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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 [...]

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.  [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The short answer is it depends.  Here we go… On a flight back from London today, my partner showed me a little blurb in the most recent Time Magazine about a bet between two scientists.  They bet $300 on whether the first person to live 150 years would be born by 2000.  They put the money [...]

Starting this week, about 190 million Windows PC users in the EU will be offered the chance to change browsers as part of the Microsoft settlement.  The process should take about 3 months.  The browsers being offered were selected based on market share in the EU.  Here are the 12 browsers being offered: Avant Flock Google Chrome GreenBrowser K-Meleon Maxthon Mozilla [...]