It been a while. I just read a couple of posts on the relative importance of Team, Product and Market that motivated me to write. Here are the post. The first is from Marc Andreson (Netscape fame) and the second is in response to Marc by Paul Buchheit (Gmail fame). I think both are worth […]
Stock compensation in early stage start-ups: Shares or Stock options?
I have a question regarding compensation for key employees in early stage start-ups. From an employee and company standpoint which one is better? Shares or stock options? For example: Consider an early stage venture that has total share capital of say Rs.5Cr (50L shares at Rs.10 par value) post first round funding. They would like […]
How did you fund your startup?
In the US it is quite common for a startup to get its 1st round of funding from SBA (small business association) or an overdraft of $100K from the neighbourhood bank. After that if cash flows can support you should be able to get more credit from the bank. Then there are Mezzanine funds which […]
What’s a great team?
Well, this came out of a comment on our fund announcement post. Someone asked, what do we mean by a great team. While it is almost impossible to provide a precise definition of the same, I would like to offer some things that we look for. Every team might not have all of them, but […]
Canaan closes $650M fund
Happy to report that we have announced closure of our eighth fund at $650M. The fund will continue to focus on early stage technology businesses in US, India and Israel. India could account for upto 25% of the fund commitments. For our India operations, this is a significant increase in commitment. We started investing in […]
Back to vortals
Remember vortals from the dotcom hey days? For those who dont recognize the term, it stood for vertical portals – go after a particular target group, and provide range of services to them – our first business before we gravitated to jobsahead was a “vortal” called zipahead for Indian youth! Well, the vortal is back. […]
The Death of Indian Outsourcing
“Are you kidding? No way!†In 2008, the IT and IT enabled services (ITES / BPO) industries are supposed to be the major drivers of India’s economic growth. According to Nasscom, the two industries combined will employ 4 Million people, account for 7% of GDP, and 33% of foreign exchange inflow. Death of this industry […]
Is performance management an issue for startups?
This is performance review time (at least in US) and I have been posting about my thoughts on these on my blog. One of the topics that I deal with regularly is the need to grow the engineers and managers reporting to me to the next level, in a way manage their career according to […]
Career/Talent Management for individuals
One of the thought process I have been going through ever since I posted my previous (and only) post in June ’07(giving back to society in the area of education) is the notion of career/talent management for individual careers in Indian companies. Particularly, the fact that if you look at the talent lifecycle of an […]
Partnerships between startups
Hi , I have been thinking a lot about using strategic partnerships to generate the early customer traction. I feel a lot of startups can save costs if they go for a strategic partnership with another startup. That way they can easily cash on their common customers and would be a win win situation for […]
Eko- Beyond the Inner Circle
Our use of restricted stock to get advisors/talent has worked very well. Plans at Eko are aggressively on track and we have had some exciting developments. We will be closing our early employee restricted stock offering by Jan 31, 2008. It is already closed for other categories such as advisors. We have also worked on […]
Harish Gandhi joins Canaan Partners
Happy to announce that Harish Gandhi has joined Canaan Partners’ India team. Prior to joining Canaan Partners, Harish headed the Value Added Services (VAS) Business and the New Product Development team at Bharti Airtel. In his product development role, Harish was responsible for working with a number of VAS product, service and content companies as […]