John Frankel

flashpoint Demo Day – January 18, 2012

ff Venture Capital and HBS Angels of New York are happy to be co-sponsors of Flashpoint’s upcoming New York Demo Day, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 2:30 PM to 6:00 PM, held at Union Square Ventures.

Flashpoint is a startup accelerator program at Georgia Tech.  Some of their portfolio companies look very promising. The current crop includes:

Raising Capital for Venture Capital Funds and Bumblebees

Fundraising is not just limited to companies.  Venture Capital firms have to do this as well.  It is an interesting process and you get to meet fascinating people.  Potential limited partners (or LP’s as we call them) come to the table with a set of beliefs that are, well, sometimes peculiar and rarely challenged – after all, the VC that is raising capital does not want to upset their potential investor.  The net result is that certain “truths” often have to be addressed …

Hire the Best, Expand the Nest

I am delighted to announce that ff is expanding significantly.  Firstly, we are very excited to add David Teten as the second Partner in our history and Michael Yavonditte as a Venture Partner in the Firm.  David is Chairman of Harvard Business School Angels New York and an experienced entrepreneur.  He has founded three startups and sold two, most recently selling Circle of Experts to Evalueserve.  Michael is CEO of one of the fastest-growing New York statups, Hashable, and was CEO of …

Okay..I Said it: This Time it’s Different, or How The Bubble WILL Come About

This Time It’s different

[Source www.500px.com]

We are entering a new era.   A time when great wealth is being created, and old fortunes destroyed (but not let us dwell there). A time of convergence and disruption that has not been seen in anyone’s lifetime.

In the late 90′s it was all about expectation and a belief that disruption of existing businesses was imminent; well, a decade or so later it now is. This is why the current (and upcoming) crop of Internet leaders are, …

Social Privacy

I was watching Mark Suster and Tom McInerney on This Week in Venture Capital mainly for fun, though Tom is a good friend.  If you have not watched it you should as it is highly engaging.  Well into the discussion Tom and Mark delve into privacy and Tom mentions that many teens have moved to having more than one Facebook account.  This was the same week that Hashable re-tooled their privacy settings, moving from a very open public followship model to an ‘Inner Circle’ model.  All …

There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

I really did not want to post about the Yuri Milner/Y Combinator/SV Angel announcement, but felt that there was something lacking in the debate.

Like Roger Ehrenberg I think this is a “ho-hum” announcement, but time will tell.  There are various surveys and analyses out there, and all the numbers are slightly different, but the order of magnitude is that there well over 100,000 angels making over 50,000 investments for a total amount of $15bn /-, each year.  One angel’s …

The Future of Computing

Now that I have your attention with a grandiose title, I am going to share with you an iPad tech support story: I am in London and had to switch out my iPad – I could not get the O2 sim card working for UK wireless connectivity, so Steve at the Genius Bar switched out my iPad, and voila, it now works. Usual Apple approach of not wasting my time if they cannot find out why something does not work – amazing service.

But I am far from home: how useful is this without my applications …