Entrepreneurial financing

The creators of the start-up AndFound, an online platform that connects angel investors with a curated selection of promising start-ups, have a towering...

For years "risk management" has been characterized chiefly by caution--preventing the business from doing things that would create exposure. Although...

With private equity buyouts and acquisitions on the rise, we turned to Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, a longtime observer and researcher...

Spinouts rarely take off; most, in fact, fall into one or more of four traps that doom them from the start. Some companies spin out ventures that are...

When getting a company ready to sell in the short term, it turns out, PE firms employ many of the best strategy practices--use debt aggressively, focus...

Being clear on what it means is not just an academic exercise.

Having worked for two VC firms before entering academia, Lakshmi Balachandra was mystified: Why did a proposal that looked so promising on paper become...

In the 1990s, just out of college, Andreessen went knocking on VC doors in Silicon Valley, looking to fund what became the breakthrough web browser Netscape...

By utilizing the reality show format, corporations can create a more effective forum for pitching innovative products.

Ever wondered how entrepreneurs convince VCs to fund their businesses? A leading venture capitalist delivers the inside scoop on what not to say.

Venture capital is ignoring the region for all the wrong reasons.

Most entrepreneurs understand that if the fundamentals of a business idea—the management team, the market opportunities, the operating systems and controls—are sound, chances are there’s money out there. The challenge of landing that capital to grow a company can be exhilarating. But as exciting as the money search may be, it is equally threatening. Built […]

To react quickly later, set up the right systems now.

Pros and cons of the five major funding sources.

The more rivals you outbid, the more likely you are to have paid too much.

In Silicon Valley, exciting new business ideas rapidly attract capital and talent away from less worthy ventures. But in big companies, ideas, capital, and talent are stagnant—prisoners of traditional bureaucratic ways of allocating resources. To capture the Valley’s entrepreneurial magic, your company needs to move from resource allocation to resource attraction.

In one of my posts last year, I shared a framework for more effective negotiations. The first step of the framework described the need for pre-negotiation...

In the book we're working on right now, we make the argument that capitalism is evolving because the environment in which it is situated is changing in...

More and more tech-oriented start-ups are using "negative working capital"--cash received from customers in advance--to finance their businesses, freeing...

Lending to mid-market companies has fallen nearly 60% over the last year.