Tag: VC Firm

Before anyone can dive into the Chinese market, noted GSR Ventures Partner Yuechen Zhao at a recent AWS event in San Francisco, it’s important to understand what drives China, and how it is different from other markets around the world.

So, what are the secrets to investing in DeepTech? While there are likely many, a tolerance of a longer time-horizon for returns and the ability to source deals from anywhere are things interested investors should keep in mind.

Nichole Onome Yembra is the CFO of the Lagos, Nigeria-based Venture Garden Group and the managing partner for Greenhouse Capital, VGG’s investment arm.

At the most basic level, a term sheet is a non-binding contract. It’s a short document, anywhere from 1-10 pages, that has a handful of terms outlining what will happen in an investment. If a deal goes through, lawyers will take the term sheet and turn it into hundreds of pages of legal documentation. 

As more companies move towards this mode of application development, we expect to see a massive amount of innovation around AI and machine learning, application of AI to vertically-focused applications, and new applications for IOT devices driven by the ability for companies to build products faster than ever.

Accel Partner Ping Li notes, The advent of cloud computing, which began in earnest with the launch of AWS in 2006, kickstarted an era of unprecedented new tools for developers — from minimizing operational overhead with IaaS to bypassing operations altogether with serverless services like AWS Lambda.

Ambition has never been an issue for Fedor Holz. When he was barely out of his teens, he beat out 183 other pros to scoop up nearly five million dollars at the 2016 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Now he’s the founder of Primed Mind, a tech offering that takes the experience of having a personal mindset coach and translates that into a series of two-part audio sessions.

More often than not, it takes a community of people and resources to push startups onto a path that offers even a shot at glory, says Riku Asikainen, a Finland-based angel investor and long-time entrepreneur. “It is not the lonely wolves game,” says Asikainen, who sits on the board of the European Trade Association for Business Angels (EBAN), a community of more than 4,000 people investing in the European startup ecosystem.

First Round Capital’s Hayley Barna and Boldstart’s Ed Sim look back on the startup landscape in 2017, and toward the trends powering the year ahead.

Josh Elman, a consumer specialist at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, couldn’t have been blunter about “acquihiring,” the practice of big companies paying big bucks for startups to hire teams for their expertise. “There was this funny little period time where that seemed like it was a thing,” Elman recently told a crowd of startup entrepreneurs at the AWS Loft in San Francisco. “I think that’s gone.”

That doesn’t mean big companies aren’t buying startups, Elman continued. In fact, it turns out that acquihiring didn’t translate to getting better talent than just hiring—it’s just more expensive.