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MATT TROTTA

Location: New York, NY

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A Trattoria is 'currently' defined in Wikipedia as a is an Italian style of restaurant, less formal than a ristorante. There are generally no printed menus, the service is casual, the prices low, and the emphasis is on a steady clientele rather than on haute cuisine...

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3 March 10
C - r ə g: What's on your reader?

Looking for more recommendations.

General Tech News

Reblogged: c-raig

16 February 10

Owen Van Natta as Hitler Finds Out He Was Fired from Myspace (via owenvanhitler)

15 February 10
What a great way to get your head straight for the coming week — an afternoon walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a sunny day

What a great way to get your head straight for the coming week — an afternoon walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a sunny day

9 February 10
The distances I will go for a free lobster roll….

The distances I will go for a free lobster roll….

Posted: 9:27 AM

Style of VC Fund

thegongshow:

VCs have a wide variety of styles, and I don’t know if all of them are obvious to entrepreneurs or not, so I’ll enumerate some of the differences in style here.

When a VC firm goes out and raises a fund, one of the docs that is a minimum requirement is a Private Placement Memorandum (PPM). The PPM is what you distributed to potential Limited Partners to explain to them (amongst other things) your flavor of fund. One element of the PPM is always a description of the fund’s focus.  How could this differ?  Well…

  1. Geographic: Some VCs only make investments in a specific geography. For example, the DFJ Network of funds are a group of VC Firms, many of which invest specifically within a defined geography.
  2. Stage: Some VCs limit their investments to a specific stage. Certain funds will only invest in company with annual revenue greater than $1MM. Other funds, will only invest in seed-early stage opportunities. For example, Accel offers a growth-fund and an early stage fund separately, which differ primarily in stage.
  3. Sector: Some funds will invest only in specific industries: such as Information Technology, Biotech, Cleantech, etc… Other funds are sector-agnostic, and use partner specializations to focus on specific sectors within the same fund.
  4. Opportunistic: Some funds deliberately market themselves in their PPM as leveraging a proprietary network of deal flow, from which the investment team can be opportunistic. For example, LPs who invested in the Founders Fund likely gave good thought to the appeal of the PayPal Mafia’s network and proprietary deal flow.
  5. Quantitative: Some stylistic choices can be very specifically quantified by common financial metrics.  For example, I talked to an investor a few years back that was taking a deep dive into the Ad Network sector, and he said, “we won’t invest in any Ad Networks that can’t reliably produce 40% gross margins.”
  6. Thesis-Driven: Some funds will apply a intellectual framework or thesis to all their prospective investments. A thesis is typically used as a filter; a great team generating high-margin revenue in an attractive market might not meet an investor’s investment criteria if the company is not a fit for the investor’s thesis regarding overall market trends. Here’s an example of a thesis we commonly apply at Union Square Ventures.
  7. Other LP-related Limitations: Some funds can’t invest in certain industries, such as gambling or alcohol-related revenue because of restrictions in their agreements with their limited partners.  This is most common with Sovereign money limited partners, such as Saudi or Chinese sovereign wealth LPs.

The takeaway here if you’re an entrepreneur is you can use this list as a set of questions to ask a prospective VC to see if they are a good fit with your company.  Sometimes you don’t even need to ask a VC… their current and past portfolio will speak for itself about what they actually do. Their actions define their style.

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I really like this breakdown by Andrew - a good way to simplify the complex.

Reblogged: thegongshow

2 February 10
Diving Anyone???

Diving Anyone???

30 January 10
fred-wilson: Status THIS - Check-In, Please

fred-wilson:

Status THIS - Check-In, Please

Reblogged: fred-wilson

29 January 10
fuckyeahghosttowns: Bokor Hill Station, Cambodia (via) Bokor Hill Station is an abandoned French town in Preah Monivong National Park, located in northern Cambodia. The town was built in 1921 as a resort by the colonial French settlers to offer an escape from the heat, humidity and general insalubrity of Phnom Penh. Nine hundred lives were lost in nine months during the construction of the resort in this remote mountain location. The centrepiece of the resort was the grand Bokor Palace Hotel & Casino, complemented by shops, a post office, a church and the Royal Apartments. It is also an important cultural site, showing how the colonial settlers spent their free time. Bokor Hill was abandoned first by the French in late 1940s, during the First Indochina War, because of local insurrections guided by the Khmer Issarak, and then for good in 1972, as Khmer Rouge took over the area. During the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, Khmer Rouge entrenched themselves and held on tightly for months. In earlier 1990s Bokor Hill was still one of the last strongholds of Khmer Rouge. Now abandoned, most of the buildings are still standing. The site is owned by the government but is under 99–year lease to the Sokimex Group who are undertaking to relay the road and redevelop the site, repairing the old hotel and casino along with new buildings.

fuckyeahghosttowns:

Bokor Hill Station, Cambodia (via)

Bokor Hill Station is an abandoned French town in Preah Monivong National Park, located in northern Cambodia.

The town was built in 1921 as a resort by the colonial French settlers to offer an escape from the heat, humidity and general insalubrity of Phnom Penh. Nine hundred lives were lost in nine months during the construction of the resort in this remote mountain location. The centrepiece of the resort was the grand Bokor Palace Hotel & Casino, complemented by shops, a post office, a church and the Royal Apartments. It is also an important cultural site, showing how the colonial settlers spent their free time.

Bokor Hill was abandoned first by the French in late 1940s, during the First Indochina War, because of local insurrections guided by the Khmer Issarak, and then for good in 1972, as Khmer Rouge took over the area. During the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, Khmer Rouge entrenched themselves and held on tightly for months. In earlier 1990s Bokor Hill was still one of the last strongholds of Khmer Rouge.

Now abandoned, most of the buildings are still standing. The site is owned by the government but is under 99–year lease to the Sokimex Group who are undertaking to relay the road and redevelop the site, repairing the old hotel and casino along with new buildings.

Reblogged: fuckyeahghosttowns

16 January 10
“

Facebook posted that it is going to give users the option to share their real email address or a proxied email address.

According to Facebook, “In our tests we found that users strongly prefer having the option to share an anonymous email address. In rare cases we will set the default for the dialog to share a proxied email (instead of the user’s actual email address). We will only do this in a small number of cases (if any), based on an algorithm that will auto-detect applications that we suspect might be abusing email addresses.”

This will enable Facebook to maintain some sort of quality control over the email channel – preventing blatant abuse when users choose to share their proxied email address instead of their real one.
—

Facebook Platform Email Sharing API, Proxy Email Service Going Live in 5 Days

Rafer sez:
What would you like to bet that Proxied Email Addresses far outnumber direct email addresses in no time flat?

For the twenty of you that told me, “Rafer, you’re paranoid. FB’s email sharing mechanism will be fine. There’ll be no benefit to building our own or using Sweepery or whatever.” Wrong.

FB is very smart, very ambitious, and very good at what they do. They may not always charge you to get to THEIR user base (it ain’t yours), but they will find a way to retain the option for later.

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Reblogged: rafer

11 January 10
nevver: Flak Photo This reminds me of home.

nevver:

Flak Photo

This reminds me of home.

Reblogged: nevver

Themed by Hunson. Originally by Josh