One of my pet peeves about startup-land is myth-making. I refer to the stories that get made up about a startup’s founding and trajectory. Entrepreneurs spin tales for two reasons: to get press, and, particularly, to get funding. Investors have a name for their intuitive filtering — they call it pattern recognition. But at the early stage, it seems to …
$9.4M? And Aprizi’s First Pivot
When Liz and I first started Aprizi, it was very different in concept from where we eventually ended up. I had become fascinated with Mint and Gist, and people’s willingness to share rich data in exchange for the right value proposition. I started thinking about other places where valuable data existed, but was relatively hard to get to. This led …
The Cold Reality of First-Time Funding
Earlier today, I watched Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz debate lean vs fat fundraising approaches (very different from “lean startup” concepts even if often confused). The reality is very very simple: unless you are a celebrity/proven founder, “lean” is your only option. I don’t buy for a second that Horowitz would write a “fat” check to an unproven entrepreneur no …
The “Past is Prologue” Objection
One of the most annoying things for an entrepreneur to hear, and one of the hardest things for a venture capitalist to navigate, is the “past is prologue” doubt. By that I mean: “your idea failed before, so why will it work this time around?” Given that most Web 2.0 ideas were conceptualized, attempted, and failed, during Web 1.0, this …
Investors & Customers – sometimes there’s an early stage disconnect
peHub just wrote an article titled “VCs love Blippy, but do users?” Some of you correctly guessed that Blippy was the company I was referring to when I wrote, “Don’t let another startup throw you off your game”. And it’s true, there are a lot of VCs really excited about that company. Aprizi, Blippy, Bynamite, Swipely and a number of …
Angels: Development or Momentum?
Aprizi is not in a mad rush to raise a seed round, but it is something we want to do and I have been thinking about when to start expanding the conversation beyond a few folks who already know me. An interesting question arose last night when I mentioned to another entrepreneur that I was heading to Australia for 2 …
Startup Tools: equity and investment (cap table) model
As an entrepreneur, have you struggled to figure out what your ownership stake looks like over multiple rounds of dilution from investors and employee options? In the spirit of sharing modeling tools I use when thinking about a startup, here is an Excel spreadsheet for modeling out cap table equity and dilution across a number of capital raising rounds. There’s …
Applauding Hornik
David Hornik over at Venture Blog has a marvelous post up called “Venture Capitalist At Your Service”. He recognizes that his LPs are his customers, yet he also recognizes that: “The executives of my portfolio companies are my clients. But all entrepreneurs are potential clients. And I need to behave accordingly.” Easily said, right? The lovely thing about David is …