| Date | Title | Description |
| 21.10.2023 | State of Venture in Fall 2023 | Earlier this week, I held the annual meeting for K9 Ventures. As I mentioned in the meeting, I am gr... |
| 16.04.2023 | Beware of Fake / Scam Engineering Candidates | It has been a while since I posted to the K9 Ventures blog. I’ve been heads down working with K9 por... |
| 22.12.2021 | Hit Start Media – Enabling Enterprise Companies to Own Their... | Hit Start Media is my latest investment for K9. Historically, I have avoided content companies. In f... |
| 23.02.2021 | The First Close Podcast w/Manu Kumar | I had the pleasure of chatting with Jessica Straus (@jstraus) at Carta, under the creative eyes and ... |
| 15.10.2020 | I Believe | Today was K9 Ventures’ annual meeting. Each year that I do this, I’m amazed at what K9 founders and ... |
| 14.04.2020 | The Story of How/Why K9 Invested in Pragli | Pragli is a virtual office for remote teams that facilitates faster communication and increased clos... |
| 08.02.2020 | Startups are never straight lines | This is a recent tweet-storm that I wanted to cross post here as well as I feel so strongly about th... |
| 07.01.2020 | Introducing Avoma: Meeting Intelligence | I’m pleased to announce and support the launch of Avoma, a K9 Ventures’ portfolio company that is ma... |
| 28.05.2019 | Solving Hard Problems: Traptic’s Harvesting Robots | A little known fact about me is that my paternal grandmother was a farmer. When we would visit her I... |
| 20.04.2019 | What is the biggest enemy of a startup? | In 1998–1999, when I was running my first company, one of my investors, the late Don Jones, came by ... |
| 17.04.2019 | 10 Years for K9 Ventures | My typical Wednesday schedule is pretty grueling (by choice, to try and free up other days of the we... |
| 02.11.2018 | AI Power: Introducing Currant | The home is getting smarter. We hear that every day and we’re constantly exposed to new devices that... |
| 26.09.2018 | The future is keyless: Introducing Nexkey |
Ah, the morning pat down: wallet, check; phone, check; keys, check. That’s been my routine for dec... |
| 20.09.2018 | Investors should pay their own legal expenses | Legal by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
There, I said it; right there in the title o... |
| 08.09.2018 | What you didn’t know about TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Foretho... |
Yesterday, K9 Ventures portfolio company, Forethought AI, was declared the winner of the TechCrunc... |
| 18.08.2018 | Hi. Hello. And Bye Bye Business Cards! | I last ordered business cards in 2009. I think I ordered a thousand of them. And I haven’t run out o... |
| 07.08.2018 | Browsers were meant for browsing, but with Workona they’re n... | I’m excited to announce K9 Ventures’ recent investment in Workona. K9 led the initial financing for ... |
| 12.07.2018 | The Logical Evolution of Private Markets: A new class of com... | Recently I attended a lunch where we were all asked to present something provocative/mind-blowing. I... |
| 10.04.2018 | Ideas Matter aka The Execution Myth | I’ve written about how Ideas Matter before. I’ve also written about Finding a Problem Worth Solving.... |
| 10.10.2017 | The Pre-Seed FAQ | One of the people I respect the most in the VC/PE media ecosystem is Dan Primack. I’ve been an avid ... |
| 14.08.2017 | Announcing K9 Ventures III, L.P. – A $42M technology-focused... |
42: The Answer to the ultimate fund size?
Those of you who have read or watched the Hitchhiker’... |
| 20.03.2017 | How to reference check your prospective investor | Of all the advice I have given founders over the years, one of the most important ones is to make su... |
| 02.03.2017 | Don’t let success get to your head | Dear Founders,
I know you are all super busy. So I put the key message I want you to get out of thi... |
| 24.01.2017 | Startup Metamorphosis: The Story of Bugsee | We’ve all heard over and over again that “Startups are hard,” but it’s a hollow statement that just ... |
| 05.01.2017 | Computing vs Medicine | In high school, one of the teachers who I respected a lot (she was also feared by a lot of my peers ... |
| 27.10.2016 | Rethinking Founder Vesting | So much of what we do in the tech industry is about innovation, disruption, and changing the status ... |
| 14.09.2016 | Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) | A couple of years ago I was talking with a company that wanted to build robots. Their proposed price... |
| 21.07.2016 | You Can’t Spell Hardware without H-A-R-D | I started my tinkering with hardware first. As a kid I used to trek down to the “electronics bazaar”... |
| 30.06.2016 | VC Cold Email Outreach: “The Only Winning Move is Not to Pla... |
Every few weeks one of the founders of K9 Ventures’ portfolio companies forward over an email ... |
| 23.05.2016 | Manu Kumar on The Twenty Minute VC |
Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Harry Stebbings from The Twenty Minute VC.
