As I continue discovering new ways to put off studying for my Venture Capital final that's tomorrow at 3, Wharton grad, Half.com founder, and venture capitalist, Josh Kopelman, has posted a link to the Blueprint Ventures' 2006 holiday card. It is available on YouTube as well. So while it won't help me learn how to value Participating Convertible Preferred Stock, the break-even valuation for a Series F investment, or what a real option really is, it does show me what I can look forward to if I do learn those things ;)
Sorry about the hiatus, finishing up the semester and job-hunting (and Zelda ;)) have taken up way too much time and something had to give. Luckily not a lot has been going on over the past two and a half weeks. Now to get back into it…
TechCrunch reports that Jason Calacanis has joined VC firm Sequoia Capital as an "Entrepreneur in Action". Congrats to Jason!
This move is another data point for the idea that to become a VC, one needs industry experience first. Guy Kawasaki also talks about this in a recent post and even came up the VCAT, the Venture Capital Aptitude Test. I'm curious to see how Jason would score? Famed VC Mike Moritz didn't do too well, but I'd still want to see how a brand new VC scores.
Interestingly enough, the news broke almost 2 hours ago and its still not on TechMeme. The first Digg story showed up an hour and a half ago and the most popular one 45 minutes ago. Hmmm…
We briefly discussed the Google/YouTube deal in two of my classes (MGMT 230: Entrepreneurship and FNCE 250: Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation) this past week. In both classes, either I overheard or someone asked the professor, "What's YouTube?"
Now, I don't necessarily expect the average person walking down the street to know what YouTube is, but the people in my classes aren't particular average. For one, we're at the best undergrad business school in the country. Second of all, these are classes focused on entrepreneurship and VC, so I hope that the people in these classes have an interest in the subject. Yet there are some people in this very specific group who had no idea what YouTube is.
I'm still not sure if I've lost faith in my fellow classmates or gained faith in the power of the echo chamber.
I recorded most of Venture Capitalist Ted Schlein's talk last Thursday here at Wharton. Mr. Schlein has been with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers since 1996, when he joined to manage their Java Fund. He spoke about his experiences in working for Symantec and his earlier experiences at various startups. He also talked about VC in Asia and the challenges VCs face in going over there.
The audio quality is markedly better than the Kevin Smith talk, partly because of better acoustics and because I was sitting a lot closer to him.
