Visit a startup’s website, and you’ll eventually drift towards a few standard links, from About to Team to Contact. But among those options, appearing on almost every site, is one link that simply doesn’t belong with the rest: “Blog.” MORE
This is the first of several blog posts discussing pre-seed rounds. To ensure you receive the rest, subscribe here. In this post, I want to answer the question, “What are pre-seed rounds?” ” I’ll also address why they’ve become fairly common. MORE
The startup ecosystem is often full of hyperbole, which is perfectly understandable when you think about it. A population of founders, employees, investors, advisors, and others all aligned in trying to build large disruptive businesses is naturally prone to lofty, even over-the-top language. MORE
Apparel is currently one of the most fascinating categories within the Everyday Economy. It’s a $1T+ global industry undergoing tectonic shifts. We are currently seeing the most rapid collapse of retail since the Great Recession, due to the internet changing consumer demand and purchasing patterns. In 2017 alone, we’ve seen widespread store closures or bankruptcies from apparel retailers, including: True Religion. JC Penny. Macy’s. MORE
Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help. MORE
The journey between an initial idea and actually shipping can be summed up with one word: agony. It’s agonizing because you care — a lot. It’s agonizing because you’re building from zero, and that can be daunting. It’s agonizing because of all the thinking and rethinking, talking to customers and talking to the team, debating and kicking and screaming. You bite and scratch and claw at everything until, mercifully, you’re ready to go live. MORE
Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast. MORE
Josh Porter is the founder of What to Wear Daily , a service that helps you prepare for your day. He is best-known as the creator of 52 Weeks of UX and was also head of UX at HubSpot, by way of being co-founder of Performable (acquired in 2011). MORE
What will the future hold? It’s a question every VC asks themselves and the entrepreneurs they invest in. Some conclude that certain sectors or technologies — like AI, blockchain, VR — will define the next decade. MORE
note: In 2013, Rob Go published a flowchart articulating his VC decision making process. Below, we’ve updated that graphic with new information in order to stay current and provide more context and transparency around each node. MORE
A little under a year ago, we hosted an event called Angel Bootcamp that was a primer for folks thinking about getting into angel investing. It was really helpful for the community, and it is something we’ll probably do again, although not every year. MORE
We at NextView Ventures invest exclusively in a startup’s seed-stage round , meaning that many if not most of our deals are made alongside individual angel investors. These angels, however, come in many different shapes and sizes. MORE
I’ve observed what may be an emerging trend, at least in some startups, that I find somewhat unsettling. It has an impact at an individual level, a company level, and an ecosystem level. MORE
This post was originally published on the personal blog of NextView founding partner Lee Hower. Lee’s posts also appear regularly on View From Seed. Subscribe here for more. Most folks reading this will know that many startups were built in part with the help of venture capital. MORE
Ask a founder of a growing startup what they need most, and you’ll often get an answer along the lines of, “We need great people, and we need them fast.”. MORE
Accidental VC is a series of short posts written by me, Jay Acunzo. Though I never planned it, I somehow wound up working in VC as NextView’s VP of platform. MORE
At NextView, we’ve never been higher on NYC tech. Today, we’re excited to launch the State of NYC Seed — a comprehensive report on the ecosystem, authored by our own Tim Devane. Since joining NextView, we’ve talked often and excitedly about the New York startup ecosystem. MORE
Going to business school and becoming a startup founder are often positioned as conflicting choices by the media and startup bloggers. Some go as far as stating, flat out, that MBAs don’t make for good founders. MORE
Accidental VC is a series of short posts written by me, Jay Acunzo. Though I never planned it, I somehow wound up working in VC as NextView’s VP of platform. MORE
“As a seed-stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction?” ” I posed this question on Twitter in December and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high. MORE
Raising venture capital at any stage of company growth requires tremendous effort from entrepreneurs. MORE
This is a guest post from Stephano Kim , former co-founder of Web 1.0 success story Blackboard and veteran entrepreneur who’s held several COO and president roles at various startups. Many startup CEOs hire COOs or launch companies with a co-founder carrying the title. MORE