Harry ... |
| 18.04.2016 | Gradescope: AI for Grading and Assessment |
“I love grading” — I doubt those words have ever been uttered in earnest! The only times I’ve ever... |
| 26.01.2016 | Stealth is Overrated |
“US Navy Sea Shadow stealth craft” by US Navy employee – http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factf... |
| 14.01.2016 | Everlaw Raises Series A led by a16z | Today K9 Ventures’ portfolio company Everlaw announced that it has raised $8.1M in a Series A round ... |
| 02.11.2015 | 3 contrarian pieces of advice for graduating students | I love teaching (Although I hate grading, but that’s why I invested in Gradescope. More on that some... |
| 26.10.2015 | Asking for Feedback | We’re becoming and increasingly data driven culture. Whether it is my children’s school, my bank, th... |
| 19.10.2015 | It’s Not Easy applied to Venture Capital | Note: If you’re a founder, stop reading this post now. Your job is to build your company and listeni... |
| 12.10.2015 | #PeakVC |
Earlier today I tweeted:
But I realized shortly after tweeting this that there is so much nuanc... |
| 04.10.2015 | Pictures from #FriendsOfK9 2015 | Pictures from the #FriendsOfK9 event on Thursday, September 17th are in!
Check them out by clicking... |
| 04.10.2015 | Working to Walk: Designing my Walking Desk | It’s Sunday. I could have stayed home and worked from home for a couple of hours (while the kids are... |
| 21.09.2015 | Learning outside the classroom: HCI in the Real World | One of my reasons for going back to school for a PhD after doing my own startups was that I love the... |
| 08.09.2015 | Meet Manu Kumar, Chief Firestarter at K9 Ventures |
The following interview by Steven Loeb was published in Vator.tv on 5 September 2015 and is reprod... |
| 08.09.2015 | Space Matters: Unveiling The Kennel |
In April 2014, in the post Making Moves, I wrote about K9’s impending move to a new space and outl... |
| 04.08.2015 | Being an investor, in four paragraphs | Most days I love what I do, but some days are rough; filled with tough decisions (good ones and bad ... |
| 01.07.2015 | Dead Ant Dead Ant! |
Every so often, I get pitched a really cool idea for a mobile app. In fact, sometimes I really lik... |
| 24.06.2015 | Auth0: Solving the Identity Crisis |
We have a problem. The first step to solving that problem is acknowledging it exists. And the seco... |
| 18.06.2015 | Seed Is The New A – #PreMoney 2015 Talk |
As always I welcome your thoughts and feedback.
You may also follow me on @Twitter at @Manu... |
| 05.06.2015 | The Seeds Have Changed: An Epilogue |
Note: This is a long post and it’s based on reflecting on a couple of years of observations in the... |
| 28.05.2015 | Startup Revenue Milestones | At K9 we invest in companies which have a clear/direct revenue model and typically don’t invest in c... |
| 20.05.2015 | Fundraising is for CEOs |
I’ve been on the receiving end of many many pitches by this point both via email and in person. ... |
| 06.05.2015 | Solo Co-founders |
The title of this post is an oxymoron — but it is intentional as it most succinctly captures the e... |
| 12.03.2015 | Osmo Masterpiece: No more fear of drawing |
I still remember pleading with my elder sister to help me draw the diagrams for my Biology class. ... |
| 26.02.2015 | Founders on a Mission | I’ve often repeated that the definition of entrepreneurship is “Insane perseverance in the face of c... |
| 10.02.2015 | Finding a Problem Worth Solving |
Patagonia, Ben O’Bryan
When we started in the PhD program in Computer Science at Stanford, Prof. ... |
| 20.01.2015 | Manu Kumar in discussion with Joe Beninato |
Last fall, Joe Beninato interviewed K9 Ventures founder and Chief Firestarter, Manu Kumar, on his ... |
| 24.07.2014 | When Vinod Khosla answered my question with a non-verbal | No, not that kind of non-verbal gesture.
I believe this was in April 2010 and if memory serves me c... |
| 30.06.2014 | Strong (Math) Foundations | When I was an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, I took a class in Linear Algebra. The class was taug... |
| 22.05.2014 | The Ingenious Osmo | Ingenuity. Ingenuity is a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful word. It is at the heart of engineering.... |
| 29.04.2014 | Making Moves | For all the stuff we hear in the press about Venture Capital, one thing that you don’t hear about as... |
| 10.04.2014 | The New Venture Landscape | In May 2011, I wrote the post: Investor Nomenclature and the Venture Spiral. That post got a lot of ... |
| 14.03.2014 | Partner, Partner, Partner | Shortly after wrapping up our PhDs from Stanford CS, my peer group had a running inside joke. Whenev... |
| 21.02.2014 | If I had a hammer… | If I had a hammer,
I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening,
All over this land.
