We produced a new print advertisement to debut at a Limited Partner and Fund-of-funds convention soon. Let us know what you think.

We have finally added, updated and cleaned-up a dedicated Facebook page for The Venture Company and added references from our website. Now Facebook users can stay up-to-date with The Venture Company without leaving the comfort of their most popular social networking site.

Tags: Facebook

We changed our website (again) to a cleaner look, accommodate our focus towards Limited Partners and prepare for some future announcements.

• We fine-tuned messaging to Limited Partners, and improved whitespace.
• Completely reorganized the startup section, which has become secondary to our LP focus.
• We implemented press coverage in the slider on the home page, now rotating with the accolades.
• We reduced load time on the home page a bit.
• Twitter signup has moved to every page.
• We moved our commenting system from JS-Kit to Disqus to enable more modern commenting features, improve syndication and improve visibility. The comments from the previous system were imported in Disqus and should show up (albeit without some of the fancy visual attributes, some of this stuff just gets lost in translation).
• We changed colors, more on that later. It has meaning.
• IE6 performance may be dropping off soon, it is time to upgrade laggers!
• We will add more features based on this design soon.

Please let us know if you have any problems using the site, commenting is now also enabled under this news section, so have a go at it. We will straighten up a few more things in the days ahead.

Today, on Independence Day, The Venture Company declares Limited Partners’ independence from Venture Capital Status Quo.



With unique Venture Capital insights garnered by operating for more than 15 years in every corner of Venture, Georges will discuss the real world deployment of Venture and delivers the expertise needed to increase the returns of this asset class for limited partners in a 2-hour online (private) seminar. Instructions for seminar signup and details are provided here.

Download the press release in pdf .

Georges has finally started the process - promised before - of writing his book (code-named S3) which he hopes to complete in about 1 month. No ghost writing, 100% straight from the heart. Postings on the blog may suffer a little bit from that time drain, and we hope you trust the book will be worth it. We will make more announcements as to when it will be available, stay tuned.

We are about to launch a new print advertisement for Limited Partners in Venture. Above is a preview. This ad will debut at IBF's the 21st Annual Venture Capital Investing Conference, San Francisco, June 9-10th.

We have updated The Venture Company website to offer tighter integration with the social recommendations to Facebook and Twitter networks. We also established a connection to The Venture Company page on Facebook, which we are in the process of building out.

We performed a slight visual update to our website, with many more changes "under-the-hood" to improve performance and incorporate some of the latest technologies.

2010: The State of Venture Capital is hot on Twitter; and is being tweeted more than any other document on SlideShare right now. So Slideshare has put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the "Hot on Twitter" section).

Tags: Slideshare

We have a new phone number (the old will be active for 3 more months), so change your address books now, to:

We changed our elaborate phone system, which comprised of regular office phones, mobile phone and Skype to a single Google Voice phone number "that travels with us". We will now be able to get back to you sooner, and voice-mails left will be converted into text and sent to the recipient by e-mail along with the original audio message. So, do not be afraid your voice-mail message will get lost, or not arrive in time - we get it immediately - and we will respond back to you promptly.

We have been using Google Voice for about 3 month without a single problem, long enough to trust the service. Get your own at http://google.com/voice

P.S.: All other previously given-out numbers will temporarily roll over or have become inactive. As you will not be notified of the time of rollover, please change your address book entry for us now.

The State of Venture Capital is among top presentations of the day on Slideshare, with more than 340 viewers on a single day before that accolade. The editorial team at Slideshare would like "to thank us for this awesome presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everyday".

Tags: Slideshare

The Venture Company supports 2010 IBF Venture Capital Conference. Come see or meet us there.

We are not in the business of simply generating page visits with salacious topics, rather to fundamentally change the venture business which is so sorely broken. Our reward is to help build a more effective ecosystem of innovation with a meritocracy that we can all benefit from, not to count web beans.

We publish our venture experiences on our own website, and many of our stories get copied and syndicated by prominent media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, USA Today, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mercury News, NPR (closing in on 50 in total) with attribution to our brand, website (they should) and what we stand for.

We do not put out a sign post that we invest in companies, which would dramatically increase the direct page views from money hungry entrepreneurs. But we write about the dysfunctional ecosystem of venture and in 2009 have moved up the food chain to address the needs of the real asset holder in venture; the Limited Partner (as the investor in VC).

We look for a discerning audience not just a large one, nevertheless our year-to-year growth is more than 350%. We believe that further indicates how the issues we address resonate with an audience that wants to see change. From the unsolicited accolades you can see our biggest fans are not the sore losers of the venture ecosystem.

