Author: Zack Miller

Want to identify successful startup founders? Check Linkedin.

Want to identify successful startup founders? Check Linkedin.

Feb 19, 2013 | , ,

Over the past few weeks on the blog, we’ve been exploring how to identify successful startup founders (obviously, this matters A LOT to investors in early stage companies). Are entrepreneurs born or made? I remember a few years back, there were some (credible) studies that seemed to point to the existence of the entrepreneurship gene. In the book, Born Entrepreneur, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life, author Scott Shane looked at identical and fraternal twins and their inclinations to be entrepreneurs. The siblings who shared 100% of their genes demonstrated higher rates of entrepreneurship — leading Shane to estimate that 30-40% of successful startup skills are innate. Successful entrepreneurs are more tribal This startup gene theory is being challenged by some more recent work at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (admittedly, the existence of the startup gene would be b-a-d for the MBA program business). In The Power of Alumni Networks — Success of Startup Companies Correlates with Online Social Network Structure of Its Founders, researchers found that university networks whose alumni have a stronger “old-boys-network” (larger...

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OurCrowd launches, raises $12M for startups, platform

Feb 6, 2013 | ,

OurCrowd hit the news today in a big way, with news that it has raised $12M for its first class of startups and to fund its own operations. This news was all about: explaining how our hybrid angel/VC model is a better mousetrap for investors quantifying the international interest in investing in the Start-up Nation describing how OurCrowd’s investment platform helps address the Series A crunch patting ourselves, our entrepreneurs, and our investors on the back for a job well-done (it’s been seriously hard and rewarding work) >>You can read the whole press release here More OurCrowd mention in the news: OurCrowd in The Marker (The Marker – Hebrew) Crowdfunding platform OurCrowd raises $5.5M (Globes) OurCrowd completes funding (TechTime) OurCrowd in Chip Portal (Chip Portal – Hebrew) Israel jumps on the crowdfunding platform wagon (SmartPlanet) Business in Brief (Haaretz) OurCrowd in Newsgeek (Newsgeek –...

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The portfolio approach to investing in startups

The portfolio approach to investing in startups

Jan 31, 2013 | , ,

Should startup investors bet heavily on one sexy startup? Or, should you keep your investments in startups relatively small and spread them out over multiple early stage companies? This question of how many startups an investor should invest in is one of the most frequently asked questions in the startup investing world. For people who invest in venture capital funds, it’s not really a question they need to address. They assign a representative — a venture capital fund — to make investment decisions on their behalf. But with the rise in popularity of angel investing and crowdfunding, investors are becoming more active in the startup investment process. The issue of the right number of startup investments an investor should make becomes a more integral part of the investment process. 2 approaches to investing in startups Concentrated, large bets: This approach is all about zeroing in a single or small number of investments with a relatively large bet on their success. It’s like a sniper who is down to just a couple of bullets in his investment gun. When he pulls...

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On Crowdfunding: An interview with the award-winning journalist, Amy Cortese

Jan 28, 2013 | , ,

Amy Cortese is an award-winning journalist and author who has written extensively on crowdfunding. Her book, Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It addressed an early, growing trend of investing locally and she recently penned an article for the New York Times entitled “ The Crowdfunding Crowd is Anxious about recent developments in the crowdfunding sphere. I recently had a chance to ask Amy a few questions on the connection between local investing and crowdfunding. Why do you think investing in local communities is so important, and how are investors accessing local opportunities? Amy Cortese: At a macro level, small businesses are having a hard time obtaining the capital they need to grow and expand, and that is holding back an economic recovery, since small, young firms create the bulk of jobs in this country and drive innovation. But there’s a more intimate side to this as well: across the country, many communities are struggling. Their downtowns and Main Streets have chipped away by box-box stores, strip malls, e-commerce and globalization. And that affects tax revenues,...

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Israeli companies making their mark on CES 2013

Israeli companies making their mark on CES 2013

Jan 11, 2013 |

I’m not sure how many of our readers know about Israeli attendance at tech shows. There’s the apocryphal very real story about the planes full of hundreds of Israeli attendees who attend the GSMA — Mobile World Congress every year. While plenty of them are there, Israelis haven’t built a similar, influential presence in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held yearly in Las Vegas. That may be changing as Israeli technology makes its way closer and closer to the consumer. Israeli hand gesture firms make impact at CES Two firms, PointGrab and eyeSight used CES to announce major supplier agreements with the likes of Samsung and AMD. Both firms compete in the 2D gesture technology space and with these deals in place, consumers will soon see their tech in mobile devices and tablets. You can read more about these two companies and their technologies in David Shamah’s column. Even CEO of Intel Israel, Mooly Eden was talking up gesture technologies at CES this year. He calls his latest venture “perceptual computing” and believes these technologies will change the nature of...

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