Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed: Matt Cohler

by Scott Edward Walker on May 10th, 2012

To Our Clients & Friends:  Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we present Matt Cohler, a General Partner at Benchmark Capital and an impressive entrepreneur and investor.   Matt previously served as the VP of Product Management at Facebook (where he was the seventh employee) and Vice President and General Manager at LinkedIn (where he was a member of the founding team).

In this interesting, 20-minute interview via TechCrunch, Matt provides some solid advice and insight, including the following:

1)  With respect to funding, entrepreneurs need to ask themselves two very important questions: (i) whose money is the investor investing — his or someone else’s? and (ii) what has the investor done in the past (what role has he played) to build really great companies?

2)  Think of funding as a “continuum” – i.e., think of your funding today in terms of the funding you’re going to take in the future and how they interrelate.

3)  We don’t have an “innovation” problem in Silicon Valley, we have an “aspirational” problem.

4)  Great entrepreneurs think big and don’t focus on minimizing downside risks; instead, they focus on maximizing upside potential.

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott


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