Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, PodcastsWelcome to Episode 176! Kristina Shen is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the world’s leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Pinterest, Skype, Box,…
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Fundraising, Growth, Leadership, Q&AI didn’t when I raised my first fund. I was in Sell mode. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the LPs to buy. I sent a…
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Career Growth & Advice, Fundraising, Growth, Leadership, Podcasts, Sales StrategyWelcome to Episode 175! Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS event with over 20,000 of the world’s best SaaS founders and investors attending every year….
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AIt’s not a big deal. Most VCs, if they see a conflict, they’ll just tell you. Sometimes, the conflict is an illusion. And most VCs, if it’s an ex-investment via…
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Career Growth & Advice, Fundraising, Growth, Leadership, Q&AIf I understand how it’s going to work right, this isn’t really selling off its shares at more abstract level — rather, it’s almost transferring them around via clever financial…
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My preferred stage is “mid-to-late seed”, somewhere between $10k and $100k-$150k a month in revenue. If you’re bootstrapped or leanly funded, sometimes I can invest a bit later (e.g., I…
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Let me answer a variant of the question: as CEO, can you get more stock later if you raise money from outside investors? The answer is yes, often. At least…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AIt will be a flag. My very tough recommendation: maybe have 2, or 3 max, of the founders be the “C-level founders” going forward. Clean up your org chart so…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AAt EchoSign, we raised $8.5m + $1.5m in debt and burned on a net basis $6.5m of that to get to the first $10m in ARR. We went cash-flow positive…
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I answer this question because some information on the internet here will confuse entrepreneurs. In the “old” days, founders would come under some pressure from VCs as their funds reached…
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Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AA typical medium sized or larger ($100m+ fund) model will work like this: ~10% goes to fees (really more, but they’ll try to ‘recycle’ some and reinvest some proceeds so…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AI’ll share my learnings. When you go to raise a “Roman IV+” fund (your 4th, 5th, 6th) fund, the LPs will indeed be expecting an extraordinary amount of data. And…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AListen. It usually means something is wrong. Or at least, off: If you got the equity splits right at first, usually, big issues don’t come up later. This may be…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Metrics, Q&ATwo things to think about when meeting with later stage investors (and Vista is the best of all of them in SaaS): They’ll meet with everyone in the space. So…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Fundraising, Leadership, Q&AWhen you hear “I need to do more homework” after a full partners meeting, that usually means the other partners pointed out some risks in the deal that the partner…
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