2009 TVC Web Stats

Without having the ability to count the visitors and page views our articles generate for our syndicates, here are some statistics and trends (generated by Google Analytics) of the direct traffic to our site we find interesting to share.

Overall 34,000 discerning readers in 150 countries have read the articles on this site 92,000 times.

During 2009, we counted:
67,000 Articles read by 26,000 unique visitors in 38,000 unique visits. More than 7,000 of those visitor express (hard-core) loyalty by coming back 3 times or more. Visitors come from 150 countries in the world, with the majority coming from The United States, Europe, Canada and China.

Most traffic (30%) comes from news syndicate referrals (article attribution), direct visits to our site (24%), business network LinkedIn (21%) and Google search (17%). Even though we distribute our articles on Twitter, we do not seem to generate a significant amount of traffic (percentage wise) through them, perhaps due to what we call the barking dog syndrome.

The top blog articles read in 2009 were: Idiot CEOs, VC blacklist, How not to raise money, Which Investors to avoid, VC needs operating experience.

From a technical standpoint; 69% of visitors used Windows, 25% used Macs, 3% used Linux, and 2% used the iPhone. 43% of visitors used the Firefox browser, 27% used Internet Explorer, 17% used Safari and 9% used Chrome.

We look forward to shaping a better future of innovation in 2010.

We redesign our website completely primarily due to aesthetic incompatibility with Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 8. More than 30 cascading stylesheets is okay for Safari and Firefox, not for the browser from the largest software maker in the world. Go figure. Many web designers will need to make separate versions of their website specifically for IE (as they've had to do with IE6 as well) and pray users do not dynamically embed snippets that call other stylesheets.

For this new design we opted for simplicity and compatibility with all browser in once design module. Support for iPhone and printing is improved. Let us know what you think. Enjoy and Happy New Year!

We redesigned our website:

• Added Feedjit snippets
• Added some cool new snippets, courtesy Henk Vrieselaar
• Added social bookmarking to the blog by AddThis
• Removed because of errors: Now prevent IE6 browser from entering, advanced features require an upgrade to a more modern browser
• Tied in with the new logo and other branding elements
• Enabled commenting on our blog by JS-Kit
• Enhanced social distribution of comments by JS-Kit
• Provided better print output
• Added new iPhone bookmarking icon
• Prepared for future developments

Hope you are enjoying the new site layout, drop us a line if you are experiencing problems. Enjoy!

Talk-time is a meet-and-greet for entrepreneurs with Georges van Hoegaerden, the Managing Director of The Venture Company. It is designed to foster a direct feedback loop on the entrepreneurial appetite and to provide assistance to entrepreneurs who want to build highly successful companies.

The first Talk-time is in Chapel Hill on October 22nd. We look forward to meeting you in person. Register online here.

To protect and resurrect the impressive technology venture returns from the past we organize an inaugural Limited Partners seminar that takes a look under the hood of Venture Capital and discloses why the current investment strategies cannot and will not drive more than 10% IRR, regardless of the state of the economy.

Georges uncovers how current investment strategies are turning innovation into a subprime asset class. He offers new VC fund allocation strategies, new fund segmentation criteria and new General Partner credentials for high performance funds.

Register here.

Georges joins AAAIM in ringing the closing bell at NASDAQ, in New York on June 9th, 2009.

Tags: NASDAQ, USA, AAAIM

We supported the 20th anniversary of the Venture Capital conference by IBF in San Francisco. Congrats to Alex Scott and Christina Riboldi for a great conference and inviting us to participate.

Tags: IBF, USA

Yesterday, we reached a bitter sweet milestone in the publication of our blog.

More than 4,000 unique visitors in a single day, and literally hundreds of glowing reviews by experienced CEOs and entrepreneurs whose support communicates the current mismatch of VC as the intermediary in connecting the assets of the LPs (money) with the assets of entrepreneurs (innovation).

We thank you all. It strengthens our resolve to fix (not eradicate) Venture Capital and restore the meritocracy of innovation this country was founded upon.

We invite sponsors to participate in the funding of this so-far self funded effort, and contact us here. Keep the feedback coming (albeit it will take me a bit longer to respond to all of them).

A VC revolution in the making" captures the interest of Harvard Alumni, and the moderator invites Georges to become part of the group.

Not quite the same as having studied there, but a nice gesture nonetheless.

Tags: Harvard Alumni, USA