Our Lessons
We’ve spent time in the trenches and made our fair share of mistakes. Here we share real-world learnings and tangible, actionable advice from our former lives as operators and current experiences with our portfolio.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Smart People | Tough Decisions: Startup Hiring During Uncertainty
In the current environment, when access to funding is more limited and growth prospects more uncertain, startups have to make decisions about the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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%...
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...
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...
Joining an Early Stage Startup in 2022? 5 Tips to Get Off to a Great Start.
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...
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...
There’s a Best Intro in Your Network
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...
Annual planning: A Multi-Directional Approach
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...