Blog - Corniche Growth Advisors

27 Sep 2018

Technopreneurs do get better with age!

Contrary to the “young founder” myth, new research shows that among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly 2x as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old. The “young found...

14 Sep 2018

Go for the “strategic” exit

A strategic buyer will generally be the best bet for acquiring your mid-market tech company, where there is a good strategic rationale, as it is more likely to provide a higher valuation than a financial investor. When strategics want an asset in the current market, financial investors are not going...

24 Aug 2018

What happened to messaging platforms disrupting mobile apps?

Back in 2016 conventional wisdom had it that messaging platforms and chatbots were going to disrupt mobile apps, based on what was happening in China with WeChat, where people almost never leave the app, and do their e-commerce and almost everything else within the app environment. And Chris Messina...

21 Aug 2018

How preferred shares can work for the technopreneur

As your start-up grows and evolves, through various funding rounds, it is likely that you will need to issue preferred shares at some stage. The timing and terms of these pref shares can have a huge impact on how much money you, as the technopreneur, actually make when finally exiting. Unless you’...

28 Jul 2018

Technopreneurs need to understand and embrace “new power”

As technopreneurs, we often see opportunities and threats in our hyperconnected world, but we need to go beyond this to understand a powerful new underlying force at work, “new power”, which is a about mobilisation, and channeling participatory energy. Its effect is visible in successful compani...

24 Jul 2018

How NOT to Lose Your Cryptoassets

The crypto economy continues to grow with a market capitalization of over $280 Billion USD. Unlike other financial markets, when you own cryptoassets it’s up to you to ensure their safety. Cryptocurrencies and tokens are bearer instruments and no bank or central authority is going to come to the r...

29 May 2018

Death by PowerPoint, or can we live without bullets?

We have all experienced that presentation using PowerPoint that “almost killed” us. So is there a place for it in today’s technopreneur world? Steve Jobs famously stated, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint”. Jeff Bezos has banned it outright i...

27 May 2018

Digital Estate Planning – because the Internet doesn’t know when you are dead

by John Berry, CEO and co-founder of OneSecurePlan, Inc. We have all at one time or another heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote – “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. While I can’t help you with your taxes, I can certainly suggest a plan to ensure ...

24 Apr 2018

Would your tech company benefit from a PE buy-and-build play?

If a PE does a buyout of your tech company, there is a 50% chance that it will be as an add-on in a buy-and-build strategy (where the PE buys a company and then builds on that “platform” through add-on acquisitions), according to a recent PitchBook analyst’s report. And according to a BCG stud...

23 Apr 2018

Can GDPR’s “Data Portability” change the game for personal data ownership?

Just like introducing number portability in mobile meant that mobile users (and not mobile operators) could own their mobile number and hence not be captive, so data portability puts the ownership of a data subject’s data firmly in his/her hands, with the ability to move that data to a competitive...