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Leadership is More Than a Memo

Steve Blank

Chasing deal flow has resulted in many VCs leading the race to the bottom in startup ethical behavior. Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Engineering (one of my mentors and then co-founder of Epiphany), broke his foot skiing just as the company started. And how long would the change in engineering dress take? The next day?

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Steel In Their Eyes – Why VC’s Should Be Startup CEO’s

Steve Blank

None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “ Hail Mary ” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster. People skills. People skills. Fund raising skills.

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Does Your VC have an Investment Thesis, or a Hypothesis?

David Teten

But you must be doing real engineering of some kind. They exist as heuristics, but at the end of the day, deal flow trumps everything. In the battle for deal flow, the thesis is at the core of a fund’s value proposition. (Rare exceptions to $6M with extreme traction.). No ideas or prototypes. We think not.

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5 Flocks Of Investors Looking For An Enticing Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

This software platform is used by many local angel organizations for managing deal flow. As an entrepreneur, you simply use their investor search engine to find appropriate investors for your business according to location, industry interest, and other relevant criteria.

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On Funding?—?The Denominator Effect

Both Sides of the Table

You’ll find engineers out of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UCSD, Caltech or execs out of UCLA, Spelman, NYU, etc. So my advice boils down to these simple points: Make sure you see tons of deals. Don’t rush to do deals. to start their next company. You need to develop pattern recognition for what truly exceptional looks like.

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The NextView Ventures Manifesto

View from Seed

For example, in the case of one recent company that we’ve been working with for the last 7 months, we have sourced half of the new team members for the company, including their CTO, head of marketing, head of customer success, and a talented senior engineer. Belief #4: The Best Way to Spot Outliers is to be Thematic.

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Is gust.com a difficult platform to replicate?

Gust

As such, creating a functional clone of Gust (including all the features under the hood, and ones that have not yet been released), using world-class engineers and state-of-the-art, 2012 project management in Ruby on Rails, would take roughly 20 person-years from soup to nuts (figure about 1/3 of that in product/UX/UI and 2/3 in actual coding.)

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