Category archives: Opinion
State of Venture in Fall 2023
Things feel s-l-o-w in the venture ecosystem. Some craziness around AI, but everything else is “Zootopia DMV slow slow.”
Read moreHit Start Media – Enabling Enterprise Companies to Own Their Narrative
Hit Start Media is a startup that helps enterprise companies “Own your narrative.”
Read moreI Believe
We’re boiling the frog, where the frog is democracy, the health of our fellow humans, justice and equality for people of different races and genders, and most importantly the health of our planet—remember that we only have one. So I want all K9 LPs and K9 founders to know that my time, my energy, my money, and YOUR money will go to supporting these causes through the companies K9 invests in, or that I start.
Read moreWhat is the biggest enemy of a startup?
In 1998–1999, when I was running my first company, one of my investors, the late Don Jones, came by to visit us at the office. Don was totally a people person and just an all around great person to talk to. In fact, I can hear the intonation of his voice in my head as […]
Read moreInvestors should pay their own legal expenses
Legal by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images There, I said it; right there in the title of the blog post. And I’ll repeat it again: Investors should pay their own legal expenses. I’ve never understood why the norm for someone putting money into a company comes with the company bearing the cost of the legal […]
Read moreThe Logical Evolution of Private Markets: A new class of company.
Recently I attended a lunch where we were all asked to present something provocative/mind-blowing. I thought about that for a while and realized that I want my provocative thought to not be something that is a pie in the sky idea but instead something that is based on a series of logical conclusions. Well, here […]
Read moreIdeas Matter aka The Execution Myth
I’ve written about how Ideas Matter before. I’ve also written about Finding a Problem Worth Solving. And I’ve also written about my Contrarian Advice for Graduating Students. What follows is a set of slides from a talk I gave sometime last year (February 24rd, 2017) in Chuck Eeesly‘s E145: Technology Entrepreneurship class at Stanford. This […]
Read moreThe Pre-Seed FAQ
One of the people I respect the most in the VC/PE media ecosystem is Dan Primack. I’ve been an avid reader of Dan’s Term Sheet while he was at Fortune, and now Pro Rata at Axios. His writings and knowledge of the inner workings of the VC/PE ecosystem is impressive, and I have learned a […]
Read moreHow to reference check your prospective investor
Of all the advice I have given founders over the years, one of the most important ones is to make sure they do reference checks on their prospective investors. When founders do their homework on investors, they make informed choices about who they will be working with for many many years to come. As the […]
Read moreComputing vs Medicine
In high school, one of the teachers who I respected a lot (she was also feared by a lot of my peers for being a strict disciplinarian) pulled me aside one day and suggested that I should really consider studying Biology and consider medicine as a future. Although my thinking back then as a 15 […]
Read moreRethinking Founder Vesting
So much of what we do in the tech industry is about innovation, disruption, and changing the status quo. But, when it comes to how we go about doing that some of the smaller details tend to get re-used based on previous norms and templates without being revisited or questioned. One of these norms is […]
Read moreHardware-as-a-Service (HaaS)
A couple of years ago I was talking with a company that wanted to build robots. Their proposed price point for the robots was about $20K per unit. It would be a brand new product, that people had never really seen or experienced before, and it would replace some amount of human labor. After thinking […]
Read moreYou Can’t Spell Hardware without H-A-R-D
I started my tinkering with hardware first. As a kid I used to trek down to the “electronics bazaar” in New Delhi, known as Lajpat Rai Market, and go store to store to try and find the components I needed for whatever I was building. It was both fun and frustrating at the same time. […]
Read moreVC Cold Email Outreach: “The Only Winning Move is Not to Play”
Every few weeks one of the founders of K9 Ventures’ portfolio companies forward over an email they’ve received from a “Partner” at a VC firm. And every time I go through the same ritual, explaining to the founder when to respond, when not to respond, and how to respond to such emails. So […]
Read moreManu Kumar on The Twenty Minute VC
Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Harry Stebbings from The Twenty Minute VC. Harry has done a phenomenal job of getting some of the top people in venture capital on his show and had high-quality, high-bandwidth, and chock full of good information conversations with them in a medium that is highly […]
Read moreStealth is Overrated
“US Navy Sea Shadow stealth craft” by US Navy employee – http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/ships/ship-sea.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. I’ve tweeted this before… I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stealth is overrated. Startups should use every opportunity to get their name out. — Manu Kumar (@ManuKumar) May 29, 2010 …and I’ve said it […]
Read more3 contrarian pieces of advice for graduating students
I love teaching (Although I hate grading, but that’s why I invested in Gradescope. More on that some other time). Every time I interact with students, I find myself repeating the same contrarian advice to them over and over again. So I figured I should write up a quick post so that I can point students […]
Read moreAsking for Feedback
We’re becoming and increasingly data driven culture. Whether it is my children’s school, my bank, the last hotel stay, a car service, a visit to the doctor’s office — everyone thinks and believes (rightly so) that they need to collect data on customer satisfaction. And now we have the tools to be able to do […]
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