When Bullpen Capital launched 10 years ago, our goal was to back overlooked entrepreneurs left behind by the latest Silicon Valley fads. COVID-19 hasn’t changed that. We still use data to find startups in underappreciated places and industries. We still admire and back diverse founders. …

Sometimes you know you’ve found your “tribe” as soon as you meet them. And while I’ve been talking to the team at Bullpen Capital for quite a few months, I knew on the first day we sat down to talk about what we all believed about the venture business, company…

DOES THE VC MODEL DISTORT COMPANIES’ NATURAL GROWTH? — Evernote is apparently looking for a CEO. It’s not clear to those of us on the outside whether this is the result of struggles to grow or organization issues, but it’s been a notable story over the past weeks. Dick Costolo is no longer CEO at Twitter, as investors grow…

Some products and services create value by solving a problem you don’t know you have (or that only looks like a problem once the solution is presented). In 1999 a good friend of mine bought a Tivo, a new device that I think wasn’t even called a DVR yet, because…

I’m struck by a lot of the chatter around the shutdown of Secret and the question posed by the founder secondary that had previously been done during the company’s large raise last year. For those unfamiliar with the facts, they’re pretty straightforward: Secret was a hot-sh!t company with buzz and…

Over the past couple of weeks, stories about the ultimate perpetrator of the 2010 “flash crash” have reminded us of a strange and notable market episode that left most market observers confused. As with many things, we all moved on and it became an oddity that was largely unexplained. Last…

Owner Businesses, not Lifestyle Businesses Several smart people have discusssed and talked about the term “lifestyle” business over the past few months, a convenient name the VC / startup industry developed to encompass all of the 99.9% of businesses that get started that aren’t suitable for venture capital financing. I think Fred Wilson kicked it…

I’ve gotten a lot of emails this week about Makerbot. People have asked me what’s going on there, “what happened” and what will happen. …

Whether to sell promising (but speculative) consumer companies — I was inspired to write about this after having lunch with my friend Josh Elman of Greylock Partners. As we talked about different companies with whom we’d been involved, we spent some time talking about two companies — the alliterative Venmo and Vine. …