Tag: venture capital

Financial Markets
Chris MacIntosh

Hold My Beer – Let’s Watch SoftBank Venture Capital Plunge

Imagine this. You’re holding what has become the world’s biggest basket of profitless, often fraudulent (I’m looking at you, BABA), and insanely overvalued, illiquid securities. You’re one man at the helm of a ¥11.6tn empire with sole discretion as to how you operate. Sure, you’ve got shareholders. But the way

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Weekly Recap
Chris MacIntosh

DM Me If You’re A Dwarf

Isht You Wouldn’t Believe Last week was “Nazi pride week” in Mongolia. Pic taken on the steps of parliament. No kidding! When I first visited Ulaanbaatar, I was puzzled at the Nazi bars. Seemed sort of like a theme bar — kinda like you’d expect maybe a weird vampire themed

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Money Roll
Venture Capital and Private Equity
Chris MacIntosh

5 Reasons Why Not to Raise Capital for Your Startup

I recently had dinner with co-founders of a startup who’d just raised quite a bit of money for their company, a deal which incidentally I’d passed on. The meal was fantastic: fresh salmon from the bay, washed down with a particularly good New Zealand pinot noir, while watching the sun

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Terminator
Venture Capital and Private Equity
Chris MacIntosh

Are You Investing Like the Terminator? You Should Be!

When robots eventually take over this planet, killing us all (save a small group singled out to be used as slaves, and thrown into a big brother style environment with live streamed cage fights to the death), or possibly used in lab tests, you can bet that they won’t feel

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Why I Don’t Really Care About Your Product

I’ve just gotten off the phone with a gentleman who runs a radio show dedicated to entrepreneurs. He reached out to us as he thought it’d be interesting speaking with me, as an entrepreneur, and as an Angel investing in entrepreneurs. He wanted to know what we look for in

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Passion – It’s Not Just What Happens Between the Sheets

Most of the really big returns made by investors and entrepreneurs come from companies which seem to have one unmistakable element. We look at a mountain of deals and consequently the filtering process is very rapid. In fact over 90% of the deals that hit our respective desks are pre-filtered

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IQ, IP and 8 Commandments of Corporate Governance

Recent dealings with a company led me to think about the relationship between corporate governance, creativity, innovation and what it takes to create or indeed wreck a successful enterprise. A result of having been involved in well over 100 private equity transactions (I’ve long ago stopped counting), Mark no doubt

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No Thanks, Call Me When You’re Dead

It’s no secret that Mark and I work with a lot of start-ups. In this capacity we align closely with various accelerators, incubators, venture capitalists, bankers and the attendant flotsam and jetsam in the early stage capital markets. All of the above mentioned folks are typically focusing on working to

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