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The Importance of Proprietary Deal Flow in Early-Stage VC

Both Sides of the Table

Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? One of the major calibration pieces for me was where to find deal flow. As a VC you want to feel like you have “proprietary sources” of deal flow. It is not my proprietary deal flow.

Deal Flow 347
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Seed Deal Flow Tsunami And The Quick Kill

Haystack

As a result, I personally cannot keep up with all the deal flow. Surely, some will read this as unfair, and I understand that — so I wanted to write this post about how I sort through all the inbound deal flow and how my brain has been trained to fixate on certain threads and ignore others.

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Why Early-Stage VCs Should Be Careful About Intros from Bankers

Both Sides of the Table

Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? One of the major calibration pieces for me was where to find deal flow. As a VC you want to feel like you have “proprietary sources” of deal flow. It is not my proprietary deal flow.

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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. I’m sure engineering productivity took a big hit that week as cognitive dissonance set in. Among other things the book reminded me how important leadership is in setting startup culture – both consciously and implicitly.

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Find an Angel Investor, Without Going Through Hell

Startup Professionals Musings

This is perhaps the most reliable source of information on angel investor groups across the world, and the software is used by most of the other angel organizations mentioned below for deal flow. It boasts 595 member-managed groups and VCs, 30,203 investors, and 2,900 new company applications a month. Keiretsu Forum.

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

Steve Blank

Rolodex/deal flow (deal sourcing/ability to make connections for the portfolio). We want to find someone who has a lot of consumer internet product experience as either product manager, founder, VP Product, etc. Then take a year as a product manager in a startup in the firm’s portfolio.

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How I Got the Monkey Off My Back – Today Was a Good Day

Both Sides of the Table

I spent my first year developing proprietary deal flow and learning the business and then the Sept 2008 / Lehman Bros collapse / financial meltdown happened. I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 years ago. That company was Invoca, which just announced a $20 million fund raise led by Accel.