“Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold” –      Warren Buffett, 2016 The COVID-19 epidemic has had a sudden and dramatic impact on financial markets. In the span of a few weeks, US indices plunged into a bear market – erasing more than 3 years of gains and $11.5T  Continue Reading »

Busting at the Seams & Screaming for an Outlet: Data Liquidity in the Healthcare Industry By Phyllis Whiteley, Partner, Wildcat Venture Partners, in conversation with Bob Bausmith, Founder, Accelerate Innovation The last few years have seen great strides in the FinTech market fueled by digital transformation and the embrace of new technology. FinTech’s wins—most recently  Continue Reading »

Kizzi’s Friday Game Changers Podcast is the world’s number one business podcast show. A unique radio-style podcast interviewing the world’s most innovative business game changers. Presented by Business Game Changer Magazine publisher, Kizzi Nkwocha, Kizzi’s Friday Game Changers provides you with the practical and valuable tools you need to take your game changing business to  Continue Reading »

Ep. 67 – Evolution of Entrepreneurship: Perceptions, Realities and Finding the All-Important Truths – with Bryan Stolle Being an entrepreneur is one of the most challenging career paths you can take — something that Bryan Stolle, serial entrepreneur and Founding Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners, knows intimately. Entrepreneurial success stories have become so pervasive in  Continue Reading »

By Bob Bausmith, Founder, Accelerate Innovation, in conversation with Bryan Stolle of Wildcat Venture Partners “Startups routinely outperform incumbents in disrupted markets. How come? Because they are not conflicted. All their enemies are outside them.” – Geoffrey Moore, Zone to Win [i] B2B startups and established enterprises have always looked to each other for strategic  Continue Reading »

Neil Hughes interviews tech leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, thought leaders and even the occasional celebrity about how technology is transforming their business on my daily show, The Tech Talks Daily Podcast formerly known as the Tech Blog Writer Podcast. In this episode, he interviews Wildcat founding partner, Bryan Stolle. Listen below or see the original post here.

The signals and signs of trapped value are everywhere. Analysts estimate the spend for digital transformation (DX) will account for ≥10% of revenues for almost 1/3rd of the Global 2000 by 2020, and reach $2T by 2022. “Technology is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And, these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of  Continue Reading »

Let’s be clear–capitalism is not going to end any time soon. It is, however, entering a new phase, and the secular changes under way are creating unexpected outcomes in both the financial markets and the job markets, ones that can roil society as a whole. We all need to step back for a moment to weigh  Continue Reading »

Living in an Age of Disruption can be exhilarating, but it is also unpredictable. Forecasting during the early stages of a technology adoption life cycle is equal parts intuition, pattern recognition, and hope. Even well-established plans can go off the rails when a market disrupter enters the mix. The net of all this: sooner or later even the  Continue Reading »

Bruce Cleveland appeared as a guest on the John D. Villarreal Radio Show – 1210 am Miami. He discusses Wildcat Venture Partners, the Traction Gap and our book, Traversing the Traction Gap.

For the past dozen years, Top Tier Capital Partners has believed that using data wisely can potentially help us to “see around corners”. Venture capital is an industry enshrouded in secrecy, making it difficult to determine what is happening in the world of private companies. The intersection between this part of the market and the  Continue Reading »

Finding Your Path “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” It’s a family expression that I used to love until I actually thought about what the words meant. But the point still holds, and it applies particularly well to executive teams who have embraced the need to digitally transform but are still struggling to  Continue Reading »

Some decisions are easier than others. Unlike other investments we have made, we knew from the very beginning Vlocity would be a winner. Why? We use the four Traction Gap Framework pillars (Product, Revenue, Team and Systems) as an evaluation model when making investment decisions. Vlocity was led by a seasoned pro, David Schmaier, who  Continue Reading »

Artificial intelligence stole my crypto! Another SXSW is in the books, and some noticeable trends emerged. Admittedly, my take has selection and exposure bias. SXSW Interactive is so big, it’s really many conferences under one umbrella. Each attendee curates their own experience from thousands of official and unofficial sessions; countless events, mixers and parties; and the scheduled  Continue Reading »

Over the last few years, you would have been hard pressed to have missed the hue and cry claiming digital transformation will require the preponderance of the American workforce to transform. We are told that the digital economy requires people who can code, with deep technical skills, and desire a career in a STEM-related (Science,  Continue Reading »

By the time your startup has reached a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it’s already come a long way. What was once simply an idea now has a team behind it, has market validation, and is picking up steam. The team has defined (or redefined) a Minimum Viable Category (MVC), performed statistically valid research, and has  Continue Reading »

