Posted by: Jeff Bussgang on June 03
June is innovation month in New England and it has started off with a bang. A few weeks ago, BusinessWeek named Boston the 3rd most inventive city in the world. This week, The Deal declared that Route 128 is well-positioned to continue its leadership in innovation, despite the economic crisis, due to its diverse economy and robust entrepreneurial environment. All month, there are numerous high-quality events going on, including an Unconference run by Mass TLC, MIT Deshpande Center's IdeaStream and MITX 2009 Awards night. Much thanks to Scott Kirsner for catalyzing this energy around innovation month!
Continue reading "New England’s Top 10 Innovators"
Posted by: Jeff Bussgang on May 10
For as long as I can remember, I have been an enthusiastic participant in sports. To be clear, I'm not a great athlete (in fact, I'm the only one of the five Flybridge General Partners that wasn't a varsity athlete in college), just good enough to participate passionately and aggressively like the prototypical weekend warrior. During any of my amateur sports efforts -- whether competing in mini-triathlons, tackling hard ski runs, or trying to jump the wake while Water-skiing -- I've always enjoyed pushing myself and approaching the task fearlessly.
Continue reading "What Rehab Is Teaching Me About Making Bad Investments"
Posted by: Jeff Bussgang on April 30
It used to be that anyone in the entrepreneurial world had to be keenly cognizant of what was going on in New York City. If you were funded by VCs in Silicon Valley, Boston, or Bombay, it still paid to have your CEO and sales team have eyes and ears in NYC for two main reasons. First, that's where the customers were. CIOs of financial services companies were viewed as gods by many in the start-up community, controlling billions of dollars in IT spending and often willing to experiment with young companies and the next, new thing. The large media companies, too, were seen as great early customers and hotbeds of innovation. (I remember how thrilled we were when we secured Time Warner's ground-breaking Pathfinder division as a customer at Open Market back in 1995, thinking we had landed what would be the 800 lb gorilla of the Internet age.)
Continue reading "First 100 Days: Washington Has Become the New, New York"
Posted by: Jeff Bussgang on April 21
The news came out yesterday that VC funding in the U.S. was down in Q1. Really down. VC funding into start-ups averaged roughly $20 billion a year for many years since the bubble crashed and recently (in 2007 and 2008) had crept up to $30 billion a year. The Q1 '09 figure was $3.0 billion, suggesting we are on a $12 billion run rate for this year.
Continue reading "VC Rightsizing"
Posted by: Jeff Bussgang on March 19
Every time there’s an economic downturn, the spotlight shines on the super-rich and their out-of-touch lifestyles. The iconic moment of the 1991/1992 recession was then President George Bush looking bewildered at the supermarket checkout line during the 1992 “It’s the Economy, Stupid” presidential campaign. In 2001/2002 it was Tyco’s CEO Dennis Koszlowski spending $1 million of shareholder money on his wife’s 40th birthday party (mine is coming up this summer, by the way, and I don’t think it will cost my partners very much at all, really).
Continue reading "Outraged by Executive Compensation? Put Entrepreneurs In Charge"
