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...
Fundraising
Investors Want to See You’re Serious About Doing Serious Things
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...
Joining an Early Stage Startup is the Best Career Decision You Can Make Right Now
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...
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...
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...
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...