We love what we do, so ClearCreek writes and publishes pieces for a somewhat irregular blog about emerging companies and the capital markets (subscribe: here). Any errors are ours exclusively while the occasional sharp insight is probably borrowed. We hope you find them of interest, and we always welcome feedback.
Betting, as the saying goes, is a tax on bullshit. Opinions are easy — you can have as many as you choose, often crowding contradictorily around the same topic. But a wager where there is something significant to be gained or lost tends to filter out all but the most serious perspectives…
Read MoreAn insightful and numbers-full piece in, of all places, Pensions and Investments, discusses the traffic jam developing in Venture Capital. As with any other backup, there is an excess at the beginning and less near than the end: as total capital invested continues to rise…
Read MoreWe’ve been lucky enough to have heard Gil Penchina opine a lot. Unfortunately, most of this was well before he became known for angel investing and his Angel List syndicate, and was usually about his failed romantic exploits. Whatever — truth is we usually didn’t listen anyway…
Read MoreOver the summer, The Economist magazine published independent pieces on six big economic ideas that changed the world (or at least modern finance). These have now been collected into a a single brief…
Read MoreLooking at venture capital investment during the first half of 2016, Redpoint’s Tomasz Tunguz has a nice piece (and several graphs) on the flux in the fundraising market — early stage deals (Series A) have nosedived by a whopping one-third…
Read MoreOne of many interesting changes in venture capital in the past few years has been the emergence of mutual fund companies investing in very late rounds. In many ways this makes sense — technology companies are delaying IPOs, and a late-stage investment gets a mutual fund pre-IPO equity at a slightly better price…
Read MoreWhen you’re in a boom, it’s always hard to see if a down quarter is a welcome correction or the beginning of a slump. For venture capital, Q3 could be either. Based on data from Pitchbook, the number of Q3 financing were down significantly…
Read MoreDo venture capitalists get paid very well to lose other people’s money? That is the thesis of a piece by Diane Mulchay, director of private equity at the Kaufmann Foundation. Along with misaligned fee structures and the limited downside risk, the core of her critique is particularly brutal…
Read MoreWe’ve all been there, perhaps. Struggling through the day to get things done — noble things, often, for good people. Things that are necessary, important even. Positive outcomes. All that. And yet sometimes we keep hitting unnecessary obstacles:…
Read More2013 in a word? According to at least one economist it was: Bitcoin – a secure peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency created in 2009. New Bitcoins are mined by software programmers, and although users can remain anonymous, central to the system is a public database and sequential record of all transactions,,,
Read MoreIf blogs aren’t visual enough for you, WonkBlog has a series on the best graphs of the year, while back on the blog side, here are some thoughts from Ben Horowitz on taking the mystery out of scaling a company; Tim Harford on why there are no new ideas, only remixes…
Read MoreThis month, read some very cogent reasons why an entrepreneur turned down $5 million in venture funding, or go the other direction and get Paul Graham’s advice on how to raise money, and if you have already tried, take comfort in some reasons why you can’t raise money…
Read MoreIn entrepreneurial culture, success dominates the airwaves. A brand new company can succeed in many ways: attracting press, landing influential seed investors, winning contests, and through stories of individual users. This culture is so strong, that the second act of an entrepreneur…
Read MoreIn this month’s five best blogs we are going all Venture Capital: start with some great startups whose ideas seemed absurd at the time, then check out six myths about venture capital — which might help, since some people believe there are now fewer than 100 tech VCs still investing,…
Read MoreOne of the minor signs of professional accomplishment is that dreaded moment where some enterprising young person asks career advice. Often one has to balance between the practical (pursue a typical corporate gig to pay off student debt?) and the promise…
Read MoreOne of the axioms of raising capital is simple: all money is green, so what is the value an entrepreneur should expect from an investor? For many early-stage companies that are growing quickly, with money safely in the bank, the primary need is talent. And one of the resources…
Read MoreThe roughly $2 billion deal between Facebook and Goldman Sachs is so chock-rich of material it will surely spawn a series of longer pieces once it has settled into historical view. To begin,..
Read MoreFunding options and pathways for early-stage companies are changing – more rapidly now than at any time in the past quarter century. We’ve detailed many of the changes individually…
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