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Practical Advice for Raising Early Stage Venture Capital

Harvard Business Review

If your business has high velocity, high margins, and a huge market, venture may be a good road for you. There are some helpful resources out there on venture terms , good venture funds vs. bad ones , and questions you may want to ask a venture capitalist if you meet one. However, a tragic flaw has materialized.

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Why Some of the Most Groundbreaking Technologies Are a Bad Fit for the Silicon Valley Funding Model

Harvard Business Review

Corporate executives seek to inject “Silicon Valley DNA” into their cultures, and policy makers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a solution for all manner of problems. If you have an idea to apply mature technology to a well-understood problem, it’s relatively easy to get it financed.

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Groupon Doomed by Too Much of a Good Thing

Harvard Business Review

Such a strategy limits an early venture's funding in order to force the business to develop a profitable business model and then invests heavily in growth once such a model is identified — Christensen terms such investments "good money" for incubating growth businesses and extols the strategy for three reasons.

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What Sets Successful Startup Accelerators Apart

Harvard Business Review

Research involving numerous accelerator programs and interviews with various stakeholders reveals that startups in these programs typically achieve higher funding and survival rates. What role do business accelerators play in boosting the growth of early-stage companies? And they work.

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Big Companies Should Collaborate with Startups

Harvard Business Review

Campbell, the food company best known for its soups, is investing $125 million in a venture fund to help finance food startups, according to the Wall Street Journal. They should take their teams and regularly walk the aisles of Whole Foods, which is as much a greenhouse incubator of the hottest new brands as it is a retailer.

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Enabling the Natural Act of Entrepreneurship

Harvard Business Review

Piecemeal policies, like angel tax credits, loan guarantees, reduced payroll taxes, direct investments, government venture funds, etc., So Puerto Rican entrepreneurs hire consultants to badger government procurement to pay up, and in parallel they jack up their prices to finance the long receivables cycle.

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VC Funding Can Be Bad For Your Start Up

Harvard Business Review

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community — VCs, business angels, incubators, and others — convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. The advice VCs give isn’t always that good.