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Lead Bullets

Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were…

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Should You Sell Your Company?

One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO ever makes is whether or not to sell her company. Logically, determining whether selling a company will be better in the long term than continuing to run it stand-alone involves a huge number of factors, most of which are speculative or unknown. And if you are…

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Why We Prefer Founding CEOs

When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund…

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Revenge of the Fat Guy

[This blog post was originally published on Marc's blog on March 20, 2010.] Fred Wilson wrote a counter post to my The Case for the Fat Startup that you can find here. Before countering his counter, I’d like to say that Fred is one of my favorite VCs and has a marvelous track record of success. Further,…

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The Case for the Fat Startup

[This blog post was originally published on All Things Digital on March 17, 2010.] Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008…

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