One of my favorite descriptions we use half in jest is that a founder seems like a “smiling killer”. This is a compliment, I promise. This means that the founder strikes a very delicate balance that is very hard to […]

It’s a 2 for 1 day today at Friday Fun-isms. Both are phrases that often come up, but often together.   The first is the idea of an authentic company. Before we start any pitch, we try to uncover what […]

This is a post about raising a Series A from an investor that is not based in your home city. Let me preface this by saying that if all things were equal, you would probably prefer to have a local […]

Given our high-conviction, hands-on strategy and NextView, we tend to take an approach where each one of our investments has a very clear lead partner within the firm. This is the person who ends up being the primary point of […]

On Tuesday, one of our most recent portfolio companies, Otis, came out of stealth and announced its public launch. Otis is founded by Michael Karnjanaprakorn, and is focused on creating a marketplace that enables fractional ownership of culturally relevant assets. […]

As I like to say, fundraising tends to move slow until it moves fast. It feels like a bit of a grind in the early and mid stages of a process, but in a successful fundraise, things tend to heat […]

Two phrases that often come up in our internal discussion is around value creation and value capture. I think of this on three levels. Does a company’s product/service create value? Is the value jaw dropping? Are customer so excited about […]

As the seed stage that atomized and series A rounds have become larger and more traction based, the paths to series A have changed. The baseline path to series A has tends to look something like this: Raise $0 — $500K in […]

Many of us in the seed stage ecosystem have noticed a shift in the way seed rounds are coming together. Historically, seed rounds were syndicated among several different firms. Early seed funds and super-angels typically wrote $250-$500K checks, and rounds […]

An inevitable question that founders face is “how is your product different?” Whether it’s asked explicitly or not, most investors that you speak to have probably seen or heard of a company that does something pretty similar to yours. So […]