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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In the current environment, when access to funding is more limited and growth prospects more uncertain, startups have to make decisions about the number and type of hires they make. This scenario puts smart people in tough positions: Which roles should I prioritize...
As an investor Range Ventures, Adam Burrows and I receive lots of monthly updates from companies, some from portfolio companies and some from companies we are tracking. Some are short, some are long, some are laden with metrics, and some focus on just a few key...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
I’ve had the opportunity to talk with thousands of people about what they want in their next role and it generally boils down to three things: The right problem (aka purpose)–people focus on working for a company where they understand, support, and even champion the...
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...
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....
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...
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...
New year, new you, right?! After putting off meetings, projects and interviews “until January” for the last six weeks of Q4, Q1 is a great time for big career transitions. Layer that yearly cycle on top of the “great resignation,” “great reshuffle,” “great...
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...