View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 9, 2019

He then very succinctly laid out how he was going to accomplish this, which is nearly identical to the first sentence of the company’s Wikipedia page and their subtext on google search results: “ 2U Inc., What I loved about his pitch is that he summed up both the market problem and the simple north star of the business in one pithy sentence.

Southern California 159

Southern California Phoenix Technical Review Seed Stage 159

View from Seed

AUGUST 17, 2021

New funds have formed, old market leaders are gone or walking dead. But the reality is that the more interesting the market, the more likely there is to be rapid and unpredictable change. But the reality is that the more interesting the market, the more likely there is to be rapid and unpredictable change. Patience is a virtue.

IRR 205

IRR Dilution Founder Portfolio 205

View from Seed

APRIL 5, 2016

Rachael is enrolled at the Startup Institute , an eight-week program that teaches its pupils the nuances of web development, web design, technical marketing, or sales and account management. Rachael is still searching the market for opportunities as a junior developer. She is looking for more than that. .

Founder 120

Founder Web Development Web Community 120

View from Seed

AUGUST 17, 2021

New funds have formed, old market leaders are gone or walking dead. But the reality is that the more interesting the market, the more likely there is to be rapid and unpredictable change. But the reality is that the more interesting the market, the more likely there is to be rapid and unpredictable change. Patience is a virtue.

IRR 156

IRR Dilution Founder Portfolio 156

View from Seed

JANUARY 2, 2024

So, I’ll kick off with perhaps a contrarian take on the VC market. But as the market as grown and gotten more efficient, everything has gotten much more blurry. This feels sort of like a mess, and during the market slowdown over the last two years, I think folks hoped that things would get “back to normal”.

Early Stage 177

Early Stage Valuation Distribution Founder 177

View from Seed

AUGUST 17, 2021

New funds have formed, old market leaders are gone or walking dead. But the reality is that the more interesting the market, the more likely there is to be rapid and unpredictable change. But the reality is that the more interesting the market, the more likely there is to be rapid and unpredictable change. Patience is a virtue.

IRR 136

IRR Dilution Founder Portfolio 136

View from Seed

OCTOBER 5, 2016

Marketing people love to swim with other marketing gurus. The one takeaway I can share with certainty is that the search for angels shouldn’t be a narrow and haphazard effort concentrating on purely financial motives and outcomes. Affinity by function. Software developers like to spend time with like-minded developers.

Angel Investor 332

Angel Investor Boston Seed Stage Syndicate 332

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DECEMBER 17, 2015

For the company, he’s led multiple tech teams focused on products like voice and image search, Google Search for iOS, Google Glass, and Android Wear. But whenever you do background searches, you should also be developing an idea of their story to identify who the person is. office, right in the heart of MIT.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Engineer Software Review Founder 120

View from Seed

JULY 28, 2015

The narrative I often hear goes something like this: “Consumer companies are all about great marketing, and Boston doesn’t have enough great consumer marketers.”. I asked the former Director of Growth at LivingSocial — who also runs a large startup marketing meetup in New York — to recommend three rising stars in that city.

Boston 120

Boston Marketing Early Stage Startup 120

View from Seed

MAY 11, 2016

Many second-time founders take a more deliberate, academic approach to searching for a problem. This is driven by either boredom or fatigue around the areas where they’ve built a business in the past, or else the founder knows too much about the market they are coming from. 2: Fleeing from the familiar.

Founder 159

Founder Cofounder CTO Hire Early Stage 159

View from Seed

MARCH 3, 2016

Editor’s note: We’ve seen a lot of demand for content marketing talent in our portfolio, including the need for freelancers and consultants. We reached out to a veteran content marketing consultant who works exclusively with startups to help. How to Hire a Content Marketing Consultant for Your Startup.

