View from Seed

JULY 13, 2022

I love LA, mostly because I think of it as a place that gave me a lot of opportunities, and a place that I find very inspiring, you can feel creativity everywhere, so I’ve found it to be a great place to be an entrepreneur. RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder? And your least? And your least?

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JANUARY 11, 2021

As high-conviction, seed stage investors, we are inherently relationship-driven, and we value meeting exceptional founders face-to-face. With the onset of COVID-19, we, along with the broader ecosystem of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, have been pushed to rapidly adapt, forge connections, and do our jobs remotely.

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MARCH 29, 2016

Tracking this metric allows entrepreneurs to identify their most effective applicant sources for certain types of positions. A founder will likely be leading these outreach efforts during the early stages of a company, and should always be tracking the percentage of people responding to the notes.

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APRIL 30, 2015

From a company milestones perspective, entrepreneurs who take on venture debt are almost always thinking about raising that next round of capital from other institutions. GM: The model is more about the relationship with the entrepreneurs, the investors, and us as the bank, as opposed to cash flow or fixed assets to lend on.

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MAY 31, 2023

A couple of years later, as reported by the Harvard Business Review in 2011 , a survey of ~500 entrepreneurs in the UK found that serial founders frequently refrain from learning from their failures to minimize the psychological impact. However, it is important to consider the potential of failure in the early stages of building.

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Silicon Valley Cofounder Term Sheet Founder 156

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

My excitement as an early stage venture investor about what’s happening – so quickly – is that these tools put more power into the hands of creators rather than take away from them. Certainly, it’s important to acknowledge that there are real risks with the power of these tools in terms of their ethical use.

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JANUARY 5, 2016

This sounds tangential but is perhaps THE deciding factor for many early-stage employees or execs when joining you — perhaps alongside their insight into your talents as entrepreneurs.). Early Growth (Founding Team to ~20). What is our mission, and how do we articulate that consistently and succinctly?

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JUNE 30, 2022

AB: Balletic was founded by Anita Broellochs, who is a passionate and mission-driven entrepreneur, in June of 2021. RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder? Get to know the founders. RH: Founders, please introduce yourselves. . And your least?

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DECEMBER 6, 2018

Almost seven years ago, I wrote a post about the difference between a “no” answer and a “no yet” when pitching early-stage VCs. Parsing Seed & Early-Stage VCs. Increasingly some seed VCs are specializing in a particular segment of the “spectrum” of seed stage. [ When “Too Early” Isn’t a “No”.

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JUNE 16, 2015

Extraordinary companies can’t be built without extraordinary entrepreneurs , especially at the earliest stages. But just like various superheroes have different abilities, so too can entrepreneurs. It’s these entrepreneurs who have a steadfast vision from the beginning, stick to it … and turn out to be right.

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AUGUST 13, 2014

Doing so can help entrepreneurs not only secure funding in general but better recognize the pros and cons of taking money from certain types of individuals. They will have the ability to “see” the opportunity that the startup is going after unlike anyone else — aside from the entrepreneur — because they inherently get the space.

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MARCH 16, 2016

There’s Semantic Machines , one of the best collections of AI and ML minds in the world, led by serial entrepreneur Dan Roth. This is true when it comes to early-stage funding, but also as it relates to support platforms being built by local firms to help Boston-based startups. Want hardcore futuristic technology?

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Boston Early Stage Artificial Inteligence Semantic 215

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JUNE 16, 2020

And if an entrepreneur dusts off a pitch deck that was put together in February but temporarily put on hold, I guarantee that the first question out of a VC’s mouth after hearing the pitch will be, “Well, what about Covid?” Rather than being defensive, there are other opportunities to react. .

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APRIL 7, 2015

Recently, I’ve been mentally noting a few things that I observe VCs doing regularly that many entrepreneurs may not readily understand. Dirty Secret #1: An early-stage startup’s design actually does matter. But at the early stages, it’s surprisingly impactful.

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AUGUST 16, 2019

With the proliferation of multiple seed rounds prior to a Series A, these situations are coming up increasingly in the early stage startup ecosystem. One of the most relevant scenarios that this fear vs. greed lens applies towards is insider-led financings. Of course, true motivations cannot be entirely divined.

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Term Sheet Syndicate Syndication Early Stage 149

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DECEMBER 17, 2015

Takeaway 3: Identify your team’s current learning style (especially among any existing tech talent or leaders, but also more generally across your early-stage team). In terms of interest in your product: If this person is an early hire, they need some product vision to go along with a desire to build.

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JANUARY 26, 2016

With that in mind, let’s look at an illustration of these trends below, which demonstrates what’s been happening to early-stage financing rounds over the last 15 years or so. Series A investors invested quite early, often before product/market fit.

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DECEMBER 10, 2014

He is currently a second year student at Harvard Business School and will be focused on supporting the early-stage startup community in Boston and its schools. NextView Ventures is excited to welcome Dimitri Dadiomov to the team as an MBA Associate. He’ll work with NextView through his final semester at HBS.

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JULY 24, 2015

We pulled together a lineup of A-list speakers, healined by TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer, Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah, and Spark Capital founder and partner Bijan Sabet, among other very talented entrepreneurs and thinkers. Lastly, Boston will ultimately succeed on the backs of its entrepreneurs and their companies.

