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 […]

Like many things in life, the VC/startup ecosystem is one of cycles. Looking back over the last decade it’s remarkable to see how the emphasis has shifted across cycles and what the overarching narrative was. I believe we are in […]

Meetings can suck. I know that you’ve been there.  Stuck in a meeting which wasn’t productive.  Not for you, and not for many (or even all) of the participants. Sometimes it’s a standing small-group meeting, an obligatory gathering that’s on […]

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 […]

Over the past few years, “pre-seed” as a distinct category has emerged within the early stage fundraising landscape.  To some degree the best way to describe a pre-seed round is that you know it when you see it, as the […]

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 […]

As our fundraising month focusing on the seed pitch deck recently wrapped up, we’re returning to our “Friday Funisms” series – fun & quirky sayings which one can repeatedly hear around the NextView offices that have become part of our culture over […]

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 […]