We were recently approached by a potential new client, who wanted feedback on his pitch deck, a rewrite and assistance with reaching out to the appropriate investors.
We liked him and his product and decided to take him on as a client.
An investor friend called us a few days later, and asked what we were working on, meaning was there anything in our pipeline that might be of interest to him and his fund. We gave him the broad strokes on the software that our new client had built, and which already had some traction in the market, knowing full well that it was in his sweet spot.Read More...
Feld also offers a free Venture Deals course that “demystifies venture capital deals and startup financing to give both first-time and experienced entrepreneurs a definitive guide to secure funding.” Sign up and make sure that you’re notified as to when the next session is starting, which will most likely be Fall.Read More...
We work with and/or coach entrepreneurs all the time, and recently realized that many founders have no idea how the VC model works, meaning how and why VCs deploy funds – and make decisions – the way they do. So we’re going to shift the perspective to help you to better understand the process.
You go to investors because you need capital in order to get your company to the next level. Time to think about VC firms as companies as well, because they are. Some of them are large companies, re have a bigger war chest of funds to deploy, but truth be told, the majority are more akin to SMBs. Where does the money come from for the funds? Family offices, high net worth individuals, strategics (eg companies/corporations aligned with the investment vertical or thesis of the fund) or institutional investors (pension funds, university endowment funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc), and the funds manage their investments. The fund’s investors invest in specific funds for various reasons: the expertise of the team, the fund’s track record, their spidey sense, alignment of focus, etc.
Like the VCs who invest in your company, those LPs expect a return on their investments. If the fund fails to do that, well, they’re going to have a harder time attracting investors themselves when they go to raise their next fund, or to put it into startup terms, their Series A, B, whatever.Read More...
Ok, so you’ve done your pitch deck – revised it ad infinitum, based on the feedback you’ve gotten from everyone you know and his or her fourth cousin twice removed. Now you’ve secured a few investor meetings, via Zoom. Where’s that investor pitch meeting template when you need one?
Brian Cohen spoke at our virtual investor breakfast recently and imparted some pearls of advice to help you with that one, some of which we’ll share with you today, with a few additions of our own, along with points other investor friends and previous Investor breakfast speakers of ours have made in the pas.
First, meetings these days are done via Zoom. Show your face. At least at the outset of the meeting. Not a photo, nyour initials, not your LinkedIn photo, which is no doubt a selfie and doesn’t look all that great anyway – the real you – and the other team members who may also be on the call. Why? Investor(s) want to get to know you and yours, and much is conveyed via your visage and facial expressions. Do you smile? At least occasionally? Investors – and Brian referred primarily to angels – after all, he was Chairman of the New York Angels for a decade before co-founding New York Venture Partner – and has invested in literally hundreds of companies over the years – have to like you. This is a partnership and a potentially a long one, so they want to see you – if only on a video call. For now, at least.Read More...
What’s the #1 Criteria for Success in the Startup World?
When he spoke at our investor breakfast a couple of months back, New York Angels chairman Brian Cohen said that Bill Gross, founder of idealab, a startup studio and arguably the prototype for tech accelerators, asked what was the one criteria that mattered most in a successful exit of a company. Was it the amount of money they raised? Or was it smart leaders that mattered. After all the research that he had done at idealabs, Gross concluded that it was timing that was the #1 criteria for success. Timing, meaning when you went to market – think Six Degrees, the first social network in the Web 1.0 days, v Facebook.
Some investors put a lot of stock in startups or founders who have subject matter expertise. Jeanne Sullivan, founder of Starvest, loves to hear from founders who are doing something totally new, in which case, how can you be a subject matter expert. After all, as she said, “the Wright Brothers didn’t have a pilot’s license.“
We host a breakfast every two weeks with one investor and a small group of entrepreneurs. We prefer this over filling the room with 100-400 people, as investors tend to say things in a smaller group and impart information that might not come out during the Q&A in a larger group. Since it’s summer and many of the investors are away – which means that we’re only hosting one breakfast in July and one in August – we felt that this might be a good time to share some of the information that they’ve share with us (and the attendees) with you:Read More...