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Boston Cofounder B2C PR 120

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DECEMBER 1, 2015

The NextView podcast Traction explores the clever, creative, and atypical things entrepreneurs do to make initial progress against the odds. We compare and contrast software to hardware in this episode, examining three core aspects of building any company: Building early products (customer dev, prototypes, etc.).

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AUGUST 20, 2014

It seems like a high-class problem for an entrepreneur to be able to influence round composition, and it is. How should an entrepreneur think about the different types of investors affecting their seed and Series A rounds? Lots of credibility, even at a very early stage. Definition: This is the case when a large VC (i.e.

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Startup Syndicate Syndication Boston 301

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JUNE 10, 2020

As we’ve shared, we intentionally wanted to flip the traditional Accelerator model on its head and offer a unique offering for entrepreneurs at the earliest of stages. So in this blog post, we wanted to expand upon three aspects that aren’t typical to the usual Accelerator model. .

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OCTOBER 21, 2014

As the seed-stage startup fundraise process has received more transparency in recent years, ranging from published advice on how to raise seed capital to increased availability through AngelList, Funders Club, and various accelerator programs, I’ve noticed another trend emerging. Lower-Than-Market Value. Above-Market Value.

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APRIL 16, 2015

An easy way to think about it is that value over time doesn’t go up and to the right in a straight line like this: Instead, it’s more of a stair step like this: So, what are the value inflection points that create the stair steps, and how does one think about it at the earliest stages? These might include: Bring on a technical co-founder.

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SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

With plenty of resources available for entrepreneurs about how to craft an effective pitch deck for raising seed-stage capital from VCs, often what’s left out are some of the tactical components of an initial meeting. This requires arriving at the office a few minutes early which, surprisingly, doesn’t consistently happen.

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Technical Review Entrepreneur Due Diligence Seed Stage 308

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MAY 14, 2019

Some investors are really great after PMF, but are not great before PMF, even if they work at early stage funds. There is obviously a balance here, as you probably got to where you are because you are a run-through-walls kind of entrepreneur. Third, you want to work with investors that are along for the twists and turns.

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JANUARY 13, 2015

When you are thinking about joining an early stage company, how should you be evaluating the risk of the overall company? How should you be weighing the presence of a great founding team versus early signs of traction? Generally speaking, this is because of what it takes to get early distribution in these markets.

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APRIL 2, 2015

And since I’m an operator, not investor, I recognize just how valuable all the casual, daily discussions inside a VC’s office can be to fellow operators and entrepreneurs. Few projects in an entrepreneur’s life can lead to more scope creep and more agony over little details than the company pitch deck.

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MARCH 31, 2015

Editor’s note: Unlike the Ubers and Airbnbs of the tech startup world, seed-stage companies don’t typically have the valuations, awareness, or traction typically associated with press coverage. That said, coverage is important, and early-stage companies would be wise to work with local press in addition to national.

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JUNE 23, 2022

RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder? DC: My thoughts: Love him or hate him, Kanye West has a fascinating and highly inspirational life story that every entrepreneur could relate to. And your least? DC: Favorite thing: Seeing your input turn into tangible output/progress. Would you recommend it?

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JUNE 16, 2015

I was recently asked to sit on panel with my fellow VC peers and some top entrepreneurs from the Boston tech community. Generally, my advice to entrepreneurs is to avoid these situations. Leading up to the event, they published an article listing questions VCs never answer , as submitted by the community.

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FEBRUARY 3, 2015

These help address a common question which we frequently receive from entrepreneurs about how to create startup pitch decks for this crucial financial milestone. For context, last year, based on questions from our existing portfolio, we launched two board deck templates for seed-stage startups. That said, The Show isn’t just fluff.

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SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

success story Blackboard and veteran entrepreneur who’s held several COO and president roles at various startups. For most of my career, I’ve served startups and early-stage companies as an operating executive or advisor. It’s why every successful entrepreneur will tell you that focus is so important.

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MARCH 22, 2016

This is for the early-stage companies — the entrepreneurs with great ideas and tireless work ethics who feel like they’ve emailed half of the country’s news outlets with nothing but the rare “thanks, but not interested” reply to show for it. This one is tricker in the pre-revenue stage. The irony hurts. Pitch late.

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FEBRUARY 19, 2015

Special thanks to Rob May for sharing his advice to other startup CEOs and entrepreneurs. For similar stories, practical advice, and free resources created specifically for early-stage startups, subscribe to The View From Seed. I plan to focus less on the startup culture the next time around.

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AUGUST 26, 2015

Just yesterday, Adam Medros , SVP of Global Product at TripAdvisor and an entrepreneur advisor for NextView, just asked about when the next event will be. And although this is written for angel investors, I think entrepreneurs can only benefit by increasing their knowledge around these investors and hope you’ll continue reading if that’s you.

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Technical Review Angel Investor Software Review Silicon Valley 120

View from Seed

AUGUST 26, 2015

Just yesterday, Adam Medros , SVP of Global Product at TripAdvisor and an entrepreneur advisor for NextView, just asked about when the next event will be. And although this is written for angel investors, I think entrepreneurs can only benefit by increasing their knowledge around these investors and hope you’ll continue reading if that’s you.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Angel Investor Software Review Silicon Valley 120