Finance Geek

WASHINGTON-You’re Ian Urbina, a senior New York Times reporter. In February and March you write that hydraulic fracturing, a method of natural gas extraction, is contaminating Pennsylvania drinking water. Your accusations are subsequently disproved by government tests.
What do you write next?
You write a three-part series in the Times saying that shale gas production is “inherently unprofitable” and a giant Ponzi scheme, as well as loosely-regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
No matter that many emails you cite quoting industry managers, geologists, government…

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In today’s crowded market, looking for a tablet is like buying a new car. Everything looks great when it’s slick, polished and sitting on the lot. The hard part is keeping track of what’s under the hood. Wired.com took some of the front-runners from the current tablet field ?? the brand-new HP TouchPad, Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and others ?? and stacked up their features side-by-side in a chart.

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We took a look at some of the most prominent mobile-application ecosystems out there today, comparing the benefits and drawbacks of each. Before buying that next tablet or smartphone, we suggest you take a look.

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As any sentient being knew would happen, the Greek government got its bailout. It was a foregone conclusion, and there’s a 99% chance that the IMF would have disbursed more billions to the profligate government even if Greece’s Parliament had failed to pass an “austerity” program.
The reason why Greece was saved should be obvious, but if not, let’s be clear that the bailout was not one meant to aid a Greek government that has been in default for much of its debt-issuing existence, rather it was a bailout of banks around the world that have exposure to Greek debt. If…

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Twitter is all about bridging cross-generational gaps. At least ?? that’s what you might think after reading the introduction to Twitter for Newsrooms, or #TfN, the newly launched resource guide from the Twitter Media team. Some of you might be “native to the pilcrow, others native to the hashtag,” it reads, “but you share a …

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Bank of America has agreed to pay $8.5 billion to settle lawsuits brought against its Countrywide unit for sloppy mortgage underwriting during the housing boom. $8.5 billion is a huge amount of money, but it’s tiny compared to the face value of the mortgages in question ($424 billion) and the principal still outstanding on those [...]

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Like everyone else, I’ve spent the best part of Tuesday seeing if I could get an invite to Google’s latest social service, Google+. I e-mailed a few contacts at Google, with not much luck, but I’ve slowly come to the realization that I don’t actually want one.

Cast your mind back to the heady days of …

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Financial markets exhaled Wednesday as the Greek parliament passed a $40 billion austerity package. A second vote on implementing the package is set for tomorrow and ongoing protests in Athens could change the political calculus. But the expectation now is Greece will receive a $17 billion tranche of its EU-IMF bailout package and avoid a [...]

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Here’s a question: Why is repealing the Bush tax cuts such a constant obsession for the Democratic party? Especially the top rates for the most successful earners and small-business entrepreneurs?
It seems this is the Democratic answer for every single issue, every problem, every debate.
This, of course, saddens me enormously.
And so, always ready to help, I am recommending a 12-Step program to help the Democrats overcome their anger, resentment, and obsession over the Bush tax cuts. Democrats really need a Higher Power on this.
First, when tax rates were lowered across-the-board in…

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Oil prices are currently trading just around $90 a barrel, down from the recent triple-digit highs of the first quarter. But despite the recent signs of weakness in oil prices, gone are the days of $20, $30 or even $40 a barrel, says Frank Holmes, CEO of U.S. Global Investors. (See: “Straight-jacket Time”: Dow, Crude [...]

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Twenty-seventh in a series of weekly posts by myself and Nicholas Lovell of Gamesbrief which answer the fifty questions you should ask before raising venture capital.  We expect the series to run for a year after which we will collate the posts into a book.  You can find the rationale behind the series here, and the list of questions here.  We welcome your comments on any and every aspect of what we are doing.

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Hopefully the recent posts in this series have given you an idea of how VC evaluate companies, markets, teams and so on.  My next three are going to deal with how to best get that in writing with the aim of getting productive meetings with investors.

I use the term ‘productive’ very deliberately as I’m a big believer that ‘raising money’ is actually better described as ‘selling equity’ and hence should be treated like a sales process where qualifying prospects out quickly is key to being efficient.  The purpose, then, of putting something in writing in front of the VC is to make sure that they have thought about your business enough to be genuinely interested before you give up your valuable time to meet with them (and take up theirs).  Meetings where it becomes quickly apparent that there is no fit between the startup and what the investor wants are no fun at all and the approach I describe here works better for both entrepreneur and VC.

The first document you put in front of the VC should, therefore, contain the key information a VC needs to make their first level assessment – and that includes a description of the product/service, the market, key team members, any high profile investors or advisors, how much you raising, and some high level financials.  Depending on the startup other elements may be important too – e.g. if your product is novel like say Quora was last summer it will help to describe the customer problem and vision, if you are entering a competitive market you should refer to the competition or if you have a uniquely interesting business model like say Groupon you should detail that out.  The product/service description is by far the most important of these as that is the first filter most VCs use to determine interest.

The other important thing is that the document should be short.  You want the VC to read it and understand all the key points so you know your meeting will be productive, and that means getting it into one or max two pages of an executive summary, or into the body of a shortish email.  In the world of iPhones, Blackberries and narrow band cellular networks a short emails have much more chance of getting through and getting through quickly and I think the best approach is to send an exec sum attached to an email with 100-200 words in the body making your top 1-2 points (which should almost certainly include product/service).

All of the above assumes that you have already determined that you want to raise venture and have a reasonable chance of success, i.e. you are in a sales process rather than a discovery process.  If you are still at the stage of figuring out whether it makes sense to try and raise money then you should be looking for meetings with anyone who can give you feedback and setting them up as discussion meetings rather than pitch meetings.

Finally, if you are lucky enough to have a company that is super hot, is growing super fast, or has some other characteristic which means that in practice all VCs are interested and you don’t need to worry about non-productive meetings then it is less important to make sure your business is well understood before the meeting happens and maybe your time is better spent doing something other than preparing documents for investors.  For most though, I would guard against arrogance.  It is far better to have over-prepared than under-prepared.

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On the eve of the Greek Parliament’s critical vote on austerity measures, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet stressed the need “to develop a renewed vision of the kind of Europe we want and indeed need,” Bloomberg reports. In case it isn’t already clear, what’s happening in Greece has ramifications for the broader European Union — and [...]

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Just hours after debuting Google+, a new social network, Google announces that user data can be exported. It’s a clear attempt to poke at Facebook’s walled garden policy towards user data.

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Nearly three years after the worst of the financial crisis, we are still living with its residue of slow growth, anemic job creation, and a moribund housing market. On top of these real-life reminders have come movie depictions of the crisis, including the May 2011 HBO version ofAndrew Ross Sorkin’s book Too Big to Fail, and the 2010 Academy Award-winning Inside Job.
The essential cinematic prism on the Great Recession remains 2009’s Up in the Air, featuring George Clooney in a crushing tale of dislocation and downsizing. The two more recent movies both focus on Wall Street rather…

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In October, 1992, researchers for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston produced a report meant to settle the question of whether banks were refusing to write mortgages for residents of minority neighborhoods merely because of their race. A few years earlier newspapers, beginning with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had started publishing sensationalistic stories based on studies which argued that banks were redlining, or avoiding minority neighborhoods for racial reasons, but many experts questioned the research behind these stories. The Boston Fed study, while critical of the earlier…

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