I have had the benefit of working closely — as an operating executive or investor — with some of the top technology B2B early stage startups that subsequently went on to scale and become market leaders. This includes companies such as Oracle, Siebel, Marketo, and others. I was recently asked if there was something each of them had in  Continue Reading »

The road to startup nirvana is littered with companies that didn’t make it. Industry statistics show that at least 80% fail outright; it’s even higher for consumer-oriented products and applications. Each year we must reflect on the past and predict the future as we review investment opportunities presented by determined entrepreneurs. So, it’s that time  Continue Reading »

For better or worse, it’s popular to ask venture investors what they see happening in the new year. Alas, I am no exception, so I’ve put my predictions (which will be as accurate as entrepreneurs’ five year financial forecasts) here, instead of doing a dozen various interviews. Feel free to rip away, although your own  Continue Reading »

In the years sinceBill Davidow co-founded Mohr Davidow Venturesin 1983, venture capital has changed dramatically. A period of capital scarcity has turned into an era of capital abundance, and hundreds of millions of dollars pour into big rounds. Powerful new companies, such as Google and Facebook, define the Silicon Valley landscape and benefit from new internet-focused business models. For Davidow,  Continue Reading »

New people I meet always ask me what I do for a living. When I reply “human resources,” they say something along the lines of, “Oh ….” There’s always that pause. When I start working with people, they say, “I don’t understand why you are in HR. You can do so much more!” But the  Continue Reading »

Who Needs a Security Deposit? Too many of us are all too familiar with the burden of signing a new lease and its most dreaded sidekick, the security deposit. Just eleven days after I moved into my new apartment in the Pac Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, we met with LeaseLock, a startup that’s taking a  Continue Reading »

We’ve established in Parts 1 & 2, that professional services are a significant part of many successful SaaS company playbooks, and we have identified the scenarios where it’s important to build out a professional services capability. So, what now? What are the key components of these playbooks, that create a service offering effectively addressing the  Continue Reading »

In the first installment, we showed how professional services are a key component in most successful SaaS company playbooks. Mature SaaS companies derive almost 20% of revenues from professional services and invest almost 14% of total expenses (COGS + OPEX) in same. For early stage SaaS companies, it can be as much as 50% of  Continue Reading »

Americans are being crushed by student loan debt, and the trend is continuing. More than 44 million Americans currently owe $1.5 trillion in student debt. By comparison, Americans owe $1.0 trillion on credit cards. Both numbers are so large they’re almost impossible to imagine, and similar problems are also growing in Canada and Europe. Breaking  Continue Reading »

There are many ways conventional addresses fail us. It can be as trivial as trying to find a friend at a music festival to the more harrowing task of navigating in a developing country; in both cases Google Maps simply doesn’t cut it. These situations are solved by navigating to that “really tall tree on  Continue Reading »

Businesses across the globe are struggling to keep up with the pace of change and customer demands as the digital transformation rewrites the rules on everything from how products are designed, built and distributed to how they’re marketed, sold, and serviced. There has been an explosion in technology – a digital big bang – and  Continue Reading »

Wildcat Venture Partners today announced that industry veteran and human resources (HR) executive Jennifer (JT) Trzepacz has joined the firm as chief people officer and operating partner. In her role, JT will focus on connecting talent, people strategies and operations to accelerate performance in Wildcat’s portfolio companies. She also will act as the executive director of  Continue Reading »

One of our portfolio companies, FIGS, announced a great round of financing by Tulco Holdings last week. FIGS, the medical apparel company that is shaking up the world of scrubs — creating high-quality and flattering scrubs in a market that used to completely lack style and utility — was founded by Trina Spear and Heather  Continue Reading »

In an ideal world, the most open and least stressful relationships startup founders have would be with their board members. Unfortunately, for many founders the exact opposite is true. According to recent research we did in conjunction with Wildcat Venture Partners and the Traction Gap Institute, less than 50% of founders agreed very strongly with  Continue Reading »

Why We Invested in Carrum Health There’s not much predictability in healthcare costs, as anyone who’s ever shopped around for elective surgical procedures knows. Depending on geography, hospitals, physicians and insurance plans, the costs can vary widely for patients – who also worry about which option delivers the best outcome. Then there are the bills  Continue Reading »

When a group of guys got together to send their buddy off into the land of marriage, they needed a few beers. Specifically, they needed 840 cans… of Bud Light. They wanted it stocked in the hotel refrigerator. Not 839 and not 841. It was some kind of inside joke. But the reason didn’t matter.  Continue Reading »

