Today we have added new ways to subscribe to The Venture Company, to ensure our updates are automatically pushed out to our readers when they appear. The detailed subscriptions are available from the meritocracy page, to which an icon has been added from the home page. The following RSS streams are now available:

• RSS Live Stream: new blogs across categories, intermingled with news and announcements (the full scoop)
• Economics feed: only the blog articles appearing in the economics section, primarily for policy makers and limited partners
• Capital feed: only the blog articles appearing in the capital section, primarily for investors in venture capital and those depending on them
• Innovation feed: only the blog articles appearing in the innovation section, primarily for entrepreneurs and consumers of technology products

The new RSS buttons on the meritocracy page refer to the unique type of information they appear with, the RSS button behind the live stream refers to the live stream RSS, the one behind economics only refers to the RSS related to economics, etc. In addition, users of Apple’s Safari can simply click on the RSS menu in the address bar upon which they are presented with a list of RSS streams they can subscribe to (pictured below). Similar menus are now also available on the individual blog pages.



Please note that our feed burner address for the Live Stream has been changed into http://feeds.feedburner.com/venturecompany, so please update your reference if you were subscribed through the old feed (it will no longer work).

The same information that appears on the Live Stream will also appear on the Twitter and Facebook pages of The Venture Company, to which one can subscribe by clicking on the respective icons on the meritocracy page, or other pages with social icons attached. The default behavior for the RSS stream subscription is the aforementioned live stream.

Tags: RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner

The State of Venture Capital, now available in video and narrated by Georges van Hoegaerden has been viewed 11,000 times, and sails by another milestone as the most preeminent presentation on the state of the arbitrage of innovation.

Tags: The Venture Company

Due to a rigorous reconfiguration of our Google account our consolidated Feedburner RSS stream has been changed per immediate to the following, please update your reference to the RSS stream to following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/venturecompany

Or, simply press the (updated) RSS button atop any of our blogs to re-subscribe to the new one.

Tags: Feedburner

Per immediate our phone number has changed, and the old one is no longer active. Please update your records with the following number:

Lauded by many as the great guide for wisdom in “the industry”, The State of Venture Capital by The Venture Company has just surpassed 10,000 viewers. An impressive milestone considering the only marketing it received is the merit of its content.

The purpose of the presentation is to shed light on what prevents us from reaching maximum potential in the support for groundbreaking innovation. Because if we fix where we systemically fail we will regain access to an 80% adoption greenfield that will drive massive stimulus through our interconnected and global economy.

We have developed the framework for a more sustainable economy, our financial systems and Venture Capital that changes everything from the top, economics reinvented. It is not another plan to artificially adjust advantage or disadvantage at the bottom of the economic food chain. But a righteous way of dynamically and authentically balancing the merit of production and finance.

I urge you to review the presentation to avoid the instant death traps in the current model and ask questions through our comments system attached to the bottom of every blog or contact us via the contact form. Venture Capital the way it is deployed en-masse today can by economic principle never scale to meet the opportunity of the greenfield that lies ahead. That will become clear when you study our presentation.

We are honored to receive such positive responses to the cure that awaits, yet wish it never had to get this far:

"Fred Wilson and Tim Draper used to be guiding lights within the industry. Georges, you've cut the legs out from under it, and replaced the gas lamp with neodymium-focused xenon torch." - CEO

Tags: The Venture Company

Ready for a mental workout perhaps combined with some physical exercise? Then join Georges friday mornings between 8 and 10 am (*) at the gym of the Claremont community in Chapel Hill for an informal workout about economics, capital and innovation. We invite limited partners, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to freely discuss startups, venture capital, the american economy or everything in-between.

See here why you would want to talk with Georges.

(*) For exact timing and availability (due to travel) be sure to fill in the contact form provided here and select Open Office with a date of the friday you would like to come in. Georges looks forward to “working out” with you. The exact location can be found on Google maps by clicking here.

Share the love for a renewable opportunity for innovation. As of today we have added new sharing options to our blogs and news articles using the AddThis service. Now articles can immediately be shared with people on the following social services:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google
• y-combinator Hacker News
• Instapaper
• Plaxo

or distributed in one-go through your own set of favorite networks using ping.fm

Access to more than 355 other services supported by AddThis, including print and e-mail distribution is available as well.

Tags: AddThis

Our 2010: The State of Venture Capital presentation (abbreviated as SOVC) published last year has been viewed more than 9,000 times.

Easily the most viewed presentation on the state of Venture Capital it highlights how not innovation is broken, but the arbitrage deployed by Venture Capital. And that means there is hope, since when we fix Venture Capital the quality of innovation intake will improve and thus the returns for Limited Partners.

