Whew!

We’ve been dying to tell you all for a while that we had raised a new venture capital fund and of course given SEC filing requirements the story was somewhat already scooped by the always-in-the-know Dan Primack a few weeks ago.

We raised $280 million. Our last fund was $200 million but as you may already know since we raised that fund we added new partners Greg Bettinelli and Kara Nortman and Venture Partner Hamet Watt – all of whom are busy looking at new deals for the firm in addition to Yves Sisteron (the founder), Steven Dietz (also part of founding team) and myself.

The speaks to the continued confidence in the venture capital markets and as I had predicted some time ago the VC markets right now are a great place to invest – especially relative to other places to put one’s money.  I knew eventually people would realize that the Kauffman Report and all the talk of VC returns were rear-view mirror analyses. If you want to understand how the VC industry is changing there is a great primer in the link.

Wait, didn’t you just raise a fund?

Well. Our last fund we raised was in 2012 and we began investing it in April of 2012.

I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. From these meetings you can really tell the leaders that care deeply about their customers and those the look down on them. Given customers & sales are the lifeblood of any organization you’d imagine everybody would respect their customers. You’d be very wrong.

I was thinking about it this week through some snippets of recent experiences.

Starting with a positive. I had dinner this week with a top new customer at one of our enterprise software investments. I wish I did more enterprise software investing because when I attend meetings like this I realize that this is my core DNA – rolling out business software solutions to customers. The entire dinner was a discussion of what it would take for our software to help this customer be successful, what he liked about it and where we needed to improve. It was a personal discussion and you could tell that our senior leaders and he shared friendship as well as respect and admiration.

This week I wrote about obsessive and competitive founders and how this forms the basis of what I look for when I invest.

I had been thinking a lot about this recently because I’m often asked the question of “what I look for in an entrepreneur when I want to invest?” I look for a lot of things, actually: Persistence (above all else), resiliency, leadership, humility, attention-to-detail, street smarts, transparency and both obsession with one’s company and a burning desire to win.

In the comments section a clever question popped up about whether I would have invested in myself before I became an investor.

My first response mentally was, “Of course!” but then I realized I didn’t even need to answer the question. I had invested in myself for years. I quit a very well paid job at Accenture with very little time remaining before making partner and took a risk of having no job security at all. We had raised a $2 million seed round, which meant taking almost no salary so we could afford to hire staff.