The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

The Future: End of Capitalism

On October 17, 2016, I gave a talk titled The Future of Capitalism at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Kolkata, India. RKM, for the uninitiated, is India’s largest NGO. It was founded by one of the greatest social entrepreneurs the world has ever known – a Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, who in 1893, delivered a message of universal religion at the Chicago Parliament of the World’s Religions. In these days of intolerance and bigotry, it was an honor for me to stand on the grounds of an institution that shaped my own egalitarian worldview since childhood. You can listen to my speech here:

Photo credit: Hamza Hussein/Flickr.com.

Featured Videos

The Future: The Problem with Longevity

We are extending life expectancy by leaps and bounds through the miracles of science and technology.

Today, longevity doesn’t necessarily mean quality of life. It means, simply, surviving to a much older age.

Given the march of progress in the medical sciences, it may be safe to assume that over time, quality of life will also increase in the later years of life. As geriatric diseases become treatable, and even curable in certain cases, long life may also become more enjoyable through better health.

But there are other problems with longevity.
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The Future: Technology Without Philosophy

I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, right off Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, California. Supposedly, this is the seat of the modern Renaissance.

Technology is disrupting everything.

Technology will continue to disrupt everything for the foreseeable future.
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What is the First Thing in Your Office AI Will Take Over?

What is Your Personal Vision Statement?

What is Innovation?

How to Fund Fat Startups

While we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going these days, fat startups still play an important role in developing large-scale success stories with significant, defensible, competitive advantages.

The bulk of the VC industry has moved away from the ‘fat startup’ category. Investors expect that you will have your product launched, customer acquisition model fleshed out fully, and a team in place before Series A.

However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they all need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization, analytics and artificial intelligence requires some serious investment.
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The Future: The Most Important Entrepreneurial Challenge of Our Time

The US Presidential election just concluded.

The rage of the white working class that is today poor and disenfranchised has propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

Majority of the college educated did not vote for Trump.

Large numbers, in fact, did not vote at all, finding Hillary Clinton equally uninspiring.

In my previous column, The Future: An Age of Idiocracy, I pointed out that more and more, the uninformed and the ignorant will be deciding on the future heads of states in the Western democracies. [This is already the case, by the way, in countries like India, where bulk of the voting population is uneducated, uninformed, and incapable of making rational choices.]
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The Future: An Age of Idiocracy

America has elected Donald Trump as President.

We have entered the age of idiocracy.

There will be more populist candidates both from the left and the right.
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Answers to Some Frequently Asked Questions About Accelerators

As I’ve written about extensively, there is a very real knowledge gap on both sides of the early stage start-up game. First-time entrepreneurs lack the seasoning to steer through turbulent waters. Inexperienced friends and family (and, increasingly, crowdsourced investors) lack the ability to gauge the viability of a business, or to mentor naïve entrepreneurs. I’ve come to believe that this knowledge gap is best filled by savvy accelerators. However, there are over 7,500 business accelerators/incubators around the world, and most of them fail.

Here are several 30-second videos answering the most common questions I’m asked about accelerators that can help you navigate and make informed decisions.

Why Join a Non-equity Based Accelerator?  

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