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.
An 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 facilitate acquisitions. So it’s good for us if M&A activity pays off for everyone involved. But too often it does not. The Economist has an excellent post on the difficulty with many M&A deals, focusing on a new study on acquisitions by public companies…
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 MoreWe’re big fans of behavioral economics, so the idea that you can make better decisions by flipping a coin naturally caught our eye. The author of a working paper that makes this claim is none other than Steven Levitt, of Freakonomist fame…
Read MoreLeadership transitions within private equity firms are icebergs: sometimes the tips are spotted in the distance, but the vast majority are usually out of sight and only significant in a catastrophe. Large crashes became well-known, but even then information is largely anecdotal — stories passed around with cocktail glasses…
Read MoreThis month what’s caught our eye includes: a brief from consultancy McKinsey on where machines can replace humans (with accompanying visualization) — not to give it away, but about 60 percent of occupations could see just under one-third of their activities automated…
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 MoreAprès nous le deluge: in the tech world, it’s pretty hard to just keep up with what everyone else is doing. Time flies even faster during the holidays, so our interest is overly practical this month…
Read MoreWell, we all have something to say. Our picks this month include Y Combinator’s Sam Altman who lays out the playbook for startup companies; which leads you to the A13Z team’s helpful list of the best startup company metrics…
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 MoreClearCreek has published a semi-regular blog and newsletter since July of 2009. However, when we applied for (update: and received) our broker-dealer license for ClearCreek Securities, there was an unfortunate consequence:…
Read MoreNews junkies everywhere know that it is the best of times, as news is presented in various forms through a multitude of channels, often in real time — but fear the worst of times, as the implosion of the former monolith of print news threatens the existence of journalism as a profession…
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 MoreQuick – to aptly recognize Labor Day, everyone go update their LinkedIn profiles. You won’t be alone: LinkedIn membership has tripled in the past three years and now stands at about 315 million professionals, of whom two-thirds live outside the United States…
Read MoreInspired by Labor Day traffic, we decided to rise above the crowds. Instead of recommending a specific product, we are going all meta: The Wirecutter is a cultivated list of great gadgets, with “each pick chosen mindfully and in accordance with many hours of research, interviews […] and testing.”…
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