So goes... |
| 19.02.2014 | A VC trick and a related startup mistake | There is a fundamental information imbalance in the startup world that stems from the fact that most... |
| 15.02.2014 | 4 Rules of M&A for Startup Founders | The following post was written by @TomioGeron for ExitRound based on an interview with me and was pu... |
| 15.02.2014 | Producers and Consumers on Social Media | I’m making a concerted effort to start blogging again on a more frequent basis. It’s not that I have... |
| 12.02.2014 | Protip for nascent startups on payroll cycles | If you ask most startups how often they run payroll, the most common answer will be: “Twice a month.... |
| 11.02.2014 | The problem with getting an MBA | I was reading Dan Primack‘s Term Sheet this morning and saw the part about Chamath Palihapitiya maki... |
| 10.02.2014 | Watch out for the Board Observer request | Ah, I love it when someone cancels a meeting with me at the last minute. It’s like found time. So li... |
| 04.02.2014 | An Email Apology | Those that know me well know that I’m generally quite anal about email. To date, I’ve never declared... |
| 14.11.2013 | Coin: the missing link in payments | It’s 2013. We have a super computer in our pockets (or purses), but the way we pay for things hasn’t... |
| 19.07.2012 | Announcing K9 Ventures II – A $40M technology-focused micro-... | I am pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures II, L.P. – A $40M technology-focused micro-VC ... |
| 12.06.2012 | The Curse of Over-Capitalization | I’ve written before about how Capital Efficiency doesn’t exist and is an oxymoron. However, there is... |
| 31.05.2012 | Hope and Numbers | [I often end up repeating the same things to different founders. Some things I’ve said often enough ... |
| 02.05.2012 | Boomerang Calendar — scheduling done right | One of the downsides of being an investor is that you spend a lot of time in meetings. What’s worse ... |
| 25.04.2012 | Torbit Insight – Real User Measurement of Web Performance | Over a decade ago, the big bottlenecks for web performance were server load and network bandwidth. L... |
| 10.12.2011 | On Geography | One of the investment criteria that I set for K9 Ventures is based on geography. Specifically, K9 on... |
| 21.11.2011 | Founder Liquidity | Note: The content of this post is part opinion and part observation/speculation. Before you read it,... |
| 16.11.2011 | ‘Capital Efficiency’ doesn’t exist | When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of ... |
| 11.10.2011 | Congratulations IndexTank! | - |
| 12.08.2011 | Fifteen Years Later | Fifteen years ago, in 1996, while I was still a student at Carnegie Mellon University, I wrote an ar... |
| 10.08.2011 | Welcoming @Occipital! | - |
| 05.07.2011 | Congratulations @BackType! | I’m pleased to announce that K9 Ventures’ portfolio company BackType (@BackType) has been acquired b... |
| 23.06.2011 | card.io: Like Square, but without the square | It’s been a busy week folks! I’m pleased to announce the developer launch of K9 Ventures’ portfolio ... |
| 22.06.2011 | The Making of Lytro | This is how I remember it: It’s September 2005, and I was sitting in my office at Stanford in Gates ... |
| 27.05.2011 | Ideas Matter | There is this common adage that gets thrown around in startup circles that “Ideas don’t matter, and ... |
| 19.05.2011 | Startups: Just say NO to outsourcing, contracting, and distr... | One of the 5 necessary but not sufficient criteria I use for evaluating investments for K9 Ventures ... |
| 14.05.2011 | Investor Nomenclature and the Venture Spiral | The press loves the term Super Angels. They use it at almost every opportunity they get and sometime... |
| 27.04.2011 | The investment that didn’t happen | Note: All information contained in this post is based on my best understanding and perception of wha... |
| 01.04.2011 | Our latest investment: iWalk | K9 Ventures is pleased to welcome to its kennel, our latest portfolio company, iWalk, Inc. iWalk is ... |
| 22.03.2011 | Thoughts on Convertible Notes |
There has been a lot of noise in the Valley lately about how most seed stage deals are now being d... |
| 26.01.2011 | Congrats Team CardMunch! |
CardMunch announced today that it has been acquired by LinkedIn! The CardMunch acquisition marks t... |
| 11.09.2010 | Investment Criteria | Someone on Quora asked me a question regarding my investment criteria for K9. I figured it would be ... |
| 13.08.2010 | Revenue Development | In 1996, when I started my first company, SneakerLabs, Inc., we began by building chat servers. This... |
| 10.08.2010 | Twitter Best Practices for Startups | Twitter has become part of almost every startups marketing and engagement strategy. It’s become a ch... |
| 04.08.2010 | CardMunch: Business Cards Solved | I am super excited about today’s launch of CardMunch, Inc. CardMunch is a K9 Ventures portfolio comp... |
| 24.06.2010 | Friends of K9 Event | Here are some pictures from the Friends of K9 event on Monday, June 21st at the Computer History Mus... |
| 13.05.2010 | #20tweets (updated) | Here are the slides from a talk I gave at a Carnegie Mellon Alumni event in the Bay Area today. #20t... |
| 28.04.2010 | Announcing K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed stage fund | I’m pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed-stage fund.
K9 Ventures, L.P. i... |
| 22.03.2010 | The truth about the Startup Visa | Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry) recently authored an article that ran on Business Insider. The arti... |
| 26.10.2009 | Stanford Roundtable discussion on US Immigration Policy #sta... | On Saturday, October 24th, Stanford University hosted the Stanford Roundtable. The renowned intervie... |
| 24.09.2009 | My story and support for the Founders Visa |
In the past few days there has been a lot of discussion on the topic of a Founders Visa. The credi... |
