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.

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.

The idea is the seed. It is the kernel that is the start of something new.
Ideas are powerful because they invade the mind. Once you are introduced to an idea, you cannot get it out of your head.
Ideas are what provide that little twist of ingenuity that can make or break a company.
Sometimes ideas are not revolutionary, but they get the ball rolling and without them, that wouldn’t happened. The best ideas are often simple ones. Maybe that is what a revolutionary idea is — an idea so simple that it sparks a revolution.

If you are a tech startup, where the technology is your business and not just supporting your business, then you shouldn’t be relying on any outsourcing, contracting, or distributed teams for developing your core product. I believe that the chance of success of a team is an order of magnitude higher when the entire team is local, in one room and working closely with each other. Bottom line: “When you stick a couple of smart people in a room together good things happen”

The story of Modista.com — a young startup that was forced to shutdown before it even really got going because of a patent infringement lawsuit by Like.com.

Here are the slides from a talk I gave at a Carnegie Mellon Alumni event in the Bay Area today. #20tweets is tweet-sized advice for founders of tech startups. In the presentation I went into more detail and provided some rationale/anecdotes behind these tweets. For now, here are just the tweets: #20tweets by @manukumar View [...]

In the past few days there has been a lot of discussion on the topic of a Founders Visa. The credit for starting this fire goes to Paul Graham from Y Combinator, who wrote a great essay titled The Founders Visa in April 2009. Brad Feld (Brad is an advisor to K9) from the Foundry [...]

Yesterday, while attending TechCrunch50, I tweeted some tips for the companies presenting at the conference and those participating in the demo pit. By popular demand, I’m aggregating these tweets in a blog post:

Ever since I found the blog Startup Company Lawyer, I’ve had a high regard for its author, Yokum Taku, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Yokum’s posts are always chock-full-of-good-information. His most recent post was on the topic of When do I need to incorporate a company? I’ve spent some time thinking about [...]