Something Ventured

Private Equity & its Economic Role

On Friday, UoC and UoI hosted their annual Private Equity Conference. Steve Kaplan, the primary organizer from UoC, did a masterful job pulling together quite a few interesting panels with panelists from leading universities such as UoC, Northwestern, UoI and... Read more →

Engineering Crisis or Not?

Boy, did my post last Saturday about US students not going into engineering strike a nerve. Between my site, Digg and other sites, there were nearly 700 Diggs and over 200 comments posted in two days putting it as one... Read more →

Net Ads Pass Magazine Ads

According to Ad Age, it is projected that in 2006, magazine ads will be the first big medium to get passed by online advertising in terms of total dollars spent. While publishers have jumped onto the web, they have been... Read more →

Leisure Class

If one is to believe that a country's long-term prosperity and growth is tied to the strength of its innovation and science, the US is in increasing trouble. I fear that we will not begin to take things seriously until... Read more →

Resilience in the Storm

Resilience is a key theme you will hear about time and time again in the entrepreneurial world. The ability to persevere and bounce back from adversity is part of the DNA of a successful entrepreneur (and VC Sith Lord). During... Read more →

The People's Voice

It is too late for me to get a full post out, though I have several topics on the burner. That said, I would be interested in hearing from you (either in the comments section below or email: mccall@dfjportage.com) about... Read more →

The Black Art of Deal Pricing

Summary: -- pricing is driven off of multiples not IRR -- VC’s target 10x due to high failure rates -- start at the expected final valuation and work backwards. What area of venture capital is more opaque and mysterious than... Read more →

World Is Flat part II

In yet another indication of how global the entrepreneurial world is becoming, our portfolio company, Imago, just acquired its primary competitor, an English company, while selling nearly half of its machines in Asia and Europe. Imago sells a mulit-million dollar... Read more →

World Is Flat

Here is another supporting fact about our how flat our world truly has become. I use Blogbeat (thanks to Brad Feld's suggestion) to analyze site traffic. Here is the "City Cloud", listing where visitors to my site came from since... Read more →

Affluenza Outbreak

Scott Burkett and I have been blogging back and forth about the importance of giving back, the power of small groups and the need for philanthropy. His most recent post, Philanthropic Entrepreneurship: Up Close talks about an entrepreneur in Atlanta,... Read more →