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The fact is, it''s just not cool to criticize the investing side of the venturecapital market. That doesn''t mean I have anything against the founder or the investors. But in the private markets, we''ve got "Yay, founders! I think we''d all benefit from the public discourse, especially new founders.
The culture is driven by the 20-something irreverent founder with huge technical chops who in a “David vs. Goliath” mythology take on the titans of industry and wins. But markets have changed and I think investors, founders and experienced executives who want to join later-stage startups can all benefit from playing the long game.
We then help surround founders with other talent who want to join important causes but don’t have the startup idea themselves. We help founders through difficult moments, we help coach, we act as sparring partners, we help them resolve conflicts when they’re fighting with co-founders and we help them deal with adversity as well as successes.
Brooklyn Bridge Ventures , the pre-seed and seed stage VC fund I run in NYC, has invested in 64 companies in the last six and a half years. Twenty-five of them have at least one female co-founder. Fifteen had co-founders over 40. Five have LGBTQ+ founders. Three teams have African-American founders.
But until very recently, raising capital for your startup was significantly easier if it was located in the major startup hubs, most notably Silicon Valley. It takes a long time, at least five years and more likely a decade, to know how changes in the startup economy and venturecapital will play out.
It just seemed like a fitting title for a company built around narrative by a founder who used to write stories for a living. It's a story that just hit a milestone--a $4mm round of venture funding that I'm ecstatic to say Brooklyn Bridge Ventures just led.
The last thing you want as either a founder or even a VC is to have an investor get stuck with you when you're not on the same page about expectations. You trust me with your money and I get to do the fun part--working with founders. So here's all the reasons I told him he shouldn't be in: 1) Fund investing is boring. Let's be clear.
So I asked a few founders that I've worked with and they mentioned a word that struck me--because I've never heard any of the hordes of people in my inbox asking for internships, VC job recommendations and advice, etc. I think of venturecapital as a service business. mention about themselves.
After checking out The Information's "open dataset" on diversity in venturecapital , I felt pretty disappointed. Who is actually building a portfolio whose founders reflect the diversity of the greater population? A whopping 17 of the 32 companies (53%) have founders that fit into those groups. Not directly, anyway.
One of the least understood parts of the venturecapital industry and venturecapital firms is how investment decisions actually get made. The beauty of venturecapital is that on any given deal I can only lose one times my money. I need to bet on things that could help create an industry.”
House Committee on Financial Services Hearing, Beyond Silicon Valley: Expanding Access to Capital AcrossAmerica On March 25, 2025, Revolutions Chairman and CEO, Steve Case, testified before the Committee during a session examining policy proposals to improve capital access. Watch the hearing and read his full testimony here andbelow.
I entered venturecapital with some beliefs – many of which still hold true (such as ‘your LPs are your business partners, not your customers’). The dominance (in scale) of the multibillion dollar AUM holders, who are often underwriting to lower outcomes and needing to put more capital to work.
Today's top founders will undoubtedly start something new in the future, but they won't make up the majority of innovators going forward--just as prior generations of venture backed founders don't make up a majority of those who are succeeding today. I didn’t say venture investing was easy—but at least we got a look.)
One is “tentpole company,” or a category-defining startup that helps put their hometown on the map, both for investors and future generations of founders. Internally, we’ve begun using the term “founder-market-geography fit” to describe this idea. What is Founder-Market-Geography Fit? Let’s get into it. Plastomics: St.
The venturecapital screening call is an important step to get right in due diligence. In this Dreamit Dose, associates Alana Hill and I, Elliot Levy , offer five things we wish founders knew after screening over 1,000 startups in the last year. By Elliot Levy , Healthtech Associate at Dreamit Ventures Book Office Hours with me.
Female-founded venture firms have shown strong support for female-founded startups accounting for 28% of their deal counts from 2016 to October 2021 in startups with at least one female founder. venture firms allocated only 22% of their deals to female-founded startups. billion of total venturecapital.
Two prominent entrepreneurs share their views on starting a business plus 10 tips every first-time founder should have. A founders journey when taking on the challenge of launching a startup is filled with highs and lows.Their path to success will have challenges, setbacks, and moments of doubt.
This blog started from a series of conversations I found myself having over and over again with founders and eventually decided I should just start writing them.It I see founders who think they can be at every conference, advise multiple companies, do side investments in angel deals, leave the office at 6pm and have a balance life.
Long before diversity and inclusion became buzzwords, we decided to make venturecapital inclusive from day one at 500 Startups. The post Why Investing in Female Founders Matters Now More Than Ever appeared first on 500 Startups. Since 2010, we have expressed our commitment to those values in multiple ways.
From Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who ran a prosperous dressmaking business that eventually led to her designing and sewing dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln, to Anne Wojcicki, founder of genetic testing and analysis firm 23andMe, women have proved they have what it takes to reach the top of the entrepreneurial mountain.
Cincinnati, like many startup communities in the US over the past 5 years, has revitalized important regions in its urban core, created accelerators, built co-working facilities, pooled together angel capital, attracted VCs, involved educational institutions and solicited the help of important corporations in a more cohesive ecosystem.
There''s been some writing about how VCs and founders interact with each other and it inspired me to take a step back and reflect on what my role is supposed to be with regards to the investments I make and the founders I deal with. VentureCapital & Technology' Here''s what I came up with.
