David Cowan has a great post summarizing a presentation he made at Babson College. My take-away:

And so the winning recipe today for aspiring entrepreneurs is GET BIG CHEAP.
Don’t waste expensive development on untested ideas, and don’t let a
fat marketing budget mask a weak value proposition. If instead you
tinker your way to scalable organic growth, you’ll have a valuable
business on your hands. Don’t worry about how long it takes—just make
sure your burn rate is low enough to accommodate several cycles of
iteration.

A classic post by Baris, outlining how he likes to see a company explain its business and funding needs.  He adds a "what the VC is thinking" component to each section, and tops it off by an actual ppt that provides the outline for his model.

He points to the Per Customer Economics, as the most important slide:

Slide 8: PER CUSTOMER ECONOMICS

The most important slide of the whole presentation.  A good answer
here shows how well you’ve thought about your business.  Per user
economics is how VC’s reduce all business to the same units.  How much
does it take for you to acquire a customer?  How much revenue do you
get per customers?  What’s your cost of goods per customer?  What does
it cost you to service each customer?  What is churn?  What is the
lifetime value of a customer and profit per lifetime of the customer?
Any entrepreneur who doesn’t have the answers or see the risks, doesn’t
yet understand his/her business.

What the VC is thinking: "What is a customer worth?"

There are many businesses where the per customer economics is critical.  Although, IMHO, it’s always the team that makes or breaks a company, and its investors.  My most important slide would be #5.

Another list is up from Guy Kawasaki, this time dealing with scenarios of what typically goes wrong at venture-backed start-ups.  (Thanks, Tahir.) The take-away, for me, is:

I have never seen a company fail because it couldn’t expand fast
enough. I have seen many companies die because they “invested in the
future” and “spent ahead” to avoid missing an opportunity.

Umair has a sharp post about how he thinks the general VC community is missing the Web2.0 point and failing in its critical role in early stage value creation.

I think VCs are the new chasm because they are so scarred by the bubble, they’re scared of new concepts and new Big Ideas – they are paralyzed into trying to "monetize" yesterday’s stale, tired, old ideas. Yes, many venture guys have always been vultures – but a good portion were also fairly visionary. That fire in the belly is gone – the passion to disrupt and change things has disappeared.

Ultimately, this death of ideas, novelty, and renewal is why we end with the VCs thinking 2.0 is about technology; why we end up with the guys who should have an economic vision failing to create one; why we end up with a whole community of very smart guys, who, afraid to step outside their narrow comfort zone, are missing the obvious and enormous tectonic shifts rumbling through the economic landscape, where innovators outside are using the real 2.0 – markets, networks, communities – to disrupt new industries almost every week.

I think part of the issue is the Zero-Billion Dollar Fund phenomenon I’d blogged about.  Increasing capital markets efficiency, the proliferation of sophisticated angels, the appetite of large web companies to acquire early-stage companies, and Moore’s Law are combining to make the VC’s job more difficult.  Add to this the fact that the sector is still fairly young, with many funds still being run by the first generation of GPs.  Umair is being tough on the VC community, but I think he’s right.