The Top 20 Machine Learning Startups To Watch In 2021
There are a record number of 9,977 machine learning startups and companies in Crunchbase today, an 8.2% increase over the 9,216 startups listed in 2020 and a 14.6% increase over the 8,705 listed in 2019. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning (ML)-related companies received a record $27.6 billion in funding in 2020, according to Crunchbase. […]
A Tip of the Hat to Grid On Their Launch Day
It’s not every day you hear about a startup in Iceland, founded by a guy whose last company was a data marketplace that he sold to Qlik. And it’s a small world when a friend and fellow board member had independently discovered the same tool and built a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) calculator […]
Pandemic, Future of Work & the Current Fundraising Environment
As a data-driven investor, we constantly track data. Fundraising data. Market data. Economic data. Over the last month, one question persists —how will COVID-19 affect venture capital fundraising particularly in the Future of Work? We decided to look at our data to understand VC fundraising over the last month and compare last month’s data with the […]
Kellblog’s 10 Predictions for 2020
As I’ve been doing every year since 2014, I thought I’d take some time to write some predictions for 2020, but not without first doing a review of my predictions for 2019. Lest you take any of these too seriously, I suggest you look at my batting average and disclaimers. Kellblog 2019 Predictions Review 1. […]
Summary of the 4Q14 Fenwick & West VC Survey
Because I was reading it and had a minute, I thought I’d do a quick post summarizing the 4Q14 Fenwick & West Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey (PDF). As the name indicates, this is an ongoing quarterly survey on the state of venture capital that pulls from many sources, integrating lots of data into a single […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Innovation Part 4: Setting Up a CVC Organization
In the previous post I introduced a five-dimensional framework to employ while setting up a corporate venture group and discussed in detail two of its dimensions: strategy and people. The corporation must establish a long-term strategy for its venture group. As part of this strategy it must create a set of objectives, formulate an investment […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Innovation Part 3: Setting Up a CVC Organization
In the first part of the series on corporate venture capital I explored how the disruption of institutional VCs (IVCs) and the imperative for corporations to innovate provide an opportunity to corporate VCs (CVCs) to make their mark in the startup ecosystem and be viewed as viable and valuable financing sources to private companies. In […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Disruptive Innovation Part 2: Will the Big Numbers Result In Big Success this Time?
I started writing these posts with the hypothesis that in their effort to innovate, corporations must re-invent the traditional R&D model with one that augments the R&D efforts with venture investments, acquisitions, strategic partnerships and startup incubation. Corporate VCs (CVCs) are expected to play a big role in this innovation quest. With that in mind […]
Why You’ll Need Just about $3,000,000 to Build Your First Real Sales & Marketing Team
Every week, I meet with several entrepreneurs, often bootstrapped or close to it, who fit the following sort of model: Gotten to Initial Traction (~$1.5m ARR), or getting close to it, or a bit beyond; and With nice growth (>=100% YoY); and Company isn’t really burning much cash because The CEO basically is the VP […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Disruptive Innovation Initiatives
A large corporation recently requested my advice on how to set up and structure their venture fund, which they wanted to base in Silicon Valley. This corporation had initially set up a venture fund in the late ‘90s to invest in Internet startups. By 2002 they closed down the fund after determining that its portfolio […]
