21–30 of 144 posts
This was an attempt to describe everything we do, so if there's anything I didn't cover, please let me know. (Sorry it's so long. I was surprised myself how long it turned out, but we do a lot.)
Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?
"At the end of Demo Day what the startups usually have is a bunch of potential leads. Our default advice is to do a breadth first search, weighted by expected value. ... There are a few investors for whom it should be zero, and we can tell startups about those too." Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?
Also, zero is probably an overstatement. It would have been better to say epsilon. Because most of these investors I would take money from if the alternative would be to shut down the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in several ways. We hired Harj and Alexis, who are alums. We have some of the alumni read the applications, in case we overlook any good ones. And the alumni who come in to give advice about funding are fabulous.
In order to be self-replicating, you'd have to have alumni with relatively large exits who then participate on more or less equal terms... is that something you foresee, or is it going to just be too messy to add people that way?
Minor typos I noticed (since you seem like you want the feedback):
missing 'the': "to get the company into best shape possible"
spelling of predict: "know the investors but can preditct their reaction to each specific startup"
see instead of seem: "no one except the current batch of startups gets to seem them"
This was an attempt to describe everything we do, so if there's anything I didn't cover, please let me know. (Sorry it's so long. I was surprised myself how long it turned out, but we do a lot.)
Besides music labels, are there other industries you try to steer startups away from, either through not accepting them or through nudging them in other directions? I'm looking specifically at medical applications, but I imagine there are others too.
This was an attempt to describe everything we do, so if there's anything I didn't cover, please let me know. (Sorry it's so long. I was surprised myself how long it turned out, but we do a lot.)
One question though, what about startups from outside the US? Can you offer advice there visa-wise and such? I know it doesn't really matter for the three month period, but what about after that. It would really suck for a startup to do well on Demo Day, only to be unable to go to any meetings because they can't get back to the US for a few months (I think the wait period is another three months)
"The general answer is to pick something where the product of how fast it can be built and how excited users would be about it is high."