The idea of being a founder has never been so popular around the world, so how is that going to change industries and entire regions? This year we dove headfirst into the rise of corporate venturecapital, the changing nature of venturecapital education, and the important task of startup ecosystem building.
I’m a female founder. I don’t have a technical co-founder. These are all of the things I heard from a founder that I recently backed. So what about all of the above statements—things that founders widely hold to be true barriers to fundraising? Or that venturecapital is a meritocracy? This isn’t surprising.
If you haven’t yet heard about Female Founder Office Hours it is an initiative you should be aware of whether you’re male, female or any other gender identify. Female Founder Office Hours gives founders the mentorship and the role models to see that it is in not only possible but also to have a plan to make it a reality.
In Their Own Words: Female Founders and CEOs Discuss the Discourse That’s Missing (and Hitting) the Mark This year’s International Women’s Day theme is “ Inspire Inclusion ” — a call to recognize the unique perspectives and contributions of women from all walks of life, in all facets of life, including the innovation economy.
Over the past month a colleague ( Chang Xu ) and I sifted through data on the venturecapital industry (as we do every year) and made a bunch of calls to VCs and LPs to confirm our hypotheses. As a result of the IPO window shifting we saw a massive inflow of public-market capital into the latest stages of venture.
That was a question posed to me by a new analyst at a venturecapital fund. While there are lots and lots of really kind, generous people working in venturecapital--the recently retired Howard Morgan, Hunter Walk, Brad Feld, and Karin Klein for example--it's really tough to argue that there isn't widespread jerkery.
Part of the antidote for startups: employing a more prudent approach to raising capital and curating a diverse investor base. To shed additional light on this issue and its ultimate impact on startups, I partnered with the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation to ask proptech founders about their capital and strategic partners.
One thing that comes with being a venture capitalist is you see hundreds and hundreds of businesses. You get to have interesting conversations with founders and review business plans and then see how these businesses evolve over the years. But if you want to add some in the comments section on Medium and I’ll make sure to read them.
The product should be live if we hope to raise capital. A program to get your company 'accelerated'- selling faster, moving faster, which does not necessarily translate to capital. But 2012 me, a first-time half-Latino half-African-American founder from Costa Rica, coming from a university these guys had never heard of, nope.
This list needs no explanation: 1) You need a technical co-founder. This list needs no explanation: 1) You need a technical co-founder. VentureCapital & Technology' 2) We''re really interested in what you''re up to, but would love to see just a little more traction before we fund it. 3) No one else can do this.
Japanese fintech leader SmartPay has secured $7 million in a pre-Series A funding round, oversubscribed and led by SMBC VentureCapital. Other participants in the round include Japanese venturecapital firm Angel Bridge, European venturecapital firm Global FoundersCapital, and American venturecapital firm Matrix Partners.
We believe this consistency in leadership and intuition for where the markets were going in the heady days of 2019–2021 helped us to stay sane in a world that momentarily seemed to have lost its mind and since we have new capital to deploy in the years ahead perhaps I can offer some insights into where we think value will be derived.
and of course a relentless pursuit of helping founders succeed. So mostly we just had to listen to customer feedback from founders, VCs and LPs. She made the right decisions not joining back then because that founder empathy is the “++” that makes a difference in this business. So why now?
Not in the “founder friendly” culture of tech anyway. An examination of several high profile stories this past year about female CEO issues lays bare the other reason: It’s not “founder friendly.” It’s male founder friendly. Founders have to reckon with that. Travis should hire her back?? He should have been long gone.
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a founder that I backed and he was telling me how excited he was about his company. VentureCapital & Technology' He said the path was so clear that he could literally see it--and that''s the way he''s always been since I met him.
When the pandemic started, the conventional wisdom was that the capital markets would take a beating, including the venturecapital market for startup capital. I suspect what we will see is a very active venturecapital market, quite the opposite of what was initially expected.
In early June, I wrote this post explaining that I and we need to do more to reduce the inequality issues for Black people in tech, venturecapital, and startups. I think MLK day is a good time to talk about what has happened since that post.
It’s been a crazy journey for us from a small first batch of startups in our Silicon Valley Accelerator to running accelerators across the globe and investing in founders from over 76 countries. Over the past nine years, the venturecapital landscape has dramatically changed.
Founders are not machines. The rate is even higher among founders: Studies reveal that entrepreneurs are more prone to depression (30%) and anxiety disorders (27%) compared to non-entrepreneurs (Journal of Business Venturing). One Series A founder noted, “The peer-to-peer sessions were powerful. The feedback?
Dreamit Urbantech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman recently sat down with Jeff for a wide-ranging conversation on real estate tech, and a large part of that conversation focused on what founders can do to successfully raise venturecapital from real estate tech investors. Does the founder know how to sell into real estate?
One of the points I tried to make is that as venturecapital investors as an industry we seem to have a healthy disdain for public market investors. What is your revenue growth rate and what does this imply about your number of months of capital remaining? ” It goes like this: What is your net burn rate? ” Listen.
They started their company in LA but a couple of years after raising capital from Khosla Ventures in the Bay Area they ended up relocating there. Luckily for our community the founders decided they wanted to build their company in LA regardless of not having local funding from LA. Local capital matters.
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