One of the fun books I read last year was “Paper Tiger” by Tom Coyne. I love to play golf, and Tom did what many golfers dream about – he devoted 100% of his life for 2 years to get […]

One of my more popular posts in recent years was a long write-up on how VC’s get measured. It occurred to me that about 2 years has transpired since that original post and I thought I’d write a follow-up.  At […]

Recently, Stu Landesberg, the CEO of Grove Collaborative shared the story of the struggle he faced in raising his series A round. You don’t often hear a founder speak so candidly about this (especially before the final chapter is written) […]

I sent a tweet out last week that elicited quite a few responses from both founders and investors:   seed funds that don’t invest pre-traction = 🤔 — Rob Go (@robgo) November 4, 2019   I could hear the internet […]

One of the biggest rookie mistakes I see among founders pursuing seed rounds is that they’ve spent too much time building something vs. proving something. Increasingly, seed rounds occur after some sort of pre-seed or at least some period of […]

As seed rounds have atomized, it’s not uncommon for founders to raise 3 or even 4 rounds prior to a series A.  These include angel rounds, pre-seeds, institutional seeds, second seeds, pre-A, etc. The reality is that if a founder […]

The best kind of traffic to a web based business is organic traffic.  It’s the best because it’s free, and usually means you are doing a lot of other things right that is driving folks to come to you directly […]

One of my first seed investments was in a company that was looking to disrupt the textbook publishing space. The team was terrific, and the premise was to develop a digital textbook product that was 20x cheaper, better, and more […]

When I started out in VC, there was a strong consensus around early stage investors that the “right” level of ownership was 20%. Pretty much every firm was targeting at least 20% ownership.  And I found that pricing, check sizes, […]

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here*   […]