I get lots of questions from entrepreneurs about what “the process” is within a VC firm of getting a deal done/approved. Regardless of experience - this is a question virtually every entrepreneur asks. 💯

So I thought I would do a quick recap of what “process” really means 🤷🏽‍♀️ 1/ Most firms have the same process. There is little variability - which looks something like this -> 1st mtg, 2nd mtg with more partners, diligence, partner mtg, term sheet. I will go into each below. 🕵️‍♀️

1/ This has been the busiest end of summer, start of fall I've had in 8 years of venture investing. The market is abuzz. A few takeaways: 2/ When founders say they aren't raising, it just means they aren't actively pitching partnerships. Keep trying to build the relationship regardless. These days, founders decide overnight to fundraise and it's a mad dash to a term sheet.

1/ I started @officiallaunchx 5 years ago in business school because I knew something had to change in the venture capital industry. I had my dream job but no matter how far and wide I looked, no one looked like me. 2/ What was worse was that from the thousands of founders that came to pitch me, a minuscule amount were women. If pitching to me, a young woman in VC, was hard - imagine how much worse it was at firms that had no women.

0/ Lots of founders have asked me to tweet storm my recent Open Source Paper into a quick 10 point hit list on what to look for when building an #opensource company. Here goes: 1/ Fulfill an operational pain point. This should be central to your company. Is this a nice to have for developers? Saving just a few hours of dev time? Probably not a pain point enough. When you get on the phone with your early users, do they say: "I couldn't survive w/o this?"