I am pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures II, L.P. – A $40M technology-focused micro-VC fund. This new $40M fund is backed by several high quality institutional limited partners including university endowments, foundations, family offices and fund of funds and key individuals.

For VCs money is a commodity. VCs also operate in a limited time window. Now, combine those two motivations that venture investors have: 1) ownership, 2) quick growth, and what do you get? You get a situation whether investors are incentivized to put in more money into a company, not only to buy more equity, but also to fund the quick growth. In fact, it becomes a vicious circle. First, a company may get encouraged to raise more money that it really needs, just so that the venture fund can get to it’s desired level of ownership. Then the same company gets encouraged to spend that money to accelerate and to grow quickly, which in turn means it runs out of that money more quickly, and then needs to raise even more money.

The seed round happens on hope. The Series A happens on a combination of hope and numbers. And the Series B and beyond, happen largely based on numbers.

One of the downsides of being an investor is that you spend a lot of time in meetings. What’s worse is that most of these meetings need to be scheduled. And yes, in 2012, we all still mostly schedule meetings via email. Consequently, a fair number of emails that I exchange with people are about [...]

Torbit Insight uses Real User Measurement, i.e. when a visitor comes to your site, Torbit Insight measures how long the page takes to load for every visitor, on every page. It collects all the data from every visitor and gives you a real-time view of how your site is performing across all visitors to your site

Put simply: “What happens in Silicon Valley, simply doesn’t happen anywhere else,” and, “If you want to be an actor move to Hollywood.”

My recommendation is that founders should consider selling between 5%-10% of their stake once a company gets to a high-priced Series B or a Series C.

“There is no such thing as a capital efficient company (at least in Silicon Valley). There are only two types of companies — those that attract capital, and those than don’t. And you obviously want to be the former.”

IndexTank (@IndexTank) has been acquired by LinkedIn! Huge congratulations to the entire IndexTank Team and especially to IndexTank’s founder Diego Basch (@dbasch).

Fifteen years ago, in 1996, while I was still a student at Carnegie Mellon University, I wrote an article (blog post in today’s parlance) about the future of computing…