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Larry Cheng focuses on investment opportunities in Internet applications, information services and software. He prefers capital efficient businesses with $2M- $20M in subscript...
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Recent Posts
- Why I Did Not Join Bain Capital
- Is Being Top Quartile Any Good?
- The Letter Given To The Valedictorian of Harvard College
- Venture Capital (VC) Blog Directory - 2011 Edition
- The Great Divide In Technology Stocks
- DIVINE MISSION.
- Talking Technology On Fox News
- Which Is More Important - The Stock Market or The Bond Market?
- Does God Answer Prayer?
- Why Growth Equity Is The Best Risk/Reward in Private Equity
- Who Is Scott Kirsner?
- Cortera - Crowdsourcing Business Credit Ratings
- Why Do Some Relationships Fail?
- The Tension Between An Optimistic CEO And A Conservative CFO
- Single Unit Value Is More Important Than Growth
- The Google Shift In Enterprise IT
- Just How Profitable are Healthcare Insurers?
- Why Are 80% of Harvard Students First-Borns?
- Independent Firms With Single Limited Partner Histories
- Volition Capital And Cue Ball Capital Lead Stylesight Financing
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- June 2011 (1)
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- 2009 (42)
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Posted: Friday 13 January 2012
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Coming out of college, without even really knowing what they do, my dream job was to one day work at Bain Capital. Their reputation was that they took the very best of the young investment bankers and management consultants a couple of years after college. Since I was headed into the management consulting world after school, I [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 28 June 2011
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Historically, the measure of success in the venture business has been consistent top quartile performance at the fund level. Each firm generally compares their fund level performance to funds that started the same year or vintage, and if they beat the top quartile threshold put out by Cambridge Associates, they feel good about their performance. [...]
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Posted: Monday 31 January 2011
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This is one letter I decidedly did not receive. Nonetheless, I thought it was pretty compelling that there is indeed a valedictorian of Harvard. Out of 1,600+ students in each class, there is one who ranks at the very top. Tags: Harvard+Valedictorian, Harvard+College Filed under: Pop Culture
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Posted: Wednesday 19 January 2011
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This is the 4th edition of the Venture Capital Blog Directory (1st edition, 2nd edition, 3rd edition). This directory includes 148 venture capital, microVC/seed, and growth equity blogs. The imperfect statistic used to rank these blogs is their average monthly uniques in Q410 from Compete (more methodology info below). Blogs that have seen increased traffic over Q409 [...]
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Posted: Friday 14 January 2011
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There is a great divide taking place in the land of technology stocks. The "New Guard" of technology companies have a cloud computing, recurring or transactional revenue story with promotional leaders and great spin. The "Old Guard" of technology companies have big brands and huge presence among customers, but are viewed by some as stodgy [...]
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Posted: Friday 24 December 2010
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DIVINE MISSION!! Firstly, I seek your indulgence to solicit your assistance on the contents of my e-mail, even if I am uncomfortable to contact you through this means, because of the current unsolicited mails on the Internet nowadays, but I have no other means to do this now because my health situation is deteriorating. I [...]
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Posted: Friday 17 September 2010
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Filed under: Growth Equity, Technology, Volition Capital
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Posted: Wednesday 11 August 2010
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This topic was raised to me today in a meeting, and after thinking about it, doing some research, and trying to put aside my biased interest in stocks - I think a stronger case can be made that the bond market is more important than the stock market. There are a number of reasons for [...]
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Posted: Sunday 16 May 2010
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In response to the question presented in the title of this post, the following poem was read at my church service this morning - author unknown. I thought it was insightful, so decided to pass it along here: I asked God for strength, that I might achieve, I was made weak, that I might [...]
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Posted: Saturday 17 April 2010
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There are really three general asset classes in private equity: buyouts, growth equity, and venture capital. So why is growth equity the best risk/reward among the three in my estimation?
1. The downside protection of leveraged buyouts is exaggerated. The lure is that LBO firms are buying highly profitable companies with consistent cash flows, levering [...]
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Posted: Thursday 18 March 2010
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Today marks the first entry in a new series called "Who Is". This series will be about getting to know people in a slightly different light. My favorite part of the work we do at Volition Capital is getting to know people. So, I figured I take a little time each month and tell one [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 16 March 2010
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Congrats to Volition portfolio company, Cortera, which launched their new website yesterday. Cortera has a pretty simple mission in life - bring great financial and credit information on businesses to users at their fingertips for free or nearly free. Cortera also allows any business to rate any other business on how they pay their bills. [...]
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Posted: Saturday 13 March 2010
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I like to blog about different, random, more personal things on the weekends. Hence, I’m starting a series on books that I think directly or indirectly answer an interesting question with an interesting point of view. The first installment last weekend was Why Are 80% of Harvard Students First-Borns?. Today is the second installment and is [...]
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Posted: Friday 12 March 2010
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From what I can tell, in nearly every Volition portfolio company, the CEO is more optimistic than the CFO - and usually by a wide margin. Certainly, part of this structure is by design. But in reality, you just don’t find a lot of optimistic CFOs to hire, and a conservative CEO probably doesn’t inspire [...]
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Posted: Thursday 11 March 2010
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The pressure for revenue growth has hurt a lot of young companies. It starts with an entrepreneur representing a growth story to an investor. Then the investor represents the growth story to his firm to gain support for the investment. And then the investment happens. Then the company takes the investment, invests in sales and [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 9 March 2010
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Through our portfolio companies, we have a view into how Google is perceived for both large enterprise and small/medium enterprise computing needs. In some board meetings, I find myself exhorting management teams not to underestimate the impact of Google. In other board meetings, I find myself cautioning management teams not to overestimate Google. This dynamic [...]
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Posted: Monday 8 March 2010
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After reading this blog post on healthcare and hearing the rising volume against healthcare insurers - I wanted to understand more clearly the profitability of healthcare insurers. So, I went to Google Finance, searched for Aetna, got a list of their competitors - and researched their net profit margins. Here they are:
2009 Net Profit Margin of Healthcare [...]
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Posted: Saturday 6 March 2010
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That’s my estimate anyways. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was my freshman year at Harvard, and I was going to the first lecture of "Justice" - one of the most popular classes on campus. The lectures took place in Sanders Theater packed by over a thousand students since it’s only offered once [...]
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Posted: Friday 5 March 2010
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A breakfast conversation with Fred Wilson this morning prompted the thought of how many independent venture firms come directly or indirectly from firms that had a single or captive limited partner structure (one source of capital). Just thinking out loud:
Union Square Ventures was formed by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. Fred came from Flatiron which at the [...]
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Posted: Thursday 4 March 2010
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We are very pleased to partner with Cue Ball Capital on a $10 million investment in Stylesight which was announced yesterday. Stylesight is the leading style information service and SAAS platform for the global design ecosystem. Thousands of retailers, brands and manufacturers are using the subscription service to be inspired by real-time design images from around [...]
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