Ali Whitman

Founders: Think Like an Investor, Focus on Your Future

I've had a lot of conversations with founders about what to expect for valuations and why despite a lot of company progress, that they are still going to face headwinds. I found it helpful to explain to founders how investors think in the simplest terms Hopefully...

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The Most Important Rule Still Matters

Business experts have no shortage of rules and axioms to help make you and your company successful, but I continue to find that following the most basic rule of all will still consistently allow you to stand out from the crowd. The Golden Rule: simply treat others the...

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Fail (And Survive)
Proactively

By this point in the cycle, every founder has heard the message that cash-efficient growth is the most important thing to be focused on (as it always should have been). As a starting point, most founders have either frozen hiring or have executed RIFs to right size...

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How We Invest (and Why We Haven’t Done a Web3 Deal)

This week has been a fascinating one with the blowup of crypto-exchange FTX and the related fallout. Unlike Theranos, many well-known Silicon Valley funds were investors in FTX and will lose serious money, which seems to be causing a lot of folks to dunk on venture in...

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Proactively Have Your Crucible Moment

Not every business is going to work. In fact, MOST businesses fail. The market isn’t there, the pain point isn’t that acute, or the economics just don’t pencil out. That’s reality. It used to happen every day. However, for the past few years, we haven’t been living in...

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Nobody Knows
Anything

Yesterday, a founder of a company we know received a note from a VC passing on their round with the explanation that “things are going to be really rough in your space for the next 24-36 months.” Another well-known investor recently posted on LinkedIn to broad aplomb...

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Be Wary of Advice
without Context

Great founders do many things well, and one of the things recently I’ve observed founders doing especially well is soliciting outside advice from other founders, investors, and advisors.  Especially in times of uncertainty, I find that gathering these additional...

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The World Isn’t Ending, But Your Job Just Got a Lot Harder

Your number job as a CEO of a start-up is simple. Never run out of money. Your already hard job just got harder. Uncertainty is high, but I can tell you with confidence that we are in a reset period (how long it is going to last, how much slower capital will be...

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Embrace the Opportunistic Open-Ended Conversation

It’s my job to have a lot of open-ended, serendipitous conversations. I’m continually reminded of the value of these conversations and relationships as time passes. The opportunistic, open-ended conversation could be one of the highest ROI conversations you’ll have,...

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Build Trust and Enlist Support by Communicating Bad News Early

Build trust and enlist support by communicating bad news early Founders by nature are optimistic - otherwise they’d never start and believe in the crazy journey that is required to build a company from scratch. And sometimes that pure optimism is the only thing that...

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Know What Great Hiring Looks Like

At Range, one of our team’s biggest areas of focus is helping our founders build A+ teams. While hiring great talent is always important, it has a vastly outsized impact at the early-stage; whether employee number 10 is a superstar or a bust could be the difference...

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Control Your Narrative & Manage Your Fundraising Funnel

This week we were doing diligence on a really promising seed-stage company. We had a great initial meeting with the founders and as part of our follow-up diligence asked for a financial model (historical and forward-looking) as well as trend data for the KPIs they...

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Hire for the Now

At Range Ventures we love it that founders dream big, think about the future and building billion-dollar+ companies. Having that mindset is 100% necessary - you aren’t going to build a billion-dollar company if you aren’t trying to build a billion-dollar company....

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Hard Conversations Done Better

I had three separate interactions with Range Ventures portfolio company CEOs last week that reminded me how important it is for CEOs to be great at managing (and winning when needed) hard conversations. Founders at the simplest level need to be able to do three things...

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Don’t Give Investors an Easy Reason to Pass

Being an early-stage investor requires an interesting duality of mindset. We need to be imaginative enough to suspend disbelief and go all-in with a founder on a crazy vision of the future while simultaneously using our well-tuned antennae to detect BS and other land...

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Storytelling is the Key to a Great Fundraising Deck

Building a compelling fundraising deck is one of the most deceptively difficult things to do. It’s still the case in 2021 that a founder can really stand out from the noise with a really good deck, as the vast majority of those that we see as investors leave a lot to...

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