http://thebandchoice.com/member/images/dzh_logo.gif I am sharing some of my thoughts on management, the kind of issues that I encounter quite often, and where my views are different than what you may read in a management book. This post is by no means an exhaustive list, just what you would hear when chatting with me. Experience is overrated We […]
Tag: entrepreneurship
A Dynamic World
Every now and then I receive an email from a recruiter who has seen a particular keyword in my Linkedin profile and is offering me the “opportunity” to talk with a company that is looking for that skill. Not really reading my profile, not understanding my career progression, just the simplest rule of all: if […]
The Startup CEO
There is no shortage of advice for startup CEOs, from books to blog posts, and an endless stream of online advice. The bigger the mainstream media buzz about startups, the better the chance of seeing almost every day something like “The 3 Most Important Characteristics of a Successful Startup CEO”. But I digress… I have […]
Why We (Sometimes) Invest
Our job at SBT Venture Capital is to invest in startups. To a novice, it sounds simple, until you realize there are thousands of startups, at various stages, and we need to narrow it down to a manageable list of teams that we can work with. I wrote recently about our filtering process, the “why […]
The Startup Team: 4 + 3 = 1
The days of building something really innovative on your own are long gone. Edison – the prototypical inventor – had a huge lab and many assistants. Steve Jobs led teams of innovators. I have been arguing for a while, in corporate environments and my blog, that no sane company should reward individual contribution/results and settle […]
Why We Don’t Invest…
In our work at STB Venture Capital we see hundreds of financial technology (“fintech”) companies. We ask all companies to submit their startup profile through the Gust web site — our submission page is here. Most of the time, we have to reject a proposal because it does not fit our preferred profile – we […]
Innovation Teams and Innovation Culture
In a sense, life is simpler in a startup — you have an idea, you select a team, you get some money to start, build the product, launch, and try to make money from customers that love your product. If you fail at any of those steps, you learn and start over. The innovation culture […]
VC Negotiation Fun
When we started SBT Venture Capital, we were excited about a future of identifying great companies – visionary teams with excellent products. And excited about the post-funding challenge of helping them grow to their full potential. What we did not foresee was the huge amount of time spent on negotiating details, from term sheets to […]
An Alternative To Alternative Lending, or Why We Invested In AMP
Today we are announcing our investment in Advanced Merchant Payments — AMP, an alternative lender for small and medium-sized businesses. This is a market with tremendous unrealised potential — a credit gap of US$3 trillion faced by businesses all over the world that, while generating revenues and employment and profits, and being vital to any […]
Innotribe, Finovate, or Money2020?
This year I have attended four major FinTech conferences – Money2020, Finovate London and New York, and Sibos Innotribe. I have met with hundreds of startups, talked with maybe a thousand people. Some thoughts: All of them are growing – more companies, larger attendance – all in synch with the overall worldwide “boom” in fintech. […]