%.

GreenGold of Colorado Springs also pitched their manufacturing technology that according to their website “unlocks the full potential and benefits of biobased ingredients to create machining lubricants”

Source: Denver Post

L.A. Startup: BuzzMob Is First Company In MWW Ventures

MWW is one of the largest PR firms in the country with a global presence. Their client list includes some of the top tier companies in their industries. Nikon and Samsung Mobile are both represented by MWW among a long list of familiar brands.

MWW just announced a new venture capital project spearheaded by their global head of technology and digital content, Ephraim Cohen. MWW ventures is incubating startups that advance media, marketing and public relations industries by investing firm resources in exchange for equity.

Cohen told Nibletz.com that MWW Ventures was developed by he and MWW Group CEO Michael Kempner who is a serial entrepreneur. With the verticals that the MWW Group is involved with Cohen says they come across great startups all the time. With MWW Ventures, the MWW Group will invest and incubate companies that will help them stay on “…the cutting edge of technology”.

Buzzmob, a Los Angeles startup was announced as MWW Ventures first portfolio company last week. Buzzmob is a mobile app for live events that forms location based social networks in real time and on the fly.

More after the break

St.Louis: New Venture Capital Group Cultivation Capital Announces First Three Investments

Yesterday we brought you the story of the exciting St.Louis startup LockerDome. LockerDome, the first social network for athletes (that’s been done right) has attracted the investment of Jim McKelvey, one of the co-founders of Square. LockerDome has so much going for it right now, that yesterday we asked is LockerDome the Groupon of St.Louis. Many folks from St.Louis chimed in on Twitter suggesting that LockerDome was even better than that.

Today we’re reporting on a new St. Louis venture capital group. Cultivation Capital has announced it’s first three investments. Not surprising, LockerDome is one of those investments.

Cultivation Capital announced a $250,000 investment into LockerDome, which co-founder Gabe Lozano told us was a new investment for the company, complimenting the $750,000 they raised at the end of last year.

“Cultivation Capital brings much needed financial resources to the rapidly growing number of early stage tech startups in the St. Louis area. We decided to work with Cultivation Capital because they’re run by a solid team of local entrepreneurs that have collectively built some of the area’s most successful startups. I have a lot of respect for the individuals behind the fund and look forward to seeing these guys positively contribute to evolving the local landscape.” Lozano told nibletz.com

Cultivation Capital’s second investment was also $250,000 which went to JBara Software. JBara Software provides deep customer intelligence analysis for enterprises to manage customer success and minimize churn. JBara is a leader in supporting the executive in charge of customer satisfaction by providing actionable insights into the customer experience and key customer metrics.

They also made a strategic investment into Capital Innovators. Capital Innovators is a St.Louis based technology accelerator which provides mentorship and seed funding into select companies.

“These three companies mark an exciting entrance for Cultivation Capital into the Missouri startup market,” says Peter Esparrago. “Their innovative approaches to business set a strong precedent for future investments in the Midwest.”

The Cultivation Capital team is led by General Partners and experienced entrepreneurs Brian Matthews, Peter Esparrago, Jim McKelvey and Rick Holton, Jr., who have a combined track record of more than 25 companies started, over $200 million raised and multiple exits. The team includes Associate Partners Kyle Welborn and Israel Vicars.

Linkage:

If you’re a St.Louis area entrepreneur you can apply to Cultivation Capital here

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Ben Horowitz Sets The Records Straight On Instagram And PicPlz With A Few Words From Mase

The lyrics to Mase’s 1998 hit “Lookin At Me” graced the page of Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, personal blog on Sunday afternoon. Horowitz needed to set the record straight. There’s a lot of haters out there (I know this personally) and people were asking questions. Ridiculous questions if you ask me, but still they were asking.

Andreessen Horowitz invested $250,000 in Kevin Systrom’s first company Burbn, and with the $1 billion dollar purchase of Instagram by Facebook the venture capital firm stands to make $78,000,000 thats 78 million dollars for those of you that aren’t good with numbers. That’s a return of 312 times their money. Yet people have been asking why Andreessen Horowitz didn’t make more.

Horowitz took to his blog to explain why they didn’t make more. But first he said:

Ordinarily, when someone criticizes me for only making 312 times my money, I let the logic of their statement speak for itself. However, in this case, the narrative that some critics put forth has the nasty side effect of casting two outstanding entrepreneurs—Kevin and Dalton Caldwell—in an unfair light and glosses over an important ethical issue that we faced. As a result, I will clarify what happened and why we didn’t make even more money.

More after the break
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