Sometimes New York can feel like a pretty cold place. People are always in a hurry, it’s insanely crowded, and at any given moment, someone within earshot is yelling at someone else. But it’s moments like the one captured below that make me feel there’s really something special about this crazy city. The below video was filmed at 10:30pm last night in the Times Square subway.
Last night I was fortunate to see prominent NYC angel investor David S. Rose give his “Confessions of an Angel Investor” talk at NYU Stern. I heard super-angel Ron Conway talk last semester, which I thought was amazing, so I was eager for David’s presentation as well. I’ve been lucky to learn a great deal about early-stage VC investing through my internship with Canaan Partners, however, I didn’t previously know quite as much about the angel investing space, therefore I found these sessions to be particularly interesting.
David, who runs Rose Tech Ventures and is the Chairman of the New York Angels, shared some interesting facts about angel investing, and quite a bit of helpful advice for entrepreneurs. I plan to do a couple follow-up posts about his talk, but I’m going to focus this post on the most important things he looks for in entrepreneurs (along with his commentary on each point).
And he threw in an 11th point that brings it all together:
Communication – “Show me that you can do all these things and convey all this stuff in a meaningful and convincing way.”
All of David’s above-listed points really resonated with me and are things that I am focusing on applying to my inner-entrepreneur. If you missed his talk, you can check out a recorded version HERE (or stay tuned for more tidbits in later posts)!
StartupAtWork launched a very clean new website last night, just in time for the first Speaker Series event of the spring season (24/7 Real Media, which was awesome by the way – more to come on that later). While I provided a bit of input here and there (with Warren Lee and Bartek Ringwelski), our developer Sankho Mallik drove the project and did a terrific job. While his code and design skills are solid, he stood out from many developers I’ve worked with due to his excellent project management and communication skills. Cheers Sankho!
The new website has some killer videos from the fall speaker series (including the full interviews). A few of my favorite clips are:
Check it out and let us know what you think by leaving comments or sending the organizers feedback!
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is in my opinion one of the most useful tools available on the web. When you enter one or more terms or phrases, Google returns data on approximate number of searches for the terms you entered, as well as similar terms/phrases and their corresponding search volumes. I tend to use this tool primarily for keyword research when I’m working on SEO efforts for my various websites, but I also believe that search data is immensely powerful for other applications as well.
While doing some SEO work the other day, I stumbled across a really interesting bug in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. I found a stupidly simple way (no, I’m not the Chinese government and I didn’t hack Google) to extract some limited pricing data for the suggested keyword results when you enter one or more keywords or phrases into the tool. I highly doubt Google wants this data to be public, which is why I’m assuming it’s a bug.
For example, when I entered “new york pizza” into the tool, I was able to extract the following pricing data (showing data for the first 10 results):
What does it mean?
The way I interpret this data is that the average cost per click (CPC) for a sponsored search listing in the top three AdWords results will cost you the dollar amount shown next to each keyword. For example, if you want to buy the first term “new york pizza delivery,” it’s going to cost you roughly $1.91 per click if you want to appear in the top 3 sponsored search positions.
How did you do that?
If you’re from Google, shoot me a note and I’m happy to discuss. By the way, I just applied for a summer internship so bumping my application to the top gets a faster response 
I went for a walk downtown yesterday and passed by Ground Zero. I’ve seen it several times, but I never seem to get used to the sight. Each time I’m overwhelmed with sadness for the tremendous loss that took place there. It’s hard to believe that 2,973 people lost their lives, and our country (and the world) changed forever that day. I think it was particularly emotional for me this time given the powerful newly released 9/11 aerial images that surfaced this week.
On a positive note, it was good to see the rebuilding efforts starting to take shape. Here’s a picture I took when I walked by last month that shows the new buildings starting to be erected.
There are always high expectations going into the Super Bowl for some pretty entertaining TV ads. At this year’s rate of $2.5-3 million dollars per 30 second spot, they had better be pretty good in order to resonate with the brand’s target audience and potentially justify the dollar spend. While a lot of discussion centers around the best Super Bowl ads (we discussed it a lot in my Marketing class today), I think the flops deserve some attention too. The absolute worst 2010 Super Bowl ad in my opinion (also the opinion of many of my classmates and our professor) has to be the 2010 U.S. Census commercial.
I know. I’m confused too. What the heck is the goal of that ad? I can’t think that the U.S. Census needs to build its brand. If they’re trying to get viewers to take some action, I can’t figure out what that action is. The advertisement clearly exhibits a lack of coherent messaging strategy.
It’s bad enough that the government would waste taxpayer money to produce such an ad (which I would expect to be rather expensive), but to choose to run it during the Super Bowl at a cost of $2.5 million dollars? Pretty frustrating, particularly in such a difficult economic environment and a $14.3 trillion dollar budget deficit. If you click through to the YouTube video page, you’ll see a few more people that are upset too.
