I thought about trying to make it down to the bay area for Dave McClure’s PreMoney conference. I had heard great things about it and the lineup looked rather appealing. I came up with all sorts of excuses and didn’t go – instead I followed the livestream, tweetstream, and of course the slideshare. I made note that I should definitely be there next year as the quality of the presentations was high and the attendance was interesting.
I won’t go into depth and pretend I learned a lot because I wasn’t there, I’ll let you grab the slides and dig through the tweets yourself. A few that I pulled out that I thought were particular interesting though included…
- Don’t quickly dismiss things that look like toys, look for compounding fast growth even if small base @eladgil
- Angels & seed funds “value add” decreases as # of investments increases b/c overwhelmed and/or complacent. @eladgil
- Angels can be tempted over time to become more involved w/institutional VCs & as a result become less founder-friendly.@eladgil
- First super angels starting to appear. Chinese VC is 2nd largest in US…50% in Beijing. 1/3 size of US. Increasing. @evdemon
- “Look for signal among who is sending you the deal” @jeffclavier”
- The notion of a ‘unique idea’ has pretty much disappeared… all about executing better, faster, and bigger.” @jeffclavier
- “All startups I’ve invested in that have done best, have all compounded from very start…even from a really small base” @eladgil
- “135 micro-VC firms today, need a differentiated strategy: geo, sectors, stage, value-add, infrastructure/ecosystem” @jeffclavier
- “Smart founders will optimize for ‘Investor Market Fit’ when they have several options” @jeffclavier
- “If you can comfortably hit your next few milestones, why would you take your Series A early?” @bullpencap
There is loads more in the slides that is particularly interesting