sutton020

It's that time of the year again, the blogosphere is full of reviews of the year that is coming to a close and predictions for the coming year. When it comes to predictions, I agree with Niels Bohr (or Mark Twain or various other people who the quote got attributed to): Prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Seriously, as Paul Graham just wrote in his latest essay , change is notoriously (and tautologically) hard to predict. So let me take the safer path, take a look back at 2014 and show you some stats from the Point Nine family of startups. Some are true KPIs, others are from the fun/vanity metrics department – but I believe all of them are impressive and inspiring. Enormous gratitude goes to all the extremely hard-working and talented people in the #P9Family . You rocked this year (and not only this year)! (If you're reading this post in an email client or RSS reader, the infographic below might not display correctly. In that case please go to the Web version....

When we start to work with a new portfolio company, one of the things we always suggest is that in addition to (sometimes  lots of ) ad hoc communication via eMail, Skype, Basecamp, etc. we set up a standing meeting or call, at least during the first 9-12 months following our investment. Typically it's a one-hour monthly call, and the purpose of these calls is to get us updated and to talk through current issues. Our experience is that these calls are a very effective and efficient way to discuss things and to find out how we can help. The last thing we want to do is be a burden on the founders, and so we try to be very respectful of the their time (even if we're not as efficient as Oliver Samwer with his famous "supercalls" - 12 hours, 180 companies, or something like that). Just like a regular Board Meeting , these monthly calls work best if the investors get an update before the call, so that the call can be spent discussing key challenges rather than spending too...

Picture taken by "nlmAdestiny" One of the things that inevitably happens when you're in the angel or VC investing business for a couple of years is that besides a hopefully healthy portfolio, you're also building a growing anti-portfolio . As far as I know, the term "anti-portfolio" has been coined by Bessemer . Its meaning is described very well on Bessemer's website , and because it's so hilarious I want to quote it in its entirety: "Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up . Over the course of our history, we did invest in a wig company, a french-fry company, and the Lahaina, Ka'anapali & Pacific Railroad. However, we chose to decline these investments, each of which we had the opportunity ...

This is part two of my post about the early days at Zendesk. The first part is here . Small, fragmented and no potential for differentiation As mentioned in the first part of this post, the seed round was only $500,000 and it was clear that we’d need much more money soon. That’s why Mikkel and I started to work on a pitch deck and a financial plan almost immediately after the closing of the seed round and started to pitch to VCs shortly thereafter. In my personal experience as a founder, raising money has never been easy, and so I didn’t expect that it would be easy. I was quite optimistic though, since I thought we had a pretty good pitch: a well-rounded team of three complementary and experienced founders, a beautiful product, a proven business model, paying customers and nice (yet early) traction. So why did all European VCs pass? I’m getting asked this question a lot and I don’t have a perfect answer, but here are a few important factors: There just weren’t (and still aren’t) that ...