I’ve been meaning to follow up on Rob’s post last month highlighting the competitor slide as the least informative in an investor pitch deck. I’d like to nominate another: the market size slide, which is usually dominated by graphics like these: As investors, we’re considering the total addressable market for a given product or service immediately upon hearing a vision for it: How many users and/or customers are there for this? MORE
In recent years we’ve seen more and more corporations become more active or establish strategic VC arms. MORE
When thinking about how much seed capital to raise, we need a more sophisticated lens than just the old rule of thumb of “18 months of runway.” MORE
Today, we are excited to re-release an updated Hitchhiker’s Guide to Boston Tech ! This guide is a living and breathing site, so we make a bit of a push to update it on an annual basis to keep things fresh. MORE
Editor’s note: Understanding how to divide founder equity at a startup can be tricky, even to the point of reaching emotional riffs between founders. Below, Lee Hower offers advice for approaching these equity discussions objectively and properly. MORE
VC evaluation of seed-stage startups can seem arbitrary or imitative at times. Internally, the scarcity of tangible business metrics – product usage or revenue multiples for example – can make an investment decision feel daunting. Presented with various unknowns from any one pitch, VCs often lack an existing information infrastructure to examine in forming an opinion. MORE
Today we’re thrilled to re-launch our most popular resource ever: board deck templates for seed-stage startups. Last year, we released two different variations of the deck , both contained in the same resource. Since then, they’ve been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Based on that reaction, we wanted to continue improving the product through both additional revs/design and continuing to evolve how we think about board meetings in the first place. You can get a copy of our “2.0” MORE
Recently, I’ve been mentally noting a few things that I observe VCs doing regularly that many entrepreneurs may not readily understand. Below are four that come to mind, but there are probably a dozen or so that are pretty interesting. Leave a comment below if you can think of any more. MORE
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt. MORE
Editor’s note: At a recent team meeting at NextView, we looked at the high number of startups we invested in which were pre-product at the time. The question arose: What is a seed VC’s process like when a company is pre-product? The below article answers that question. MORE
A few weeks ago, Manu Kumar wrote an excellent post detailing the current state of the seed financing landscape. Read it – it’s excellent. I agree with most of the things that Manu wrote, and I’ve been thinking about the topic quite a bit over the last several days. MORE
As a child, I believed logical arguments were enough to convince anyone of anything. You just needed enough time to explain them in painstaking, rational detail—others would listen and understand. As an adult, I know the world operates on story first and logic second. MORE
Nearly all of the guidance for meetings with VCs is centered on the very first meeting: how to get it, how to prepare a pitch deck , how to run the meeting , etc. But then the tactical advice stops. What about the rest of the VC fundraising process? MORE
If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” MORE
For entrepreneurs setting out to raise a round of VC financing, with some diligent research, it’s reasonably straightforward to put together a list of target firms to pitch. MORE
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. MORE
Today, NextView Ventures is excited to release a pillar project in our Growth Guides series: pitch deck templates for raising seed capital. These help address a common question which we frequently receive from entrepreneurs about how to create startup pitch decks for this crucial financial milestone. MORE
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. MORE
Once a startup has raised seed capital, plenty of theories and advice exist on how to successfully raise a Series A. Recently, we looked at our own portfolio at NextView Ventures to dig a little deeper on how startups actually raise that next round of financing. MORE
Oh what’s in a name? Your startup’s name and branding become objects that represent your passion, pride, and determination. But startups change their names more often than their founders or teams might like, despite all the love for their current incarnation. So … why? MORE
You probably know them well. If you’re not already subscribed to a number of them yourself, you’ve seen pop-up messages—on any number of sites—that urge, beg, plead with you to sign up to receive them regularly. MORE
View from Seed
AUGUST 2, 2017
What will the future hold? It’s a question every VC asks themselves and the entrepreneurs they invest in. Some conclude that certain sectors or technologies — like AI, blockchain, VR — will define the next decade.
