About Madding King
Madding King is a principal at Camp One Ventures, LLC. He is also the President of Brookline Group, a FINRA registered Broker-Dealer, and holds the FINRA Series 3,6,7,24 and 66 designations. Formerly, Madding served as a Proprietary/Independent Trader at the Chicago Board of Trade from 1998 through February 2007 where he focused on fixed income derivatives. He has served as a board member for multiple private companies ranging in scope from technology to wireless communications and life sciences. Mr. King received a B.A. with extensive work in Business Administration and Economics from Vanderbilt University in 1997.
August 29th, 2016
The Top 16 VC Buzzwords of 2016
We scraped 16,800 headlines to find the trending keywords for 2016. (click for larger image) Methodology: VentureBeat is a great source for VC news. Import.io is a great tool for scraping content from the web. I wanted to see how the news headlines have shifted since 2015, so we did a web scrape to grab all of the headlines since Jan 1, 2015, sifted out the keywords...Continue Reading...
August 20th, 2015
Convertible Debt Explained in Entrepreneur English
Recently, there were some up and coming entrepreneurs who were asking very esoteric, high-level questions, mostly about leadership and protecting IP. One of them in particular was at a crossroads trying to decide whether he should structure a deal with investors issuing equity or convertible debt. He simply asked: “What do you think I should do?” Well, there are 7 basic components to understanding convertible debt....Continue Reading...
July 24th, 2015
What Investors Are REALLY Thinking During Your Pitch
Camp One Ventures listens to almost 500 live pitches a year. If you consider that there are roughly 260 business days a year, then that is an average of 1.92 pitches per day. That’s a lot of listening. So what are we thinking while you are pitching us? Typically, we bet on the jockey- not the horse. This means that investors are sometimes analyzing you more intensely...Continue Reading...
July 10th, 2015
4 Rules for Crafting Exclusivity Agreements
Mark Suster, of Upfront Ventures, publishes an excellent blog called Both Sides of the Table. It’s one of my favorite peer publications because his investing perspectives and strategic thinking often aligns with the approach we take at Camp One. His recent article on exclusivity deals, highlighting the “Mother of All Exclusivity Deals” (Apple and AT&T), hits home as we often encounter these types of agreements. Traditionally,...Continue Reading...
March 15th, 2015
The “Tapping” Point for Mobile Payments: Insights from Mobile World Congress
85,000 attendees. Nearly 2000 exhibitors. One topic: The future of mobile. After my team spent a week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry, it’s clear that mobile payments in particular have reached the “tapping” point, if you will. 2015 is poised to be THE breakthrough year for global adoption of seamless mobile payments. Here’s a few of the...Continue Reading...
January 20th, 2015
9 Ways to Turn Around Your Startup
If you are a founder struggling with turning around your startup and you have not seen this recent New York Times article featuring Jessica Mah, CEO of InDinero, do yourself a favor and check it out. Mah, who founded InDinero in 2009 when she was just 20 years old, shares how she transformed a drowning accounting software startup into a 75-employee business generating $3M in annual sales. InDinero is...Continue Reading...
December 19th, 2014
3 Reasons Why Apple Pay is Not Catching Fire
Apply Pay has arrived. Everyone has been talking, writing, tweeting, and fighting about it. But is the mainstream actually using it? Will it replace cash transactions? In my opinion, at this moment, NO. Here are the three biggest challenges to Apple Pay's success: 1) Merchants Are Mad Apple Pay is not going to succeed unless they can persuade merchants to accept the new form factor. You...Continue Reading...
December 12th, 2014
Is VRBO.com About to Lose Steam?
VRBO.com (Vacation Rental By Owner) has turned the vacation rental industry on it’s head by connecting renters with vacation homeowners all over the world. They claim travelers can “rent a house for half the price of a hotel”- and with over a million listings in some of the world’s hottest locations, it’s no wonder they have exploded in popularity in recent years. I recently sat down...Continue Reading...
October 31st, 2014