OUR LESSONS

As a long-suffering Chicago Bears fan, one of my favorite sports quotes is from 2006 when Arizona Cardinals coach Dennis Green declared about the Bears: “They are who we thought they were!” in a famous post-game outburst. What Green meant was that the Bears’ inept offense that game was exactly what he expected to see ...

Prior to joining Range Ventures as an investor, I worked as an GTM operator across various startups, fractional COO/CXO, and as an advisor to scaling businesses- all giving me exposure to businesses at the point of inception through massive scale. While in these roles and especially during my time leading Customer Success at Gusto, I ...

Last week, Foundry Group announced that their 2022 fund would be their last. This marks a major transition in Colorado tech. While Foundry has evolved to a more nationally-focused firm over the past number of years, they deserve a tremendous amount of credit for putting Colorado, and especially Boulder, on the map as a top-tier ...

My co-founders and I built Apartment List by doing what now feels old fashion and out of style – hitting the road and sitting down with clients. But now, As a seed-stage VC at Range Ventures, I've watched countless early-stage founders get tangled in the web of GTM “experts” who preach a gospel of overcomplicated ...

“It has to be a simple solution…It comes down to a human being issuing a purchase order for something that he or she understands to which I have to convince their managers and their peers to go buy.” This is what Doug Leone, former CEO of Sequoia, said on a recent podcast when asked about ...

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 other founders find this helpful. Founders: Think Like an ...

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 way that you’d like to be treated. ...

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 their fixed overhead. That is a great starting ...

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 general. I have two responses here. First off, ...

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 reality.  All companies had to do was ...

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 now vs. later? How do I stretch my budget? Can I get ...

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 items. All of the above can be effective as long as ...

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 that founders who need money should “hold off ...

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 perspectives can be extremely helpful to founders – but only if both sides have appropriate context ...

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 deployed, and ...

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, whether you’re a leader or looking out for your own career. CEOs/Founders/Leaders should block time and ...

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 can get them through hard times. However, there is one ...

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 between raising a great Series A and struggling ...

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 business’ reason for existing. The products resonate and the outcomes ...

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 focus on. The founder responded quickly, shared a financial model, ...

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. However, one area where I find that this mindset actually hamstrings early-stage founders (seed ...

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 to scale their company. Sell to their first customers ...

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 mines that could derail that vision early. I previously wrote about ...

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 reflection,” or whatever we’re calling this moment in work+life right now and ...

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 be desired. I can ...

There is A BEST intro in your network to potential investors – focus on degrees of trust, not just separation. Last week, I worked with one of the Range portfolio CEOs to get ready for their Series-A fundraise. As part of the prep, we built a list of Series-A investors to speak with based on ...

In the context of a post-Series A stage company, annual planning is hard and time-consuming. Even more so at the early stage when volatility is high and often the data needed to make forecasts is not robust enough or non-existent. I also often see that first-time founders and exec teams get stuck on one of ...