Loved this framing. Seeing fundraising as a board recruitment decision.
Also for those who follow this, throwing some shade on that famous crossover fund which doesnt usually take board seats:)
One of the questions Roelof asks is abt motivation for starting up. It helps identify the missionary founders, as opposed to the mercenary ones. Great example of a missionary founder here.
Why he focuses on value creation (and not value capture) in his seed bets.
On his insight into and understanding of 'crucible moments'.
Book reco: 'The Hinge Factor' by Erik Durschmied.
On preparing for board meetings.
Also "for every single company I work with, what are the three most important things that need to happen over the next six months?" I am going to steal this!
But Roelof, Evernote?
We need to find these memos!
Also Goetz not Gates.
Loved this framing of accountants looking 1 yr back, and actuaries thinking 20 yrs ahead.
And why compounding is the one intuitive biz model we struggle to wrap our brains around.
Hmmm.....another idea to steal! Preparades and premortems.
This was a really fun read! If you are on the venture side, this is a must read. If you aren't still a great one!
Enjoy!
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A perspective basis my last 3 years in a seed VC.
(this is true especially of seed investing, but holds for the broad VC asset class)
I work at @BlumeVentures, a seed stage tech VC, and we get 3-3,500 startup pitches a year. We can fund 10-12 at best a yr. This means that we reject a lot of great startups.
Some of these startups are rejected because they are too late or early for us, and thus don’t fit our investment criteria (blume.vc/for-startups). Some are rejected because we have invested in their competitors or in similar risk buckets we dont want to add to.
On @ClassplusApps, its recent fundraising round, and what we can learn from one of the most exciting B2B startups out there today.
A B2B startup with a consumer DNA, that any B2C co would be proud of.
On thursday, Classplus announced its latest fundraising round, toting up to $65m across Tiger, @gsvventures and existing investors Falcon Edge / AWI, @BlumeVentures
“Early stage valuations aren’t really valuations. They are the exhaust fumes of a negotiation about two things — the amount raised and the amount of dilution.”
Let us understand this.
2/23
They say that chess is a game that can be learnt in an hour, but it takes a lifetime to master. Venture valuations are similar.
Here is the simple part of startup valuations. Take capital invested, and divide by stake diluted.
I got this whatsapp message yday👇🏽fm a founder grinding it out, 1 month of runway left. But absolutely unwilling to give up.
We saw 2 great stories recently fm the ecosystem - as Meesho, Cred became🦄. Congrats to them, & let us celebrate their achievements.
But let us also celebrate the founders grinding it out without much love. Life is hard for them. It is tough mentally & not easy to keep pushing.
It takes a special grit and determination to chug along, to motivate your team on dreams and vision alone without hikes, or even delayed salaries; holding on to them when other startups and Big Tech are throwing money at them.
Barton Biggs, research guru turned hedge fund manager famously classified people into visiles & audiles (ref ‘Hedgehogging’).
Visiles absorb info via eyes (reading)
Audiles via ears (talking / listening)
(Youtube wasnt too popular then for it clearly breaks his split!)
2/18
Now I am a visile & I have struggled w podcasts:)
Podcasts are great content of course, & lots there you don't get easily in writing. But I have wondered as to why I should take out 40-50mins to listen to a podcast when in that time, I can instead breeze through 3-4 posts?
Was interesting to read (yes, i got it transcribed) the @jeremysliew + @HarryStebbings chat on 20VC where they discuss the 2012 Lightspeed round into Snapchat that Jeremy led.
What I found most interesting was this account of Jeremy Liew's persistence in trying to contact Evan Spiegel. VCs chasing founders who dont give them any bhav:)
Remember something like this for Sarah Cannon leading Index's recent round into Notion.
Liew's laws of consumer social investing!
- can this become part of pop culture?
- can this become a habit?
- is there a scalable, repeatable way to grow?
- does the founder have a unique insight that explains the success, that explains what's going on?