Category Archives: SuperAngels
Tech Crunch gives Bullpen some credit for predicting series A crunch…
It’s nice to get credit for spotting a trend before it happens. That said, this was not really a tough one to predict. With the massive growth of the super angel (seed) funds and flat lining of the series A funds, a crunch was inevitable. I can’t say that me or my co-founders knew WHEN […]
Photos From Venture Shift 2012
We had a really great turnout for our Venture Shift event earlier this summer. The highlight of the show was Lawrence Coburn’s brutally honest story of fundraising. Here’s a picture of Lawrence telling the story. I hope to have the video up soon. The other real highlights of the event were two discussions of the […]
Liquidity Cometh
Ari Levy and Lee Spears of Bloomberg Newsroom write clearly about the impact of the Facebook public offering, offering little in the way of condolences for those buying at $42 in the opening confusion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/facebook-ipo-spawns-new-wave-social-media-angels-tech.html Instead, they rightly focus on how liquidity, locked up for years in quiet ponds (some bigger than others), is soon […]
TechCrunch Tokyo: Venture Revolution Keynote
Bullpen was asked to TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 both to keynote and to join a panel. This event was crowded – over 600 attendees, a combination of eager found entrepreneurs and senior management at leading Japanese companies like NTT, Sony, etc. Booths out front touted new ventures, and the sushi at the networking event was great! […]
VCs Heart SuperAngels
The SuperAngel phenom continues to mature. When the SuperAngels first took share away from the Series A VCs (who felt they owned the first institutional funding stage), the VC reaction was all over the map, and the punditry had a field day with VC vs. SuperAngel smackdowns, fueling the fire. We saw out-of-box VC behavior: big firms […]
Paul Martino Live Interview
A good friend of mine name John Furrier is now running a fascinating company called Silicon Angel. He is re-inventing the advertising, analyst, and content creation market. The first segment that they are disrupting is technology. Many of you might remember John from when he was the founder of PodTech. You can read more about […]
In a bubble, you need a filter…
[THIS IS A REPOST FROM A FEW MONTHS AGO, BUT NOW WE ARE UP AND RUNNING] At the end of last year I was giving the full-on Bullpen pitch to a former senior executive from Yahoo. He said, I like the pitch, but isn’t there a more simple version? Intrigued to hear more, I asked […]
1995 All Over Again
1995 was one of my favorite years. Silicon Valley had been in a funk for over a decade, with a fading memory of the last tech bubble, the PC IPO craze that flamed out in 1983 but launched some really great companies. The peace dividend from the fall of the Berlin Wall had impacted engineers […]
Bubble Trouble
Funny juxtaposition. The media cannot get the story straight. First the WSJ publishes a Serious Editorial that Few Businesses Sprout, With Even Fewer Jobs, especially from a dearth of venture-capital startups. They added a nice chart (below), and made this assertion: Venture-capital firms that typically invest in young companies, as well as angel investors that […]
The Bubblet in SuperAngel Funds
The VC auctions for hot deals is spreading to other categories of startups. And no surprise, the number of SuperAngel funds and the amounts they are raising is exploding. A bubble in funds! Here is a map of SuperAngels, in a 2×2 where the upper half are the bigger funds (over $75m). They are spread […]
