Quoted: Kleiner’s Laws
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* Make sure the dog wants to eat the dog food. No matter how ground-breaking a new technology, how large a potential market, make certain customers actually want it.
* Build one business at a time. Most business plans are overly ambitious. Concentrate on being successful in one endeavor first.
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Quoted: Microsoft trades at a healthy 4.55 times sales. So every $1 in the acquired company is theoretically worth $4.55. Pretty profitable business, these acquisitions, no? Unfortunately for the Redmond Boys, the GOOG can turn that $1 into $10.17. To over simplify things, they can afford to pay twice as much as Microsoft and still come out ahead.

Paul Graham says there are not enough investors chasing the following type of deal:

Quoted: There are companies that will give $20k to a startup that has nothing more than the founders, and there are companies that will give $2 million to a startup that's already taking off, but there aren't enough investors who will give $200k to a startup that seems very promising but still has some things to figure out. This territory is occupied mostly by individual angel investors—people like Andy Bechtolsheim, who gave Google $100k when they seemed promising but still had some things to figure out. I like angels, but there just aren't enough of them, and investing is for most of them a part time job.

Quoted: Here's the problem. The company/web service creation process needs some kind of end game. The entrepreneurs who spend years and risking a ton need a way to get paid for that effort. And those of us who finance their efforts need to get some return on our investment. We can argue about the magnitude of the return we need and a host of other things, but the fact remains that without a path to liquidity, all the innovation that is being created by the entrepreneur/VC equation will stop happening.
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It turns out that there is another private liquidity market under development called Opus-5.

This is a nice checklist for evaluating a business.

Quoted: We would enjoy learning about your business. It's easy to reach us. Email or call. Have a mutual acquaintance connect us. Before you send your plan please read the Elements of Sustainable Companies and Writing A Business Plan.

A nice, although not comprehensive, recap.

Quoted: The list is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather to give a flavor for the deals that went down in 2007. The year started out with eBay’s acquisition of StubHub and rumors of its StumbleUpon deal

Quoted: Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold. That means there a 2/3 chance you’ll have to significantly reinvent your business between the time you take a venture capital investment and when you exit your business.
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My friend Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, describes a startup as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful deal as figuring out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.

Quoted: As the technology sector enters its fourth year of recovery from the dramatic collapse in 2002 and 2003, we are witnessing a number of trends with potential significance to venture-backed companies.

Quoted: Amp'd Mobile: Amp'd Mobile takes the crown for money-burning, with $360 million that ended in bankruptcy. The company's major problem was its customers' ability to pay.