141–150 of 217 posts
Regardless of yes or no, VC money is ludicrously expensive. 125k is barely one year's salary and your 7% of ownership gone forever and that's the deal for almost all accelerators. On top of that - the connections, reach, prestige might be meaningless or irrelevant to your particular product and market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. It could also be code for "We can't write a check big enough to lead your round". E.g. a seed fund who writes $1m checks isn't going to lead a $5m round. The VC would be putting themselves out of a job if they wrote a $5m check when they told their LPs their fund target was $1m checks.
"We're in if you find a lead" is kind of notoriously code for "no".
If you know marketing, you don't need VCs (unless you are in a capital-intensive business like rocket building). The problem is that most people who get funded are technical and do not know marketing and growing organically. However, there are lots of businesses that grow extremely well simply due to the cofounders having previous experience with marketing, often in a professional capacity. My go-to example is Lemlis…
I hated VCs most of the time. Now I'm trying to be useful, and to not waste anyone's time. I try to say "no" very quickly, and try to be very transparent about my thinking process.
Some founders really appreciate this. Some others don't. And that's fine. I want to be the VC that I would have wanted to meet when I was a founder, that's it.
Maybe it's my business major background and my skepticism of all these tech companies that have no reasonable business model to make $'s, but unless there is an obvious need for investment like buying a large amount of real estate or machinery, why would you need VC money to build an app after you've already spent several months doing it? It should run on it's own and not need investor money. You shouldn't be focused…
Everyone minus 1 at least anyway.
For our two-sided marketplace startup, this meant Android and iOS apps for customers, and another pair of apps for mechanics. 6 months later, we released our fully-fledged MVP to a deafening silence from customers, mechanics, and investors. It's probably really hard to get traction when it's not obvious who your customers are, and this description reveals that. Your customers are the entities that are paying you. Is…
I was in tech and gradually turned to VC, now I have my own VC firm based in Italy (I live in Venice, the original one, not the fake LA one), and we invest everywhere in Europe, and occasionally in the US. I was also a founder a few times. I hated VCs most of the time. Now I'm trying to be useful, and to not waste anyone's time. I try to say "no" very quickly, and try to be very transparent about my thinking process.…
People love to complain about the European VC landscape, and how little capital there is compared to the US and so on, and they’re not wrong, but this to me is a stand-out positive. We felt taken seriously by everybody, just about nobody wasted our time.
In fairness to the VCs, the 3 examples given in "The VC Codex" section seemed blatantly obvious to me. Here is the first one, for example: > When they say: “Talk to us again when you have traction.” > They really mean: “If you prove there is a market opportunity and that you can execute as a management team, then we might consider you. But because I don’t believe either of those things will happen, I will not be taki…