Every appliance, widget and device we own or use—even ones we haven’t yet imagined—will one day be connected to the Internet via sensors. In fact, the IoT (Internet of Things) revolution, is already well on its way. The IoT market could reach $11.1 trillion a year by 2025, according to a recent McKinsey report. That’s  Continue Reading »

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with a longtime colleague, Jim Hughes, founder of Quick Start Strategies, a leading-edge sales advisory firm singularly focused on ‘lead to cash’ for B2B companies. We discussed how the science of sales needs to be embedded in driving sustainable revenue growth and how companies can successfully traverse  Continue Reading »

In 2006, after 20+ years in a various product management and engineering roles, I transitioned into an investor role. When I made that transition, although I had run a large engineering team at Apple for many years, I elected to invest exclusively in software startups building products used by businesses and business users. Since then, I  Continue Reading »

Digital Transformation: A Stairway to Heaven Every so often a phrase emerges from the Word Cloud to achieve capital importance, the sort of thing that authors and pundits can dine out on years to come (well, we do have to eat too, you know). At present that phrase is digital transformation. Even as you read this blog,  Continue Reading »

A Skills Problem The global economy has been rapidly transitioning from a 20th century industrial economy, to a 21st century “digital economy” – an economy driven by digital technology and data that enables companies to quickly conceive of new products and services and bring them to market faster and more cost-effectively than at any other  Continue Reading »

Preparing the Fourth Industrial Revolution Workforce The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us and our current workforce isn’t ready for it. At Wildcat Venture Partners, we are painfully aware of this. But beyond the pain we also see great opportunity. That’s why we’re helping to launch a new education category, one that is focused on  Continue Reading »

Through parts 1, 2, and 3, we’ve covered a lot of information around the displacement that’s going to occur as a result of AI, but we’ve also talked about the fact that people are going to be in the loop for decades to come, and that AI is going to empower new job classes while radically changing the  Continue Reading »

We are all stakeholders in the economic systems within which we live and work, and the better we can understand their dynamics, the more likely we are to navigate them successfully. For the most developed economies of today, this means understanding the transition from an industrial to a digital economy, and specifically, how economic power  Continue Reading »

Imagine for a second a snapshot of a carpenter in mid-swing with a hammer at the very tippy top of it’s arc. At this point in the carpenter’s action the potential energy is at its highest, and all the hopes and dreams of that hammer rest in this climatic moment. The system is in perfect  Continue Reading »

I have been fortunate to have been either an operating executive or investor in some very transformational software companies in Silicon Valley, joining or investing at a time when they were just very early-stage, private companies. These include C3 IoT, Marketo, Oracle and Siebel Systems, to name a few. Working with, and learning from, some  Continue Reading »

I have to admit to having an extreme bias. It rears its ugly head when a startup CEO comes into our offices to take us through their business, introduces the management team, and describes one of the executives as the “VP Sales & Marketing”. I am not talking about a startup that is new and/or unfunded and  Continue Reading »

First, some bad news: A Series B crunch may be upon us. According to Mattermark, in the first quarter of 2016, Series B rounds dropped nearly 40 percent, the largest reduction since the 2008 market correction. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen many successful startups accelerate from just an idea to scale in just  Continue Reading »

Last week I started writing up some views on what I’ve seen so far, and my thoughts on technology moving forward. As we know CES wasn’t as good as years past as it’s starting to blur all it’s colors to be that mushy amorphous brown that no one likes trying to appease everyone but really  Continue Reading »

If you sit down with a number of HR executives and ask each of them which questions companies should ask candidates during the interview process to ensure they select the “best fit” person, you will likely hear a spectrum of answers. Over time, companies tend to develop their own processes and/or techniques (e.g. psychographic testing) to  Continue Reading »

Every January all eyes are on CES, tech’s biggest distraction of the year. I think they do it that way so they can offset the loss created by Burningman every August. As Niko Bonatsos from General Catalyst tweeted: “We can’t do any deals this week. All of our associates are at Burning Man. Who will  Continue Reading »

In 2014, I made a case for PRTech and the opportunities that lie therein. Since I wrote the article, PRTech has seen explosive growth, a fact marked by continued consolidation of the old guard and the emergence of new entrants across the industry. To wit, PR software company Cision has acquired a range of sub-niche  Continue Reading »

When it comes to planning and goal-setting, perhaps the most basic and often vexing question is where to set the bar. One school of thought is to set lofty goals that force teams and people to stretch beyond their comfort zones, and achieve the unexpected, or the previously unobtainable. The other school of thought is  Continue Reading »

