Eric Olson is a Massachusetts native (go Red Sox!) and Bentley College alumnus (B.S. Finance w/ IT Minor - Magna Cum Laude - 2004) who now resides in Chicago. He is currently working as an Associate at DFJ Portage while also advising a couple of Midwest-based startups.
Prior to DFJ Portage Eric was VP of Business Development at BuzzFeed. He has also worked in Partner Development at Google and in Business Development for Chicago-based startup FeedBurner which was acquired by Google in June 2007.
n his "spare" time Eric is one half the founding/managing duo of TECH cocktail which is a quarterly event for technology people in Chicago, Washington D.C. and Boston (soon to be in other cities as well). Eric also volunteers at World Bicycle Relief where he advises on web strategy.
Eric's interests include: baseball, cycling, drumming, technology, venture capital, microfinance, archeology, history, physics, movies, writing and reading.
Eric Olson's blog is Olson's Observations.
I came to realize that we may simply be in an innovation valley right now. If you were to look at innovation over time you would see that bursts of innovation hit followed by a lull and then another burst. Innovation is cyclical in the way that evolution is. Bursts followed by relatively long lulls, etc., etc.
It is official. Jim Cramer of Mad Money and TheStreet.com loves the Midwest. Today on the roof of Soho House Jim talked about the Midwest, which he refers to as Cleveland Valley (man, I hope that name doesn’t stick), and about how some real solid innovation is happening here.
One particular section of the book hit me hard since it touched on the relationship between entrepreneurs and VCs (something I have thought a lot about and also have written a lot about over the years). I will quote the paragraph from the book in full here […]
Turns out that there is a lot of turnover at VC firms (70%+ at some of the top firms over an 8 year period from 1997 - 2005) for various reasons but it seems that a lot of times it is due to lackluster performance. Looks like VC is a true meritocracy - just like entrepreneurship - as it should be […]
Being good can help you do well. If you simply work on an idea that legitimately helps people, you could find yourself with a very interesting business over time.
I figured Earth Day was as good a day as any to write abut a project my friend Chuck Templeton has been working on down at IIT. Chuck is a big fan of all things green and has been focusing a lot of his efforts (outside the day job) on localizing the food supplies […]
I had the pleasure of meeting up with Aziz Gilani the other day at Peet’s Coffee in Evanston. Aziz and I ended up meeting each other through DFJ and our friends at IllinoisVENTURES. Aziz is currently a student at Kellogg who will be joining DFJ Mercury, our Houston, Texas based fund, as a […]
Liquidity for VCs and entrepreneurs is a topic that continually comes up. It has resurfaced in the last week due to the fact that public markets have pretty much been closed to startups for a while now leaving M&A as the primary liquidity event for entrepreneurs and VCs. This time Fred Wilson is […]
Wow. Who would have thought a year ago that Bear Stearns would simply crumble like it did? The stock was around $140, things were looking good and, bam, the mortgage crisis hits and Bear Stearns stock enters into a tailspin that “ended” today at $4.10 per share (a couple bucks above the proposed […]
Harper Reed, the CTO of skinnyCorp, was nice enough to invite Frank and I down for a visit to skinnyCorp HQ last week. I had been dying to check out their offices as I was sure they would be pretty unique (plus I like the guys and their products) but I had no idea of […]
