Babson Venture Capital & Private Equity Club

The Babson Venture Capital and Private Equity Club (“BVCPE”) is established to educate students on all aspects of the venture capital and private equity industries, including but not limited to purpose, structure, best practices, career advice, and general interest. The club will also explore other areas of entrepreneurial finance such as friends & family, angel investing, and mezzanine financing.

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A great event hosted by our fellow MBA students at Harvard. They have assembled an impressive line up of speakers with representatives from Carlye, KKR, NEA and Terra Firma.

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Nice follow up post to the Rob Go article with further thoughts on a VC career.

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Great insight from Rob Go who is at NextView Ventures. There are always great and not so great aspects of any career and Rob provides an honest assessment of a career in VC. As expected, it's not as glamorous as you may think.

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Wonderful insight from Steve Blank on what he believes makes a great venture capitalists. He even presents a strategy for taking a VC analyst and grooming that person into an effective VC partner.

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The Babson Venture Capital & Private Equity Club is holding a movie screening for the award winning documentary "Something Ventured". Following the movie we will have a discussion panel on the current state of venture capital and the future prospects.

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This is always a topic of concern for company founders and the investors who take an ownership position.

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Poker player, t-shirts and jeans...sounds a little different than the stereotypical venture capitalist. He has some great experience and appears to have a solid network, so it'll be interesting to see how his investments perform.

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Interesting to see how much people get paid in the industry. I'm sure this is why some people are so attracted to the industry.

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Good insight into pro-rata rights and super pro-rata rights. This can be a confusing topic so it's good to get some simple explanations.

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It is often noted that the key questions to answer when considering an invest are the team, the product and the market. I guess this is one way to classify a team -  either pigs or chickens.

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This is a great primer on valuation and term sheets. Lots of good links within the article and spreadsheets that you can download.

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Awesome insight into the fundraising process from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

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Nice follow up to our previous post on valuing a private company. In this case the VC is already invested in a company but is now making a subsequent investment. What is important in this scenario is that the VC firm already has a benchmark in terms of valuation from the previous round. The hope is that the company valuation has increased since the last round, but that is not always the case. In fact sometimes you have a "down round", where the current valuation is lower than the previous valuation.

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In case you missed this link in the comments section. This is a database which shows various multiples based on industry sector. It's a very detailed data set. I would recommend doing your own calculations for any type of valuation exercise, but this is a good reference guide.

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Great post on how you value private companies using publicly available information. As Fred points out this will vary by industry sector. A good way to determine how companies are valued in a sector is to look at Wall Street research reports. In those reports the analyst will explain the valuation methodology which sets the target stock price. I was reviewing one report yesterday and this analyst used a few different methods (EV/Revenue multiple, EBITDA multiple and DCF analysis) to triangulate his target price. Knowing that helped me get a sense for which multiples I should apply to our start up's financial forecast in order to to get an idea about our valuation.

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Good post on why VC's make mistakes. For us MBA's I'm sure this quote will garner some attention - "And things we learned in business school: ratios, comparable analysis, revenue forecasting with Excel, are, for the most part, irrelevant." Interesting to note that the author has an MBA so he can speak from experience.

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Great article on best practices for sourcing deals. This is great insight for those of us who want to become a venture capital / private equity professional. There is no question that sourcing deals is a critical component to both roles.