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Three Magic Numbers

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Foundry Group's Brad Feld has formed a view that every young company should be obsessed about three magic numbers. Find out what they are.

Union Square's Fred Wilson invites Phil Sugar to weigh in on the issue of building a stellar startup management team, who tracks the process from best friends to buddies to co-workers.

Continuing our MBA Mondays series on The Managemet Team, we are deep into the guest post phase. This guest post comes from AVC regular Phil Sugar. I've never met Phil, but his comments here at AVC tell me that he's a very experienced entrepreneurial manager. And so I reached out to him to ask for a guest post. And he responded with this post below. There are so mant great lines in here, I'm tempted to reblog a bunch of them.

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Union Square's Fred Wilson talks about ways the investing community needs to work to make sure the macro environment for investing activities remains attractive.

I've always seen the work that my colleauges and I do as more than venture capital investing. That is our main job and we need to do it very well. But we also need to work to make sure the macro environment for our investing activities remains attractive.

There are two primary activities that Union Square Ventures focuses on in addition to our core venture capital activities of backing and then working closely with entrepreneurs and their teams. They are policy advocacy around protecting the freedom to innovate and efforts to build the ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurship. Longtime readers of this blog understand this from the many many blog posts on these two topics.

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Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley uses his scorecard to determine that Facebook is a shoe-in for the 10X+ revenue club and well worth its $70-$100 billion valuation.

Attached are my thoughts on the Facebook S-1 along with some quick stabs at valuation.  Brief disclosure, Benchmark Capital has a minority position in Facebook as a result of the acquisition of FriendFeed, a company that was incubated in our offices.

I thought it would be useful to look at Facebook using the scorecard from our May 24 blog post, “All Revenue is Not Created Equal, the Keys to the 10X Revenue Club.” For those that want to save time, the key point of this piece is that there is a broad disparity of Price/Revenue multiples for global Internet stocks, and that only a very small fraction of these companies achieve a multiple over 10X. We also created a list of 10 factors that public investors consider when trying to qualify if a company is deserved of such a prestigious and lofty valuation.

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Duck9's Larry Chiang pits Stanfords Graduate School of Business against Stanford's School of Engineering to find out which provides a better entrepreneurship education and knowledge activation in the entrepreneur realm.

I explore education because when the world fluxes, seeing how academia adapts is extremely interesting.

In this blog post, I pit Stanford's Graduate School of Business against Stanford's School of Engineering. Specifically, I examine entrepreneurship education and knowledge activation in the entrepreneur realm.

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Facebook Belongs in the 10X Revenue Club

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Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley determines that Facebook is a shoe-in for the 10X+ revenue club and well worth its $70-$100 billion valuation.

DFJ Esprit's Nic Brisbourne picks up the software theme and looks into the future, concluding that almost every industry is vulnerable to digitization, and innovation will become software based.

Back in August Marc Andreessen wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal explaining why Software is eating the world. His main observation was that the fastest growing companies in almost all industries are betting their future on software. He gave several examples of which the best two from a breadth of industry perspective are Amazon and Disney/Pixar:

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant.

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The Management Team - Guest Post From JLM

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Union Square's Fred Wilson continues with a guest post from JLM, who talks in detail about scaling up into a real organization.

Software Will Eat the Whole World

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DFJ Esprit's Nic Brisbourne looks into the future and concludes that almost every industry is vulnerable to digitization, and innovation will be software based.

Duck9's Larry Chiang gives CS majors everywhere a chance to start their own company in exchange for a few easy, simple pleasant (lead-gen) tasks.

Pay me to do lead generation is a signature Gua Gua Guacamole recipe of mine.

I first recognized the pattern with celebrities and athletes. They would get paid to appear. After the cocktail party or networking event or two-minute speaking gig, they would collect a stack of business cards. Most were people eager to pay them more money to do similar "work."

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