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JULY 8, 2020

Today I’m excited to announce the relaunch of our most popular resource ever: board meeting deck templates for seed-stage startups, now in conjunction with an investor update email template. Download Board Deck Template . Download Investor Update Email Template. Investor Update Email Template and How & When to Use It. We first released a version of the board meeting deck template template back in 2014 and then a revised version a couple of years later.

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APRIL 20, 2020

We at NextView Ventures are sensitive to the challenges which all startups face during these times brought upon us by the current Coronavirus crisis. As we have discussed elsewhere, the world of early stage investing is shifting from FOMO ( F ear O f M issing O ut) to FOLD (Fear Of Looking Dumb).

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B2C B2B Programming Seed Stage 342

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JULY 6, 2020

Since we first opened our New York office back in 2015, we have steadily increased our presence over the years ( Melody joined us in 2017 and Dorothy in 2018), and now roughly 40% of our investments are in New York.

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Hiring Seed Stage New York Bandwidth 207

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JUNE 23, 2020

“Be formless, shapeless, like water.” – Bruce Lee. I was on a pitch video call the other day when the founder asked me what the guiding principle for product was at Blue Apron when I was leading the team there, and my response was that consumer product experience should be like water.

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Product SMS Software Mobile 229

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in their own ecosystem. He'll also go over metrics we can use to measure the health of our ecosystems as we build more resources for innovators.

Metrics

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FEBRUARY 12, 2020

During the course of a fundraise, founders are likely to encounter a few questions from VC’s that seem awkward or even a bit unfair.

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Term Sheet Burn Rate Founder Partner 291

View from Seed

MAY 21, 2020

Fundraising for startups is a mix of selling both promise and reality. In some respects, one of the often non-intuitive privileges of a seed stage fundraising process is that the company is so new. There isn’t much history, much reality, to get in the way of a good story.

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View from Seed

APRIL 14, 2020

For the last several years, the early stage investing market was driven largely by the F ear O f M issing O ut, AKA FOMO.

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Early Stage Due Diligence Syndicate Syndication 239

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JUNE 16, 2020

We’re in a global pandemic. The simple truth is that all venture capitalists have told their portfolio Founder/CEOs that if they don’t absolutely need to raise capital now that they shouldn’t be out there attempting to do so. Wait until fall. Wait until 2021. Wait until the situation changes.

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Early Stage Venture Capital Distribution Portfolio 182

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MARCH 4, 2020

In a few months, we are likely to see the annual Forbes Midas list of top performing early stage VC investors.

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China Africa Venture Capital Partner 252

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MAY 28, 2020

Advances in technology and changing consumer preferences have long been transforming the way food is created, distributed, and consumed. Now, as COVID-19 revolutionizes much of what was “normal” before March, several trends in foodtech are experiencing tailwinds.

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Memphis Bankruptcy Distribution IPO 187

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MARCH 11, 2020

When a founder is raising money, he/she should expect that any serious investor will conduct some level of due diligence before getting to yes. This could look somewhat different depending on the maturity of the business. Seed stage companies will mostly face questions around the team and market.

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Due Diligence Term Sheet Seed Stage Cost 232

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

I sent a tweet out last week that elicited quite a few responses from both founders and investors: seed funds that don’t invest pre-traction =. — Rob Go (@robgo) November 4, 2019. I could hear the internet nodding in violent agreement. I thought I’d share a few additional thoughts on what may be driving this. First – there are a lot of seed investors out there that don’t actually want to invest in seed. What they really want to do is be a venture capitalist.

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Seed Stage Retention Founder Metrics 260

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JUNE 10, 2020

It’s early into the launch of our 100% virtual NextView Everyday Economy accelerator , but indications point to early success. First, we were pleasantly overwhelmed with submissions over the past few weeks since we opened up applications.

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Alabama Syndicate Syndication Miami 161

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MAY 14, 2020

Remote work has been a topic of discussion for many businesses in recent years, but little did we know that we were about to put all our hypotheses and reservations to the test.

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Management Wiki Employee Hiring 177

View from Seed

APRIL 27, 2020

In a period of uncertainty, the easiest thing to do as a VC is to be paralyzed by fear and do nothing. We can stay busy by expending time and effort supporting the existing portfolio, which is the right thing to do and a good use of time.

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Portfolio Stock Options B2B Seed Capital 181

View from Seed

MAY 29, 2019

Many of us in the seed stage ecosystem have noticed a shift in the way seed rounds are coming together. Historically, seed rounds were syndicated among several different firms.

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Syndicate Syndication Cap Table LP 284

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FEBRUARY 26, 2020

In previous blog posts I’ve written about the two main approaches to building a seed round syndicate – the subscription method (where an entrepreneur presets a structure with a convertible note or SAFE and recruits investors who subscribe to the round, all without a term-driving lead investor) and a term-driving lead investor approach.

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Syndicate Syndication Lead Investor Founder 207

View from Seed

MAY 11, 2020

Today, Monument announced the launch of their virtual programs for people looking to change their relationship with alcohol. You can read more about the company here and see their segment on GMA from a few weeks ago here. Our mantra at NextView is to “ design the future we want to live in ”.

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Portfolio Vertical Programming Software 172

View from Seed

MAY 14, 2019

A number of blog posts recently have mentioned this, but we seem to be experiencing a rise in repeat founders starting new businesses and raising seed capital.

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Founder Agile Seed Capital PR 274

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MAY 9, 2019

Throughout human history, our working environments have gone through several huge shifts. From hunters and gatherers to farmers and traders, from farmers to industry factory workers, and from factory workers to the modern day office employee.

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Hiring Employee Retention Email 265

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DECEMBER 4, 2019

One of my more popular posts in recent years was a long write-up on how VC’s get measured. It occurred to me that about 2 years has transpired since that original post and I thought I’d write a follow-up.