The rise of cloud computing brings with it the promise of infinite computing power. The rise of Big Data brings with it the possibility of ingesting all the world’s log files. The combination of the two has sparked widespread interest in data science as truly the “one ring to rule them all.” When we speculate about such a  Continue Reading »

When an entrepreneur takes investor money, they are expected to deliver on the plan and milestones they “sold” to investors during the fund-raising process. These expectation dynamics are covered in an earlier blog: http://onforb.es/25DBDfR However, you will almost certainly need more capital in the future. The next investor also has a set of things they  Continue Reading »

An angel investor friend recently got a bit of hard news – they were going to get significantly less on a recent acquisition of an angel investment than they had expected. It was a good lesson in the perils of angel investing.  Personally, I’ve made a couple dozen myself, so I have direct, sometimes painful  Continue Reading »

I’ve shelved this post for almost a year now because though I’ve been in venture for five years across both Wildcat Venture Partners and Mohr Davidow Ventures, it’s not lost on me that I’m still too early in my career to be “rocking the boat”. But thanks to Gurley’s recent article, the cat is out  Continue Reading »

An awful lot of tech stuff is going down these days, and it is creating some serious confusion.  Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot is rapidly becoming the call sign for our current era.  We may not yet feel we are in jeopardy, but we certainly do not feel in control.  What in the world is going on?

As early stage venture investors who only invest in a select number of companies annually, we unfortunately have to pass on many great entrepreneurs and compelling visions. So when we do make an investment — Clover Health’s Series B, in this case — we are inevitably asked, “Why them? What’s special about that company?” I hope this post sheds  Continue Reading »

A tweet from GrowthHackers caught my eye recently — “Our #product market fit and NPS are off the scale, but we’re struggling to grow. Any ideas why?” Like most tools in a well-stocked tool chest, a specific tool is only good for a specific problem or use.  Product/market fit is no different. It’s not a  Continue Reading »

As we kick-off 2016, I reached out to my entrepreneur network and asked, “What was your biggest ‘lesson learned’ last year?” Introspection is a very valuable entrepreneurial trait, and the best are very good at it.  The entrepreneurs polled lead companies ranging from enterprise cloud software firms to internet direct-to-consumer.  The common trait?  All are  Continue Reading »

Earnest recently announced a $275M total raise (Series B + lending capital) on the back of well-earned momentum. As Series A investors in the company, I’ve been asked a lot of questions, including “Why/how did you pick that particular company in the more and more crowded fintech space?”  The short answer: our team at Wildcat Venture Partners has been excited  Continue Reading »

The statistics are dismal: 74% of high school girls show an interest in STEM subjects, but only 4% of college girls choose to major in science, technology, engineering or math. 50% of women who are in STEM careers leave the workforce.

Next week is Money 20/20 in Vegas, a conference that is fast becoming the Fintech confab.  This conference’s remarkable growth (5x in four years) parallels the emergence of Fintech as one of the hottest startup and investment categories.  Public and private IPO’s, including Lending Club, OnDeck, First Data, WorldPay, SoFi, Stripe and Kabbage at $1BN+ valuations are rampant, and judging by  Continue Reading »

This is part 3 of a 3 part series. Read Part 2 Here. This is the final installment in a series of blogs about a set of five executive roundtables I facilitated at last week’s Dreamforce on the topic of Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption. In the first part of each session  Continue Reading »

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. Read Part 1 Here. In the previous post, I reported out on a series of executive roundtables, summarizing the participants’ prioritization of disruptive technologies based on their current impact on their industries and companies. In summary prioritized order, the technologies discussed were: Data Science Cloud Mobile  Continue Reading »

This is Part 1 of a 3 part series. Okay, it wasn’t exactly the World Series of Poker, but at Dreamforce this week I hosted five roundtables at Executive Summit with a total of 68 participants, all VIP guests of Salesforce. The topic was “Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption” (not accidentally the  Continue Reading »

At some point, a startup will exhaust the founders’ networks for recruiting/hiring purposes, and must turn to professional recruiters to fill key positions. When the position is a senior executive role, a professional recruiter often becomes even more necessary. One of the biggest challenges for a startup seeking to use a search firm is that  Continue Reading »

I was recently asked, “Aside from world peace and the elimination of poverty, if you had one wish, what would it be?” At first, I thought, “I would create more time!” But that would just get filled with all of the frenetic work that continually beckons to be done. Instead, I answered, “I would slow  Continue Reading »

We’re not talking politics here, people—we’re talking technology adoption. In any major technology adoption life cycle there are two trajectories of development, the first led by a complex systems model, the second by a volume operations model. Each passes through a series of five states, and to each state there is a peculiar market dynamic  Continue Reading »