Hiring 120

Hiring Marketing Startup Portfolio 120

View from Seed

JULY 31, 2014

Typically, these patterns arise out of a combination of approaches by my partners and me: proactive searching for startups in specific categories, reacting to what entrepreneurs pitch, and translating valuable learning from making one investment over to making another. The internet continues the disintermediation of content creation.

Seed Stage 272

Seed Stage B2C Technical Review Disintermediation 272

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

They need to show their clients that their fees are justified in a market where it takes a long time to show outperformance. If you are raising money for a strategy that is in a relatively new and very trendy market segment, Fund of Funds are more likely to be intrigued. Some LPs are buying access to direct investment opportunities.

LP 309

LP Customer Early Stage Portfolio 309

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 3, 2019

We believe that fundraising is about searching for believers not convincing the skeptics, and the best way to succeed in that search is to tell a story rather than a just-the-facts presentation; the goal is to win potential investors over with their hearts as well as their heads. What do you do? Is it working? Why does it matter?

Seed Stage 159

Seed Stage Metrics Matching Search 159

View from Seed

JULY 17, 2019

There may be many fewer series A investors in your home market than elsewhere. The quality, network, or experience of your local investors is likely fairly different from those in other markets. The risk tolerance or expected pricing of investors in your home market may be markedly different from investors in other markets.

San Francisco 243

San Francisco Cofounder B2B Seed Stage 243

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

They make contrarian decisions, push faster and harder that I’m comfortable, or question advice in an aggressive search for truth. This attribute is super relevant throughout the entirety of one’s career because a founder can always be leveling up and changing markets benefit those that always maintain a beginner’s mind.

Green 280

Green Founder Search Entrepreneur 280

View from Seed

MARCH 1, 2016

Then, also in the 1880s, some clever American entrepreneurs decided to market a “fast growing, shade generating” plant to the overly warm citizens living the waltz-dancing climate of the south-eastern United States. Search lights would pass right through where the statue used to stand. million acres of land. then go do X.

Founder 120

Founder Technical Review Cofounder Non-Compete 120

View from Seed

AUGUST 2, 2019

Later, this authenticity helps the founder better deal with the ups and downs of company building, makes for stronger recruiting, and can help a founder see around corners as the market context changes. The second and related fun-ism is the “sophomore slump”.

Cofounder 168

Cofounder Acquisition Founder Matching 168

View from Seed

APRIL 21, 2015

Georgiades (Zumper): I think business school is more about soul searching than spending 24 hours building a product. We heavily underinvested in sales and marketing but have been able to reinvest and recover from that nicely … I think it is critical and make a big difference in the trajectory of the company.

Founder 120

Founder Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

View from Seed

JANUARY 8, 2015

.” As a result, most sit idly, gathering digital dust, perhaps getting the occasional company news article, but never gaining any traffic and never becoming what blogs really should be for startups: critical marketing assets. So the question needs to be asked: Should seed-stage startups even blog in the first place? That’s it!

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Startup Audience Leadership 120

View from Seed

OCTOBER 21, 2014

Like any economic transaction, the pricing of a startup’s seed round ultimately depends on the equation of perceived supply (in this case, the quality of the team, product, and market opportunity) and the demand (how many competitive alternatives there are to any one given funder, including non-consumption). Lower-Than-Market Value.

Valuation 336

Valuation Founder Seed Stage Angel Investor 336

View from Seed

JANUARY 11, 2017

It seems obvious but strategic investment only makes sense when that corporate VC is providing technology, market access, or other aid that cannot be obtained through a simple business relationship or from a startup’s other investors or advisors.

Strategic Investors 120

Strategic Investors Post-Money Valuation Seed Stage Cofounder 120

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 12, 2015

Competition is much less relevant than whether a market will evolve a certain way or whether the product can unlock non-consumption. In crowded markets, you want to help investors understand why the large number of names they might turn up in a google search are not as relevant as the 1-3 in the first list.

