Fizzlosophy: How to get a job in venture capital It helps to be lucky and have good timing, but here are a few pointers that will increase your odds of landing a job in VC: 1) Do your homework. Doing your homework shows your interviewer that you are well-prepared, which is essential for an entry-level VC position. Secondly, it will...

Fizzlosophy: How to get a job in venture capital Positions in venture capital can be quite competitive because the supply of well-qualified candidates far exceeds the number of available positions. Venture capital professionals typically don't have a characteristic career path that got them into their career. So it's probably helpful...

Fizzlosophy: How to get a job in venture capital Getting a job in VC is tough given that there are relatively few firms and they generally maintain small teams. For those interested in breaking into the space, here are my three main bits of advice: Understand the landscape. It’s basic advice, but always important because it colors...

A Chat with Andy Payne I recently caught up with Andy Payne to chat about what we are seeing in the internet startup world around Boston. Andy has been around the Boston scene for a long time – being one of the co-founders of Open Market, Revenio, and FanSnap. He is an adviser to Care.com and Kayak, and on the board...

Fizzlosophy: What are 3 points of advice for first time entrepreneurs raising venture capital? 1. Not all $ is equal - Investors will be your partners, advisors, and sometimes (but not too often) co-workers. Be sure you can leverage their experience and specialties. Depending on how much value add they can be, the investment will (and *should*) be worth more than...

Fizzlosophy: What are 3 points of advice for first time entrepreneurs raising venture capital This week's topic on Fizzlosophy is: What are 3 points of advice for first time entrepreneurs raising venture capital? Today's guest contributor is Brian Balfour. Brian is a Co-Founder of Viximo, a social gaming platform company based in Cambridge. Viximo is funded by Sigma Partners...

How To Sell Having a chat with my team tomorrow morning about the most important but under-appreciated skill in business: Selling. I graduated from Cornell with a degree in advertising, and promptly leveraged my Ivy League credentials into 28 rejection letters from the best agencies in Boston and...

No Pansies Allowed: Why You WANT VCs Who Ask Tough Questions If I pitch a VC and they don’t ask any good tough questions, I’m not sure I want to take their money. Let me say that again. If I pitch a VC and they don’t ask any good tough questions, I’m not sure I want to take their money. I bring this up because the more fundraising I do, and the more...

Fizzlosophy: What are 3 startup marketing strategies to build a buzz around your company and product?

1. Target influencers, not customers * Do more with less: targeting 100 influencers can help you reach thousands of customers. * Research heavily: Finding influencers is not easy. Do your homework. Find out who the best people are to have talking about your brand...

Fizzlosophy: What are 3 startup marketing strategies to build a buzz around your company and product? This week's topic on Fizzlosophy is: What are 3 startup marketing strategies to build a buzz around your company and product? Today's guest contributor on Fizzlosophy is Mike Volpe - Vice President, Marketing at HubSpot in Cambridge. Mike's response: 1) Blog like a media company...

Key takeaways from TCN's Venture Fast Track Boot Camp About 80 entrepreneurs, early stage VCs and angel investors came to Nutter McClennen & Fish’s Seaport office a few weeks ago for The Capital Network’s first Venture Fast Track Boot Camp. The theme of the interactive FastTrack was to give entrepreneurs an in-depth understanding of what it takes to raise early stage capital...

Fizzlosophy: What are the three main points that a VC wants to get out of a first meeting? 3 things I like to see in a first meeting: 1. "Special sauce". Usually a combination of technology, team, market traction/size/growth, capital efficiency, competitive landscape, and timing that makes us believe THIS team, at THIS time, with THIS solution, in THIS market will be a great...

Fizzlosophy - our new series on VentureFizz! We are exciting to announce a new weekly series under our Voices section on VentureFizz called Fizzlosophy (fizz·los·o·phy)! What is Fizzlosophy? It is a series where we will cover a specific topic for the week and have 2 - 4 guest contributors provide their points of view on a relevant...

Fizzlosophy: What are the three main points that a VC wants to get out of a first meeting? The entrepreneur has passion for the idea and is uniquely qualified to go after it. I know, it totally cliché, but a great entrepreneur can turn lemons into lemonade. Besides the usual list of skillsets, passion creates drive and drive creates success. It’s also helpful if the entrepreneur/ team have some...

