Two CEO Letters (Plus a Corollary)
There is a story full of business wisdom that is one of my favorites. It has many variations but a common one goes something like this: A new CEO walks into his office for the first time and finds two sealed letters on his desk. One has written on the envelope: “open on your first […]
Full ArticleThey Are Coming to Philadelphia
We recently invested in Sidecar, a Philly-based e-commerce marketing solutions company. Great company, great team, and an awesome CEO. While the company is note-worthy in its own right, it is also noteworthy for being located in downtown Philadelphia (near 13th and Sansom). Until about a year ago, we had one portfolio company with a Philadelphia presence – […]
Full ArticleSoftening a Startup Crash Landing
In 2003 through 2005, when I was in my pre-investor, CEO role, we bought three companies and through this process we learned a lot about what to do differently, what to do better, and what just not to do in start-up M&A. One company in particular taught us a majority of the lessons. The company […]
Full ArticleSeries B Venture Capital Strategies – Building Businesses or Building Buzz
In the last couple of months, our team at Osage has met with a number of serial entrepreneurs who speak of very similar, painful lessons they learned as venture backed CEOs in a period from 1998 to 2002. If you sum it up, they raised too much money in too many rounds with too many […]
Full ArticleShopping for Healthcare Made Easy
United Healthcare recently launched an online health care shopping service that makes it easier and more affordable for consumers to make appointments with local health care professionals, including for same-day and next-day appointments. As per the press release, myEasyBook enables consumers to make appointments online with a click of a mouse and compare in-network care providers […]
Full Article5 Jobs Start-up CEO/Founders Give Up Too Late
Often I will write a blog post and several portfolio CEOs will say that I wrote the post specifically about them when in fact I am discussing a common tendency among the many CEOs I see. This is probably going to be one of those posts, especially for the founder / CEOs in the group. […]
Full Article“No Decision” Sales Losses – The Art of Inefficient Selling
As an investor with a focus on early stage enterprise software companies, I sit on a number of boards and have the opportunity to see patterns of company behavior over time. In that role, one of the key things I like to understand is how the sales pipeline evolves and what has happened to the […]
Full ArticleOsage Golf Scramble: A Lesson in Humility and in the Power of Teamwork
Osage Partners does an internal summer event each year for our team and includes families. It is usually a beach day and full of all the fun that a day at the beach has to offer. This year we did something different, mostly because no one rented a beach house. We had an afternoon of […]
Full ArticleBMC LBO: “Those Who Forget The Past Are Doomed To Repeat It”
For the next five years, will interest payments trump innovation at BMC? If so, that is bad news for their customers, and ultimately for BMC. Reading the news of the BMC leveraged buyout by Golden Gate, Bain, and others gave me déjà vu. 6x debt to equity ratios are tough to swallow and even tougher […]
Full ArticleWhy We Invested in Canvas
In conjunction with the recent announcement of their funding round, Canvas asked me to write a guest post on their blog that summarized our reasons for making the investment. In case you missed it on their blog, I have reposted our response here: My kids – ages fourteen, twelve, and ten – are often my greatest critics when it comes to Osage […]
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