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LP IRR Distribution Portfolio 214

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APRIL 3, 2019

Original research on gender diversity and fundraising amongst HBS founders. Historically, there has been a general bias against MBA founders — a skepticism around their grit and hustle.

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Founder Venture Capital Programming Community 268

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JULY 17, 2019

This is a post about raising a Series A from an investor that is not based in your home city. Let me preface this by saying that if all things were equal, you would probably prefer to have a local series A investor.

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San Francisco B2B Portfolio Seed Stage 243

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SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. Here we are, at (one of) the final slides.

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Cap Table Valuation Dilution Seed Stage 226

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Like many things in life, the VC/startup ecosystem is one of cycles. Looking back over the last decade it’s remarkable to see how the emphasis has shifted across cycles and what the overarching narrative was.

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IPO Early Stage B2C Aggregator 214

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MAY 5, 2020

We’ve been pretty blown away by the initial response to our Everyday Economy Virtual Accelerator that we announced two weeks ago. Both the volume and the quality of submissions have far exceeded our expectations, and we are starting to schedule and conduct interviews this week.

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Founder B2B Analytics Programming 156

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SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Student loan is a generational crisis – there are 45 million borrowers in the U.S. on the hook for $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, tripled in the last 10 years. When we think about money in the context of everyday living for the next generation of consumers, it’s impossible to ignore the weight of the student loan burden. . Unlike many other aspects of personal finance, student loan is incredibly complex.

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Portfolio Government Finance Cofounder 221

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APRIL 27, 2020

In one’s everyday life, “work” is certainly one of the most important activities that occupies up to half (if not more) of the available hours of a day.

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Retention Marketing Algorithm Audience 156

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *.

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Seed Stage Engineer Restful Founder 221

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JANUARY 7, 2020

About a year ago, my partner David Beisel talked about how seed fundraising is no longer a local game , and that the best entrepreneurs seek out the best investors for them outside of their home market.

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Boston New York Marketing Aggregator 190

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APRIL 8, 2020

Last week, Rob Go was joined by Rob Stevens for a virtual chat on running businesses during hard times. Stevens has held roles across verticals such as head of sales, marketing, product, and professional services at five startups over twenty years.

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B2B Vertical Retention Agile 156

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MAY 24, 2019

An inevitable question that founders face is “how is your product different?” Whether it’s asked explicitly or not, most investors that you speak to have probably seen or heard of a company that does something pretty similar to yours.

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Early Stage Differentiation Product Founder 232

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APRIL 2, 2020

Last week we held a virtual “Lunch and Learn” with Melody and Lee where they had a discussion about what they’re seeing in the market in a covid-19 world, made some predictions about where we are headed in the next couple of weeks to months, and took some questions about the state of VC funding.

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Partner Marketing Portfolio Valuation 156

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SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. So you’ve covered the “who”, “what”, “why”, & “when”. Now it’s time to discuss the “where”.

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Seed Stage CTO Forecast Differentiation 204

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SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *.

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Metrics Seed Stage PR Leadership 200

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OCTOBER 28, 2019

Over the past few years, “pre-seed” as a distinct category has emerged within the early stage fundraising landscape. To some degree the best way to describe a pre-seed round is that you know it when you see it, as the definition is squishy… but most pre-seed rounds are characterized as relatively small ($750K or less), early in company formation (pre-product), and typically followed by a larger “seed” round ($1M-$3M) within 12 months.

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Dilution Finance Seed Stage Demand 188

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NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Meetings can suck. I know that you’ve been there. Stuck in a meeting which wasn’t productive. Not for you, and not for many (or even all) of the participants. Sometimes it’s a standing small-group meeting, an obligatory gathering that’s on everyone’s work calendar merely intended for reporting and not actually deciding. Sometimes it’s an all-hands-on-deck meeting requiring a large group to attend, but what’s going to be discussed isn’t relevant for everyone.

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Syndicate Syndication Portfolio .Net 187

View from Seed

MAY 2, 2019

As the seed stage that atomized and series A rounds have become larger and more traction based, the paths to series A have changed. The baseline path to series A has tends to look something like this: Raise $0?—?$500K

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Early Stage Dilution Valuation .Net 222

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FEBRUARY 24, 2020

Last week, one of our most recent portfolio companies, Ten Little , came out of stealth and announced its public launch. . Ten Little was started by Fatma Collins and Julie Rogers , a platform that aims to make finding the perfect fit for your child easy, starting with shoes.

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Finder Stealth SMS Portfolio 156

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JANUARY 23, 2020

Over the course of 2020, we are highlighting 20 innovators and entrepreneurs from the 20th century whose work continues to shape our everyday lives in the 21st century. . Unless you are a student of design or an aficionado of cars, you may not know the name Harley Earl.

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Design Engineer America Mobile 161

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JANUARY 30, 2020

One of the often neglected parts of fundraising is the process of doing due diligence on potential investors. Raising money is super hard. But assuming success, a moment will come when a founder will have multiple funding options. Partnering with an investor and/or board member is very long term commitment, and I’m always surprised by how little diligence founders do prior to signing up for what could be a 10+ year collaboration.

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Due Diligence Partner Term Sheet Founder 157

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FEBRUARY 5, 2020

In general, VC decision-making can feel like a black box, which can be frustrating for founders who are trying to manage their fundraising process and timeline. It usually involves many meetings over the course of weeks (if not months) with various members of the firm, and the process can look quite different from one firm to another. Regardless, your singular goal is typically to drive towards a “Partner Meeting” where you can pitch the story and vision to the entire investment team.

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Partner Seed Stage Restful Differentiation 155