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Questions to Answer Before Investing in a Start-Up

Strategy Driven

However, before making any investment decision, it is essential to ask yourself some tough questions to make sure you are ready for the commitment. What Rate of Return is Expected? . For example, do you want a guaranteed return , or do you need one that entails more risk?

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Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) Business

Coaching Tip

In the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business landscape expected to continue for 2015, leaders face many challenges , requiring aggressive, sustained talent management strategies to prepare them for success. Two times more likely to place value on interacting over managing skills. The Mobile Era Matures.

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Venture Capitalists Get Paid Well to Lose Money

Harvard Business Review

The public pension funds, endowments, and foundations (called limited partners, or LPs) that foot the bill for the industry through their investments in VC funds do so to realize the outsized returns that VC claims to provide. There are, of course, individual firms that succeed in generating venture rates of return.

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Walmart Broadens ROI for Green Power

Harvard Business Review

And the commitment to green energy has helped Walmart take third place on the U.S. It also recognizes that, in the meantime, operational managers will gain valuable experience and knowledge about how to optimize the new power systems. We worship internal rates of return (IRR) to our detriment.

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What Private Equity Investors Think They Do for the Companies They Buy

Harvard Business Review

What have been less explored are the specific actions taken by private equity (PE) fund managers. In a survey of 79 PE firms managing more than $750 billion in capital, we provide granular information on PE managers’ practices and how firms’ strategies relate to the characteristics of their founders.

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Don’t Take Money from VCs Until You’ve Asked 4 Questions

Harvard Business Review

Investors in VC funds see returns data from a wide range of firms, and those performance figures make it clear that many well-known “brand” VC funds consistently fail to generate minimum venture rates of return. As a result, entrepreneurs are fully committed to the economic performance of their company.

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Capitalism’s Future Is Already Here

Harvard Business Review

” Choices about whether and how to use money to remedy social problems should be left to individuals, he argued, who would be in better position to provide it if they were not being in effect taxed by corporate managers who thought they had better ideas for how to spend it. Raised customers’ expectations.