Due Diligence 120

Due Diligence Startup Early Stage Hiring 120

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 1, 2017

With a new market emerging around advances in neural network recognition of vocal inputs, efficiency may well be the core advantage that drives user adoption and so overall maturation of the voice sector. Speech is our fastest natural means of communicating.

Vertical 120

Vertical Differentiation Internet SEO 120

View from Seed

OCTOBER 7, 2015

You might be able to build a reasonably successful business by spotting a hole in some market somewhere, but it’s much more likely that outlandish success will be won by founders (and, really, people ) who are authentically interested in solving a problem.

Search 120

Search B2B Artificial Inteligence Semantic 120

View from Seed

OCTOBER 7, 2015

You might be able to build a reasonably successful business by spotting a hole in some market somewhere, but it’s much more likely that outlandish success will be won by founders (and, really, people ) who are authentically interested in solving a problem.

Search 120

Search B2B Artificial Inteligence Semantic 120

View from Seed

OCTOBER 29, 2015

In this episode, we talk to Gabriel Weinberg, co-founder and CEO of the search engine Duck Duck Go and author of the book, Traction , now in its second edition. Subscribe on iTunes , SoundCloud , or Stitcher. Can you use a framework and process to gain initial startup traction?

Framework 120

Framework Cofounder Startup Channel 120

View from Seed

JANUARY 11, 2018

Troops is similarly embedded into the workflow of sales and marketing teams — it’s the glue between daily internal conversations and customer interactions. In the end, we look for companies dramatically improving people’s everyday lives first, and then search for startups that design the business model around that transformation.

B2B 120

B2B B2C Vertical Portfolio 120

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FEBRUARY 19, 2015

In 2010, we were recruiting for a Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Backupify, and it was clear that many of the people I was interviewing wanted the CEO role. I called the recruiter running the search and told him I was going to step down and hire a CEO. (Disclosure: NextView was not an investor in Backupify.).

Founder 120

Founder Startup Cofounder Business Model 120

View from Seed

APRIL 7, 2015

That’s why early stage fundraising is about searching for true believers, not convincing skeptics.). So, by company-building standards, these companies appear to be early — but they aren’t actually that unproven, given their product-market fit or their initial growth engine. ” Ignorant advice.

Early Stage 120

Early Stage Founder Later Stage Engineer 120

View from Seed

MARCH 22, 2016

You don’t have the traction, the big-dollar investments, or the marketing staff to attract media attention. Read up on the tech news sites you’re pitching, then do a little soul-searching. The irony hurts. Yet often it’s positive press that helps grow your user base, build credibility, and get investors on board.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage San Francisco Startup CTO Hire 120

View from Seed

JANUARY 11, 2023

Time to set real goals, iterate through real product pushes, craft real go-to-market strategies, make real introductions to downstream investors, the list goes on and on. However, participants are empowered to market to future funders that we are absolutely willing to do at least our pro-rata in the next round.

Programming 156

Programming Sacramento San Francisco Founder 156

View from Seed

MARCH 15, 2016

Plain text emails have become the norm for sales and marketing emails that we send, and the response rate has been amazing. In a world of highly designed marketing emails, these plain texts emails stand out and feel much more authentic. But we ignore that understanding when we try to market our companies. Plain Text Emails.

Customer 174

Customer Startup Email Channel 174

View from Seed

AUGUST 2, 2017

after WWII, were all a direct result of the mass market adoption of the automobile many decades earlier. Innovation in search, social, broadband, and mobile & cloud hasn’t come to an end. The internet has transitioned from just simplifying the marketing funnel to redefining the actual products and services we consume.

Seed Stage 273

Seed Stage Portfolio Cofounder B2B 273

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 7, 2019

That’s right now in 2018 and year 10 of an expansion when we’ve been plowing hundreds of billions of dollars into the capital markets to try and boost activity. Well the thing that makes me 100% confident this time is different, is that our labor market is not adapting to what’s happened already.

Conversion 196

Conversion Alaska Dividend El Salvador 196