Criticism
In a 2005 blog posting, Bill Burnham criticized the "deal flow-centric view of venture world premised on a passive approach to venture investing that essentially subscribes to a 'build it and they will come' theory of venture investing". Burnham cites statistics showing that in the 1980s, high rates of deal flow were easy to achieve because of the relatively high numbers of entrepreneurs and low numbers of venture capitalists. Now, he argues, venture capitalists have increased in numbers, such that, except for the very top firms, most VCs cannot rely on passive deal flow to sustain operations. Burnham advocates what he calls "Thesis Driven Investing", whereby a VC firm decides upon one or more investment theses, then "they go and out and 'turn over rocks' actively looking for deals that fit their investment thesis in a particular space."
Read more about this topic: Deal Flow
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)