8 Startup Lessons from Constant Contact I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview Gail Goodman last week at the Momentum Summit at MIT Sloan. Gail is the CEO of Constant Contact, an email marketing company that was founded during the “boom days” of the Internet, made it through the post-bubble apocalypse, and is now a publicly...

Tips on Investor Pitches Hey there, New England entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this, my inaugural blog post on VentureFizz, I’d like to offer some simple, practical advice about the ‘investor pitch’. For the purposes of this post, let’s use Content and Delivery to categorize these tips, since a good presentation stems...

4 lessons startups can learn from the German soccer team I spend most of my waking hours working on my startups (currently Pixability.com), but every few years in the summer, I get a bit distracted by the World Cup for a few weeks. This year, I picked up Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski – mainly to calm my nerves before the...

Are you a micro-manager or can you delegate? In the early days of a startup it’s common and necessary for the founder(s) to be involved in every decision. From the strategic to the mundane. Some love it and others do it out of necessity. But as the company grows the founder(s) have a decision to make. Do they keep a very tight...

Building a world class engineering team - Part III - Retain the Best Over the last few weeks we've been talking about how to identify and hire top talent. Not an easy task at all....and frankly a VERY expensive task if you think about the costs associated with recruiting (paying your HR staff, interviewer time, candidate travel costs, agency fees, etc). So, you spend...

Building a world class engineering team - Part II - Attract and Hire the Best Last week we put some meat behind the idea of hiring the "best and brightest".......that's all well and good, but now that you know who they are you have to hire them. Hiring these folks is hard, REALLY hard and isn't something you just "do" it takes a strategy and a concerted...

What drives great entrepreneurs If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.” I recently watched an outstanding presentation called “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek...

The Quick "No" Manifesto A frequent complaint by entrepreneurs is that VCs fail to provide a prompt "no" to startups which they don't plan to invest in. There's lots of reasons VCs do this... we have an incentive to preserve an option to invest as long as possible (rightly or wrongly), saying "no" is rarely an enjoyable...

YouCastr - A Post-Mortem There are many post-mortems from failed startups out there, mainly because there are a lot of failed startups, and the people that start them tend to be very introspective and public about their successes and failures. I'm no different. This post-mortem will serve to get things off my chest...

Why Is Four The Magic Number? No, this post isn't about achieving four wins in the NBA Playoffs. It's about a historical anomaly in start-up compensation that I'm struggling with. Although I know this risks being an unpopular post with entrepreneurs, I confess that I no longer get why we have four year vesting...

Recruiting the Digital Generation This summer we decided to bring in two summer interns in order to establish closer ties to entrepreneurially-minded students and to give a few of them direct exposure to the venture capital world. This morning we are excited to welcome Nikhil Kalghatgi, a first year at Harvard Business School...

Building a world class engineering team - Part I - Who are "The best and brightest" When you are starting a company or launching a new project, you absolutely need to hire the best team you can. Everyone talks a lot about they only hire "the best and the brightest" but really, what does that mean and how do you REALLY do it? And quite frankly, even if you do hire the "best" if...

Free or Not to Free? Most every internet & on-demand software company at one time or a another now considers the relative merits of adopting a freemium product model to both fuel growth & operate with great efficiency. While opinions are not in short supply in this area, I’d thought I’d take a simple, “NY Daily...

A special "thank you" to our 40+ contributors to Voices! We launched Voices (our blog platform) on February 18th with the goal to provide information back to the Boston startup community around a variety of topics: Entrepreneurship, Lessons Learned, Funding, Innovation, Success Stories, Best Practices, Expert Advice, Technology...

To Crowdsourcing Friends, Foes & Fanatics: Just How Loyal Is Your Community? Depending upon who you ask, crowdsourcing is either evil, revolutionary, or a next gen of internships. But one thing that ALL crowdsourcing companies like to preach is how loyal and trustworthy and professional their community is. I know because I’ve read it in 100 different...

TechCrunch Disrupt Videos TechCrunch is holding their Disrupt event this week in NYC. Here are a couple of Startup Battlefield videos with different companies presenting a demo. Even though these videos do not include companies from the Boston area, the panel of judges include some local faces...