
Venture capital investors love business plans that promise terrific upside, but they increasingly want a “funeral plan” in writing that explains what the entrepreneur can and will do if their start-up suffers from business problems or slow growth.
by Chriss W. Street15 Dec 2015, 12:01 AM PST0

Silicon Valley and other tech center start-ups raised $2.06 billion in “agtech” venture capital in the first half of 2015 to develop apps and devices to help farmers manage the four-year-old drought.
by Chriss W. Street18 Oct 2015, 1:43 PM PST0

NBCUniversal continues its big-bucks leap to catch up to millennial “cord-cutters” and “cord-nevers” by spending another $200 million to buy a bigger stake in BuzzFeed. The move comes less than a week after NBCUniversal invested $200 million in Vox Media.
by Chriss W. Street18 Aug 2015, 1:20 PM PST0

Marketing technology is emerging as one of the hottest sectors for business tech investing, according to the PitchBook Blog. Marketing tech companies in the first six months of 2015 raised $1.62 billion in 157 venture capital deals, and 205 companies were acquired for a total of $4.3 billion.
by Chriss W. Street5 Aug 2015, 4:00 AM PST0

Uber is now valued at almost $51 billion, a valuation that puts the “on-demand mobile service” (ODMS) leader at the level of Facebook in 2011. The company’s fund-raising success has spurred a vast number of “Uber for X” start-ups that are building corporate empires with legions of outsourced contract workers. But the “gig economy” seems to be operating the same money-losing business model as the “Dot-com Bubble.”
by Chriss W. Street3 Aug 2015, 5:59 AM PST0

Global venture capitalists invested $56.31 billion in 4,894 deals during the first half of 2015–the lowest number of deals recorded by the Pitchbook blog over a six month period in the last 25 years. The major reason for a smaller number of companies being funded is that venture capitalists are throwing huge amounts of money at a small number of “unicorns.”
by Chriss W. Street4 Jul 2015, 6:00 AM PST0

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll might sound more glamorous than a diversified business portfolio, but the returns are a little more shortsighted.
by Kipp Jones24 Jun 2015, 7:56 PM PST0

If Robin Leach visited the headquarters of Uber today, it would be all “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” as the ride-hailing service that just closed a $2.8 billion venture capital deal three months ago at a $40 billion valuation is on track to slurp up another $2 billion of venture capital pixie dust at a valuation of $50 billion or higher.
by Chriss W. Street13 May 2015, 3:00 AM PST0

JERUSALEM, Israel — The future of tech investing is housed–barely–in a stone spice warehouse on the Hebron Road in Jerusalem. There are, I am told, bullet holes in the walls, from the days when the building faced the boundary with Jordan. On the day I visit, it sounds like a war zone–a battle of drills and hammers, fire alarms and telephones, as the company expands into neighboring space. Only two years old, OurCrowd is revolutionizing startup funding–and growing rapidly.
by Joel B. Pollak4 May 2015, 9:00 AM PST0