View from Seed
JANUARY 26, 2016
This is the first of several blog posts discussing pre-seed rounds. To ensure you receive the rest, subscribe here. In this post, I want to answer the question, “What are pre-seed rounds?” ” I’ll also address why they’ve become fairly common.
View from Seed
APRIL 28, 2015
note: In 2013, Rob Go published a flowchart articulating his VC decision making process. Below, we’ve updated that graphic with new information in order to stay current and provide more context and transparency around each node.
View from Seed
JANUARY 8, 2015
Visit a startup’s website, and you’ll eventually drift towards a few standard links, from About to Team to Contact. But among those options, appearing on almost every site, is one link that simply doesn’t belong with the rest: “Blog.”
View from Seed
OCTOBER 29, 2014
This post was originally published on the personal blog of NextView founding partner Lee Hower. Lee’s posts also appear regularly on View From Seed. Subscribe here for more. Most folks reading this will know that many startups were built in part with the help of venture capital.
View from Seed
MARCH 3, 2015
Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast.
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 12, 2014
Josh Porter is the founder of What to Wear Daily , a service that helps you prepare for your day. He is best-known as the creator of 52 Weeks of UX and was also head of UX at HubSpot, by way of being co-founder of Performable (acquired in 2011).
View from Seed
AUGUST 16, 2016
When thinking about how much seed capital to raise, we need a more sophisticated lens than just the old rule of thumb of “18 months of runway.”
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 3, 2015
Today, NextView Ventures is excited to release a pillar project in our Growth Guides series: pitch deck templates for raising seed capital. These help address a common question which we frequently receive from entrepreneurs about how to create startup pitch decks for this crucial financial milestone.
View from Seed
MARCH 19, 2015
If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.”
View from Seed
JUNE 17, 2015
I’ve observed what may be an emerging trend, at least in some startups, that I find somewhat unsettling. It has an impact at an individual level, a company level, and an ecosystem level.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 2, 2016
At NextView, we’ve never been higher on NYC tech. Today, we’re excited to launch the State of NYC Seed — a comprehensive report on the ecosystem, authored by our own Tim Devane. Since joining NextView, we’ve talked often and excitedly about the New York startup ecosystem.
View from Seed
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
Nearly all of the guidance for meetings with VCs is centered on the very first meeting: how to get it, how to prepare a pitch deck , how to run the meeting , etc. But then the tactical advice stops. What about the rest of the VC fundraising process?
View from Seed
JANUARY 5, 2015
Raising venture capital at any stage of company growth requires tremendous effort from entrepreneurs.
View from Seed
JANUARY 20, 2015
The startup ecosystem is often full of hyperbole, which is perfectly understandable when you think about it. A population of founders, employees, investors, advisors, and others all aligned in trying to build large disruptive businesses is naturally prone to lofty, even over-the-top language.
View from Seed
APRIL 30, 2015
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 17, 2015
Going to business school and becoming a startup founder are often positioned as conflicting choices by the media and startup bloggers. Some go as far as stating, flat out, that MBAs don’t make for good founders.
View from Seed
SEPTEMBER 12, 2017
Apparel is currently one of the most fascinating categories within the Everyday Economy. It’s a $1T+ global industry undergoing tectonic shifts. We are currently seeing the most rapid collapse of retail since the Great Recession, due to the internet changing consumer demand and purchasing patterns. In 2017 alone, we’ve seen widespread store closures or bankruptcies from apparel retailers, including: True Religion. JC Penny. Macy’s.
View from Seed
JANUARY 7, 2016
I’ve been meaning to follow up on Rob’s post last month highlighting the competitor slide as the least informative in an investor pitch deck. I’d like to nominate another: the market size slide, which is usually dominated by graphics like these: As investors, we’re considering the total addressable market for a given product or service immediately upon hearing a vision for it: How many users and/or customers are there for this?
View from Seed
DECEMBER 8, 2015
Editor’s note: At a recent team meeting at NextView, we looked at the high number of startups we invested in which were pre-product at the time. The question arose: What is a seed VC’s process like when a company is pre-product? The below article answers that question.