One of the key lessons I learned from posting on LinkedIn an early draft of my next book (Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption) is that disruptive innovations can be occasions both for playing offense and defense. Indeed the two case studies in the book—Salesforce and Microsoft—ended up representing a  Continue Reading »

We are now well into the decade of Systems of Engagement. Enterprises in all walks of life are waking up to a world where their constituents are digitally armed and dangerous, and they are revamping their market-facing systems to leverage these newly empowered endpoints. The landscape of opportunity is immense as there are pockets of  Continue Reading »

We’ve been talking about the disruptive impact of digital forever. Time to stop talking. Here’s why. As we all know, digital has already reset the social contract with the consumer and end user. Marketing and customer service relationships have migrated from real-time contact with human agents typically at a designated site of the vendor’s choice  Continue Reading »

Entrepreneurs are commonly described as: competitive, evangelizing, risk taking, nimble, scrappy, and visionary. However, there is a broader skillset and mindset that entrepreneurs require to be successful. I’m going to share eight mistakes entrepreneurs make that aren’t often talked about publicly. My hope is that I can help you to avoid at least some of  Continue Reading »

This post is the sixth in a series of posts that will eventually become a book. I am looking to improve the text by incorporating readers’ feedback before I go to print. Find out more about this project or start from the beginning. Read the previous chapter in this series The Transformation Zone is reserved  Continue Reading »

It’s baseball season again, so what better than a blog with a baseball theme? I ran across a piece a while back about how Joe Torre, the famous and very successful former New York Yankees manager, led his team. Many consider him a genius at managing and motivating – particularly difficult and notable in a  Continue Reading »

Andy Puddicombe spent 10 years studying to become an ordained Tibetan monk and is now the successful co-founder of the meditation app Headspace. In his TED talk, he says: “I think the present moment is so underrated. It sounds so ordinary, but we spend so little time in the present that it is anything but ordinary. Our mind  Continue Reading »

I was asked to help address the tech/startup gender bias question a couple of times recently at SxSW in Austin. The first opportunity was as a panelist for a session covering fundraising for startups, as part of the Women in EdTech track during SxSWedu.  The second was as part of an impromptu panel at SxSW Interactive during  Continue Reading »

When it comes to hiring a key member of your executive team, hiring a recruiter can seem expensive initially. However, do not underestimate the value of having a professional recruiter who will cast the net wide to give you exposure to various types of executive candidates, to be responsible for moving the process forward efficiently,  Continue Reading »

Mark Twain is often associated with the quote, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” It was in fact Pascal who most likely first coined that phrase, but the point remains. It’s hard and takes time and effort to communicate concisely, whether a short memo, a letter or a business plan  Continue Reading »

Entrepreneurs have always embraced innovation and change, and reinventing oneself as an entrepreneurial leader will be critical over the next handful of years. Here are the secrets to setting yourself up for success: 1. Leverage Flexibility In Your Workforce The U.S. workforce is becoming much more fluid, driven by the rise of an “on demand”  Continue Reading »

There is plenty of discussion about how to build a valuable and sustaining business. Yet, I don’t often see much coverage of the building blocks that really matter; the elements that are more behaviors or philosophies on how to run a thriving startup business, elements that need to be woven right into the fabric of the  Continue Reading »

This is the 2nd installment about startup planning and execution based on the concept of “Ready, Aim, Fire” – a time-tested, tried-and-true adage that applies as much to the subject at hand as to shooting a gun or a bow and arrow or playing golf. In Part 1, the focus was on perhaps the most common failure  Continue Reading »

Thoughtfully selecting and effectively working with your investor board members and independent board members (who are not typically investors in the business but asked to join the board to add value in a particular area of expertise) are incredibly important skills for entrepreneurs that are rarely discussed and can have a major impact on your  Continue Reading »

Ready!  Aim!  Fire! It’s a very old, tried and true adage.  This legendarily accepted process of operations works universally whether shooting a gun, a bow and arrow, playing golf, or leading a team to achieve an objective.  Prepare or ready yourself for the intended action; take aim on the objective and goals; and then fire,  Continue Reading »

Be authentic. Figure out your values and who you are, and be true to both. Trying to be who you aren’t will impede your company and your career progress. Dare to follow a path unique to you. Take risks and be curious. Build specific skill sets and gain unique experiences each step along your career  Continue Reading »

Early stage venture is a lot about the entrepreneur–who that person is and what she or he is capable of. As an investor, my filter has become quite honed in terms of what to look for in the best entrepreneurs. On a recent trip to Ireland, I participated in a guided hike of the rugged  Continue Reading »