John Frankel's Blog

  ff Venture Capital and HBS Angels of New York are happy to be co-sponsors of Flashpoint’s upcoming New York Demo Day, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 2:30 PM to 6:00 PM, held at Union Square Ventures. Flashpoint is a startup accelerator program at Georgia Tech.  Some of their portfolio companies look very promising. The current crop includes: deaString BISMark Lucena [...]

Fundraising is not just limited to companies.  Venture Capital firms have to do this as well.  It is an interesting process and you get to meet fascinating people.  Potential limited partners (or LP’s as we call them) come to the table with a set of beliefs that are, well, sometimes peculiar and rarely challenged – [...]

I am delighted to announce that ff is expanding significantly.  Firstly, we are very excited to add David Teten as the second Partner in our history and Michael Yavonditte as a Venture Partner in the Firm.  David is Chairman of Harvard Business School Angels New York and an experienced entrepreneur.  He has founded three startups and [...]

This Time It’s different [Source www.500px.com] We are entering a new era.   A time when great wealth is being created, and old fortunes destroyed (but not let us dwell there). A time of convergence and disruption that has not been seen in anyone’s lifetime. In the late 90′s it was all about expectation and [...]

I was watching Mark Suster and Tom McInerney on This Week in Venture Capital mainly for fun, though Tom is a good friend.  If you have not watched it you should as it is highly engaging.  Well into the discussion Tom and Mark delve into privacy and Tom mentions that many teens have moved to [...]

David Teten's Blog

I hope you’ll join us at: The Power of “Social,” Venture Capital & Financial Engineering: How Tech Startups Are Challenging The Titans of Finance  6:00 pm, Wednesday, 5/16/12, General Assembly Co-sponsored by Harvard Asian American Alumni Alliance – New York, the Founders’ Circle, and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York Hear from venture [...]

I hope you can join me in Washington, DC, on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 5:30 PM To 8:30 PM for a talk and event sponsored by the HBS Club of Washington, DC.  RSVP required; No money can be taken at door As I’ve previously blogged, I will soon publish the first formal study of best practices of VCs [...]

Next week I’ll be traveling up to Toronto to speak at the country’s best trade show and conference Discovery 12 (“best” according to some awards the program has received).  I’ve been asked to talk about best practices in deal origination, and why our pipeline took us to Canada, where we made investments in 500px and InteraXon. [...]

We are in the midst of two great disruptions to American business: the internet’s ongoing disruption of most traditional industries: finance, healthcare, retail, finance, fashion, etc. the shift of America to a majority minority country by 2050. Any company that aspires to maintain a leadership position needs to position itself to exploit these two macro [...]

As Steve Case has said, it’s ridiculous that anyone can gamble and be guaranteed to lose money, but there are strict regulations around who can invest in early-stage private companies and earn (in some cases) a 27% IRR on their capital. * The Entrepreneurs Access to Capital Act helps to redress this.  It allows small [...]