Yesterday a VC friend of mine used the following analogy (which I happen to think is hilarious):
“Being a VC in a room full of entrepreneurs is like being the hot girl at a nerd party”
To provide some context, he was sharing his perspective that when he goes to conferences or tech events, he tends to get a lot of attention from the entrepreneurs in attendance (kind of like when an attractive girl walks into a room filled with guys and becomes the center of attention). People listen to what he says and think that he must have something particularly insightful to share (or at least people pretend to) since he’s a VC. His self-deprecating response was that it’s only because VCs are like bodyguards standing in front of a pot of gold (the fund) that the entrepreneurs want access to. I appreciated his humility and thought the quote was one of the funnier ones I’ve heard lately.
Disclaimer: I am a self-proclaimed nerd, so my post is in no way intended to make fun of anyone.
Most of my classmates seem to understand that getting a junior venture capital job (pre-principal level) is pretty tough. But just how competitive is it to get a VC job or internship? I’ve seen some more qualitative information from sources such as the Vault Guide to Venture Capital stating that for any posted job opening, you can expect 200 to 300 applicants from all the top MBA programs. While I believe those stats, I was curious to see if I could find any actual quantitative data on just how competitive the VC job application process is. So I started poking around a bit…
A classmate of mine recently pointed out that Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the oldest and most prestigious venture capital firms, is hiring a new analyst. If you had to guess, how many resumes do you think they’ll receive for this one open position? Six hundred and fifty you say? If prior history is any indicator, you’re spot on.
On her blog, Sarah Tavel (a Sr. Associate with Bessemer Venture Partners) shares some fascinating metrics on pre-MBA VC hiring. She provides the following data on the hiring funnel:
- 650+ resumes submitted
- 42 first-round interviews (~6%)
- Seven second-round interviews (17% of the 42)
- One offer (14% of the seven, but 0.15% of resumes submitted!)
Wow. Those are some wild stats.
As an additional data point, I can also share some credible quantitative metrics for an unpaid during-the-school-year VC internship here in New York. I do know that for one internship opening (with a top firm) that was only posted to a select few networks, they received more than 100 applications (resume plus a brief write-up on why you want to do it and why you’re qualified). Of the 100+ applications, they conducted first round interviews with about ten people (<10% of applicants). Of those ten people, they conducted second round interviews with just two people (20% of first round interviewees, <2% of total applicants) and extended an offer to one person (10% of first round interviewees, 50% of second round interviewees, and less than 1% of all applicants).
While the numbers look daunting (in fact, they are), I would bet that only 1/2 to 1/3 (perhaps even fewer) of the applicants actually fit the ‘profile’ that VC firms seem to look for (tech, entrepreneurship/start-ups, right schools, perhaps top consulting firms and/or banks, etc). If you have the majority of those check marks, I would expect that you actually have a decent shot of at least being considered for the first round interview (once your foot is in the door, it’s yours to lose from there). My observations have also led to my belief that most positions in VC are never even publicly open, but rather when venture capital firms do decide to hire a junior VC, it’s done through personal networks, recommendations from trusted people in the industry, and/or recruiting firms (I know several junior VCs who found jobs this way).
So the takeaway is yes, it’s tough, very tough. However, if you truly want it, and have done/are doing the right things to get there (particularly networking within the industry), the odds are not insurmountable. Good luck!
I just saw TechCrunch’s VC Leaderboard for 2009 which lists the top 25 most active VC dealmakers of 2009. The list ranks each VC firm by number of deals consummated last year. The firm that I intern for, Canaan Partners, came in at #13 on the list with an impressive 24 deals and $347,619,997 of total round participation value (not Canaan’s funds invested, that is the total value of the rounds that Canaan participated in which includes other VCs on the same deal). Pretty cool.
The top 20 firms are shown below (click to see more at TechCrunch):
StartupAtWork is an initiative that I began helping out with last fall through my internship with Canaan Partners (Canaan is a sponsor, and the moderator Warren Lee is a partner at the firm). The organization hosts a series of events that feature prominent guests such as Ron Conway, one of the most prolific angel investors of all time (Google, Facebook, Zappos, Paypal), and Steve Hafner, co-founder of Orbitz and Kayak.com. The first session of the spring 2010 speaker series features two stellar speakers from 24/7 Real Media: David Moore, Chairman/Founder/Former CEO, and Mark Moran, Former EVP/General Counsel. It is sure to be a fascinating story hearing how 24/7 Real Media raised funding, went public, nearly went bankrupt then ultimately sold to WPP Group for $650 million dollars. The 24/7 Real Media session will be held Wednesday February 10th (5:45pm registration, 6:00pm pizza & beer, 7:00pm interview) at the New World Stages.
The StartupAtWork speaker series is intended to help foster entrepreneurship in the NYC tech community by bringing in successful entrepreneurs and investors who can share their experiences and impart tangible learnings on the attendees. While the event is invite-only, the vast majority of attendees are entrepreneurs, people working at start-ups, and students interested in the startup/tech space. It’s a bootstrapped event (though there is free beer and pizza) where a lot of great contacts can be made and ideas can be shared. In case you missed the fall series, you can view some great video clips of the sessions.
If you’re interested in attending this invite-only event, more details are here, and please contact me (form at the bottom of the page) to request an invite.
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