Tags: The Venture Company

The Venture Company website has gone through major repositioning and reconstruction to reflect our work across all aspects of the innovation’s business. All of our blog articles have been re-categorized by topic:

• Limited Partners topics are covered in the ECONOMICS blog
• Venture Capitalist topics are covered in the CAPITAL blog
• Entrepreneur topics are covered in the INNOVATION blog

Please redirect your direct references to the articles in this blog as it will no longer be updated and cease to exist, including the RSS feeds to the articles. For reasons of future change it is a good idea to connect to us via Twitter and Facebook, so upcoming changes will no longer affect you.

The Venture Company RSS feeds and direct access to certain pages on the web site have also been changed as of today. Please update your reference to the feeds and pages per immediate (the old ones will disappear soon).

The economics RSS xml is now located here:
http://venturecompany.com/economics/index_files/tvc_economics.xml

The capital RSS xml is now located here:
http://venturecompany.com/capital/index_files/tvc_capital.xml

The innovation RSS xml is now located here:
http://venturecompany.com/innovation/index_files/tvc_innovation.xml

The news RSS xml is now located here:
http://venturecompany.com/news/index_files/tvc_news.xml

Direct HTML access to certain pages has changed to become more logical and consistent:

home: http://venturecompany.com
innovation primer: http://venturecompany.com/primer
our commitment: http://venturecompany.com/commitment
economics blog: http://venturecompany.com/economics
capital blog: http://venturecompany.com/capital
innovation blog: http://venturecompany.com/innovation
about: http://venturecompany.com/about
accolades: http://venturecompany.com/accolades
news: http://venturecompany.com/news
contact: http://venturecompany.com/contact
search: http://venturecompany.com/search
sitemap: http://venturecompany.com/sitemap

The old blog, rev and intercept pages will no longer be updated and cease to exist. Do not link to them anymore. Feel free to send us a message if you are looking for information that is no longer there.

Tags: Website

Our 2010: The State of Venture Capital presentation (abbreviated as SOVC) published last year and for all to see online has been viewed more than 8,000 times. Easily the most viewed presentation on Venture Capital it highlights how not innovation is broken, but the arbitrage deployed by Venture Capital. And that means there is hope, since when we fix Venture Capital the quality of innovation will improve as well as the returns for Limited Partners. But it may hurt the Venture Capitalists that deploy none of their own assets, oh well.

Tags: The Venture Company

For the third year in a row we are sponsoring AAAIM’s national event, simply because it has proven to be a great event every year. Register for the Capital Experience today!

Tags: AAAIM

You may have noticed we changed things up a bit on the web site, including a more prominent placement of our publications. Now all matters related to our company can be found under the about section, apart from being directly accessible through the home page.

We also discovered a large number of links in our blog to be broken, due to a flaw in our blogging database structure. Hence we went back over more than 5 years of blogging history and fixed every single link.

The services section has been removed, as our services are only available and customized to the investors we have relationships with. That process starts by simply contacting us.

Tags: Website

The Venture Company website is now enhanced with Apture, which means you can not only send every story or page to Facebook, Twitter or a friend or colleague on e-mail with a cute little bar that pops down, you can also highlight any word on a page and get a reference of its meaning directly from wikipedia or our site (see example above). We believe the latter feature to be a valuable addition to clarify wherever possible the specialized vocabulary used in Venture Capital and Private Equity.

Tags: Apture, Website

Here is Georges’ prediction for the performance of Venture Capital in 2011:

“With negative ten year performance and a pipeline stuffed with subprime deals Venture Capital will continue to shrink and gravitate down to the 35 of 790 VC firms that make any consistent money for Limited Partners, with perhaps a handful of new VCs taking the place of a few aging firms. In violation of rudimentary free-market principles, Venture will remain - by economic principle - unable to scale to the massive opportunity of an 80% technology adoption greenfield.

And with corporates disproving the many cyclical and economic claims of Venture Capital underperformance during the same period, Limited Partners must take a closer look at the deployment of investment risk, the experience of its operators and the way it often ignores groundbreaking innovation.

Technology innovation remains a cash cow for those Limited Partners with the investment discipline and investment model that can locate and spur the Social Economic Value the public will trust again.”

Georges van Hoegaerden

P.S.: his last year prediction about Venture in 2010 also proved true, despite similar self-serving delusion of positivity from Venture Capitalists in the media then.

Tags: Predictions

In his Master Thesis for Rotterdam's Erasmus University named “Key determinants of venture capital market performance: The Dutch experience” Ivo Berg interviews Georges and references Georges' Venture model and diagrams. Contact ivo.c.berg [at] gmail [.com] for more information.

Tags: ErasmusUniversity

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, Website

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.

Tags: Website

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 .

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.

Tags: Website

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.

Tags: Website

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

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

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!

Tags: Website, Microsoft

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

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