I keep seeing stories about a new lamp that is “powered” by salt water. The claim is that you’ll get 45 days of lighting using nothing more than half a liter of salt water… What I want to know is why none of these journalists ever check with an engineer or physicist or high school science teacher on whether such a claim is possible. If it’s not obvious to you, the...
As a startup investor (and fund manager), there are themes that appear repeatedly in the dealflow submitted by startups. The entrepreneurs typically can’t see these patterns, and thus end up wasting their time repeating the same business plans that others many have tried and failed. I’ve written about this information asymmetry before and included a short list of business ideas Fledge...
I wrote a whole book walking entrepreneurs through the process of creating a simple, compelling pitch deck. Apparently most entrepreneurs don’t like to read any more than investors. To provide an alternative, The Next Step: Podcast is running a series of episodes, one slide at a time. Below is the playlist for that series and below that, the slide deck I was referring to, along with as few...
A decade ago The Business Model Canvas made assumptions about business models visible. Today The Ownership Model Canvas does the same for ownership and governance. Unsurprisingly it is Start.coop that brings this tool to the world. Start.coop is the world’s first business accelerator focused on scalable cooperative companies. They have from the start questioned the common ways of doing...
Last month I wrote: There are funds that waste the time of startups never actually writing checks. I won’t call them out publicly by name, but one prominent institutional lender just wasted 10 months of time of one my fledglings, and I’m sure they are sitting around as upset with us as we are of them. I thought that was the end of the story. 10 months of conversations and due diligence, two...
The flipside to “unfundable” companies are funds that waste the time of startups never actually writing checks. I won’t call them out publicly by name, but one prominent institutional lender just wasted 10 months of time of one my fledglings, and I’m sure they are sitting around as upset with us as we are of them. First and foremost, investors, if it takes you more than...
Creating an investor pitch is one of those tasks that seems simple, but isn’t. I wrote a book on the topic years ago, providing slide-by-slide guidance, and that helps first time entrepreneurs, but not enough to create great pitch decks. So… I’ve launched a Patreon to take this one step further, to provide one-on-one, slide-by-slide coaching for anyone who would like the help. I...
I do a lot of teaching and the latest topic for me is teaching early-stage/Angel investing. As part of that we talk a lot about “norms”, as most of system for investing in startups is wrapped around norms more than logic. I’ll go into why that is some other time. What struck me a few moments ago was an LLC Agreement I was reviewing for an investment. Normally the reasons listed...
One of my lessons in The Angel Accelerator is called “Seeing the Future” and the main theme is the fact that entrepreneurs need to be able to predict what is needed by customers a year or two or three from now. Along the way we talk about how almost no one predicted the pandemic in 2007-2009 when the financial markets nearly collapsed, we talk about flying cars and self-driving cars...
In a recent post Fred Wilson of AVC.com talked about typos in his blog, and how their existence is OK. AVC is me. I am human. Humans are imperfect. So AVC should be imperfect.So there it is. I am letting it stand. Back when I was a young entrepreneur in the 1990s I used to obsess on perfection in my work. One of the big lessons in thirty years of startup life is that nothing is ever perfect. Not...
