Some recent reads that I’ve enjoyed

Fund Size is Still Strategy – The Growing Disconnect Between Founders and VCs (Charles Hudson) –

“The biggest understanding gap I see between founders and VCs today is this understanding of the relationship between the investor focus on terminal outcome and the founder focus on the microeconomics and unit economics….. The net result is a lot of of frustrated founders who don’t understand why they can’t raise with $1-2 million in ARR and investors who don’t understand why founders don’t realize they are in small markets, regardless of early traction.”

As Charles also notes, this is exacerbated by the rapid increase in venture fund size. Every dollar increase effectively needs another several dollars of startup exit value to justify the AUM growth.

Tips for Talking With Your Investors About Bridges and Extensions (Charles Hudson) – Charles covers a bunch of the questions VCs and founders should consider, and hopefully align on, when raising an incremental insider financing.

Beware the “Mediocre Recycled.” The Zombie Executives of SaaS (Jason Lemkin) – The type of folks who are at a bunch of companies, some of them actually good, for 1-2 years, never really getting the job done but polished enough to fake it for a while.

Skip the Line – make it easy for your VC to walk you in the door of potential customers (Ellen Chisa) – Bunch of practical things you can do to tee up your investors for sales help and make it easier for them to execute your asks.

Investor Relations Should Not Be Scary (Sean Byrnes) – Sean’s a repeat founder/CEO and gets to the heart of these conversations between founders and VCs.

“The expectations of most investors are very simple. Your investors want:

A credible plan for the business that you, as a leader, believe strongly in.

That’s it. That’s what they want. It sounds simple, but let’s break it apart to see what it takes to give that to them.”