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 18, 2014
Once a startup has raised seed capital, plenty of theories and advice exist on how to successfully raise a Series A. Recently, we looked at our own portfolio at NextView Ventures to dig a little deeper on how startups actually raise that next round of financing.
View from Seed
OCTOBER 5, 2016
Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 23, 2016
You probably know them well. If you’re not already subscribed to a number of them yourself, you’ve seen pop-up messages—on any number of sites—that urge, beg, plead with you to sign up to receive them regularly.
View from Seed
JUNE 30, 2015
A few weeks ago, Manu Kumar wrote an excellent post detailing the current state of the seed financing landscape. Read it – it’s excellent. I agree with most of the things that Manu wrote, and I’ve been thinking about the topic quite a bit over the last several days.
View from Seed
APRIL 23, 2015
Accidental VC is a series of short posts written by me, Jay Acunzo. Though I never planned it, I somehow wound up working in VC as NextView’s VP of platform.
View from Seed
MAY 12, 2015
For entrepreneurs setting out to raise a round of VC financing, with some diligent research, it’s reasonably straightforward to put together a list of target firms to pitch.
View from Seed
JULY 9, 2015
Accidental VC is a series of short posts written by me, Jay Acunzo. Though I never planned it, I somehow wound up working in VC as NextView’s VP of platform.
View from Seed
DECEMBER 4, 2014
Editor’s note: Understanding how to divide founder equity at a startup can be tricky, even to the point of reaching emotional riffs between founders. Below, Lee Hower offers advice for approaching these equity discussions objectively and properly.
View from Seed
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.
View from Seed
JUNE 7, 2016
Today we’re thrilled to re-launch our most popular resource ever: board deck templates for seed-stage startups. Last year, we released two different variations of the deck , both contained in the same resource. Since then, they’ve been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Based on that reaction, we wanted to continue improving the product through both additional revs/design and continuing to evolve how we think about board meetings in the first place. You can get a copy of our “2.0”
View from Seed
AUGUST 26, 2015
A little under a year ago, we hosted an event called Angel Bootcamp that was a primer for folks thinking about getting into angel investing. It was really helpful for the community, and it is something we’ll probably do again, although not every year.
View from Seed
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. Below are four that come to mind, but there are probably a dozen or so that are pretty interesting. Leave a comment below if you can think of any more.
View from Seed
MARCH 16, 2016
Today, we are excited to re-release an updated Hitchhiker’s Guide to Boston Tech ! This guide is a living and breathing site, so we make a bit of a push to update it on an annual basis to keep things fresh.
View from Seed
AUGUST 13, 2014
We at NextView Ventures invest exclusively in a startup’s seed-stage round , meaning that many if not most of our deals are made alongside individual angel investors. These angels, however, come in many different shapes and sizes.
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 24, 2015
The journey between an initial idea and actually shipping can be summed up with one word: agony. It’s agonizing because you care — a lot. It’s agonizing because you’re building from zero, and that can be daunting. It’s agonizing because of all the thinking and rethinking, talking to customers and talking to the team, debating and kicking and screaming. You bite and scratch and claw at everything until, mercifully, you’re ready to go live.
View from Seed
JANUARY 11, 2017
In recent years we’ve seen more and more corporations become more active or establish strategic VC arms.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Oh what’s in a name? Your startup’s name and branding become objects that represent your passion, pride, and determination. But startups change their names more often than their founders or teams might like, despite all the love for their current incarnation. So … why?
View from Seed
MARCH 1, 2016
As a child, I believed logical arguments were enough to convince anyone of anything. You just needed enough time to explain them in painstaking, rational detail—others would listen and understand. As an adult, I know the world operates on story first and logic second.
View from Seed
JANUARY 13, 2015
“As a seed-stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction?” ” I posed this question on Twitter in December and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high.
View from Seed
MARCH 29, 2016
Ask a founder of a growing startup what they need most, and you’ll often get an answer along the lines of, “We need great people, and we need them fast.”.
INDUSTRY INSIGHTS YOUR PEERS ARE READING
155 
Let's personalize your content