Entrepreneurial financing

If you want to be successful, you have to harness the talent. The top private equity firms have a genius for hiring superior talent. All organizations need great people, but PE measures talent with one test only: performance. It’s not that private equity firms are heartless. Rather, their three- to five-year time horizon doesn’t allow […]

Venture capitalists' unique approach to investment and innovation has played a pivotal role in launching one-fifth of the largest U.S. public companies....

For decades, large companies have been wary of corporate venturing. But as R&D organizations face pressure to rein in costs and produce results, companies...

The more rivals you outbid, the more likely you are to have paid too much.

After looking at hundreds of small businesses and working on a number of them, I have seen certain patterns of conduct recur again and again that lead to eventual failure. If a company is in difficulty, it is almost always a management problem, scarcely ever bad luck. When a company survives for many years but […]

An analysis of more than 4,000 firms, their founders, and their funders.

Fran Conklin, the CEO of First Line Software, could hear it in Charlie Smith’s voice—he had not had a nice day at the California headquarters of Microchannels, First Line’s major distributor. Smith had gone there to get Microchannels’s order for the new line of video games and for MasterGraph, First Line’s new product for the […]

An inside look at an opaque process

By lowering the financial risks of starting a business.

Whatever its other educational benefits, the race for the Republican presidential nomination has served to introduce legions of hitherto oblivious Americans...

Lending small amounts of cash to fledgling entrepreneurs has been a great success in developing countries, but the concept hasn’t fared as well in the United States.

It’s not just about growth.

Leadership matters more than the business model.

If you want to buy a company but don’t have the cash, consider a leveraged buyout. Headlines in the business press to the contrary, most LBOs are not management-led megabuck deals for billion dollar companies. Entrepreneurs have used leverage to buy smaller, privately held businesses for years: whenever a buyer lacks the requisite cash and […]

Entrepreneurship is more celebrated, studied, and desirable than ever. Business school students flock to courses on entrepreneurship. Managers, fearful of losing their step on the corporate ladder, yearn to step off on their own. Policymakers pin their hopes for job creation and economic growth on start-ups rather than on the once-preeminent corporate giants. Belief in […]

In one of my posts last year, I shared a framework for more effective negotiations. The first step of the framework described the need for pre-negotiation homework with an emphasis on understanding the specific interests and positions of the opposing side. Making a list of these points is the right starting place as it helps […]

Instead of casting a wide net, try a more strategic approach.

A hybrid model can balance the short term with long-term continuity.

New research from McKinsey suggests what the inevitable shakeout in the venture capital industry heralds for the broader business community.