Finance Geek

A new program links payments on federal student loans to income and forgives balances after 25 years. Those working in public service could have loans forgiven after 10 years.

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After nine months of explosive monetary and fiscal stimulus, you’d think economic recovery would be upon us. But the June jobs report tells a much different story.
Non-farm payrolls fell by 467,000 as the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent. This isn’t nearly as bad as the 700,000 monthly job losses of last winter, but it’s still a rough number. Equally disappointing is the household survey — often a key turning-point signal since it captures the health of small businesses — which has dropped 811,000 in the past two months.
Donald Marron, a former senior economist with…

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Stocks are falling today after employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, higher than the 363,000 expected by economists. Unemployment rose to 9.5%, a bit below forecasts but still the highest level since Ronald Reagan’s first term in office. …

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DES MOINES — Former prison inmates and ex-offenders who have demonstrated they can successfully obtain employment now can receive a special certificate from the state Department of Corrections.

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DES MOINES — Consumer advocates said Wednesday they hope a new state law giving Iowans the ability to sue unscrupulous businesses will serve as a deterrent to scams that prey on the elderly and other vulnerable Iowans.

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INDEPENDENCE — Council members on Wednesday fired City Manager Alan Johnson amid concerns about his performance over the last year.

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Two federal agencies are now ready to hand out $4 billion in grants and loans to help bring broadband to the people and stimulate the economy, but applicants have to promise to play fairly with whatever devices, applications and services users want to use.

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When Wall Street imploded last year, the Fed and Treasury took “some of the right moves” in order to revive the financial system, says William Cohan, author of House of Cards. But the government blew at least one crucial act of the saga, Cohan s

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Thanks in part to banks’ big investments in security technology, you’re probably not dialing for disaster with mobile banking. But there are still ways to get stung.

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From The Business Insider, July 2, 2009:The rate of crash for real-estate prices nationwide has finally
begun to moderate.  Specifically, it dropped from -19% a year in March
to -18% a year in April.
No, that’s not much to celebrate.  But it’

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From The Business Insider, July 2, 2009:Update: The market is tanking. Dow futures are off over 100. In addition to the top-line numbers, the internals are horrible. The work week is now down to 33 hours, the shortest its ever been since the data’s been c

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Brad Feld posted a couple of days ago about Saying No In Less Than 60 Seconds in which he talks about the 10-50 times a day he has to say no to deals and meeting requests, and that as a result he has to do so quickly.

As Brad describes it there are a couple of things wrapped up in here, firstly his goal of being accessible to everyone that reaches out to him, which means both making himself contactable and responding to contacts, and the second is a time management point.  The goal is laudable and the time management is a practical necessity.

Turning to myself, I have a similar goal of having contact with as many interesting people as possible.  This is inevitably a time consuming process and as such competes for my time with my portfolio, the internal operations of our partnership, deals I am pursuing, and last, but by no means least, my family.  Unsurprisingly there is never enough time to go around and at any given point I am most likely feeling guilty about neglecting one of these constituencies, right now it is my portfolio where in the last week I have had two senior execs remark that they haven’t seen much of me lately.

My point in all of this is that for VCs optimising the use of their time is a big deal, as any extra that can be squeezed out can be profitably put to use.  Brad’s focus in the post above is minimising the time to say ‘no’, while still doing it well, and in this previous post he talked about how he likes to keep meetings short (often less than 30mins).  That resonated with me, as when I look at my working life and try to figure out where I can find time to meet with more entrepreneurs and spend more time thinking about our investments the obvious place to go is reducing the time I spend with companies once it becomes clear that we aren’t going to come to a deal.

US VCs have always been better at this than we are in Europe.  The culture of the 45 minute meeting is well established over there, but over here the custom is for meetings to last an hour or more.  Moreover, it is sometimes the case that people perceive it as rude, or some kind of sleight, or comment on their business if a meeting is shorter rather than longer.  I have had cases of more arrogant entrepreneurs wanting to schedule 90mins or 120mins for the first meeting.

In order to create time to see more companies I have been thinking about reducing the length of first meetings to 45 minutes.  I think that is enough for both sides to figure out whether we want to move forward together, but I’d be interested to know what you think.  From the entrepreneur side is 45 mins enough?, is it rude to schedule meetings this short?, and any other thoughts.

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There’s been a lot of talk from the Obama administration about reforming Wall Street, but little or no action where it matters most — compensation, says author and former investment banker William Cohan.”There’s a lot of nice words in the 85-page re

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