The flipside to “unfundable” companies are funds that waste the time of startups never actually writing checks. I won’t call them out publicly by name, but one prominent institutional lender just wasted 10 months of time of one my fledglings, and I’m sure they are sitting around as upset with us as we are of them. First and foremost, investors, if it takes you more than...
This week I taught The Realities of Funding to the entrepreneurs at The Land Accelerator. It’s a depressing topic, as it continues to be true that there are orders of magnitude more good startups than funders. In that talk the word “unfundable” takes a prominent role. This is a word that venture capitalists and many Angels use to describe the 99% of startups that they pass over...
Creating an investor pitch is one of those tasks that seems simple, but isn’t. I wrote a book on the topic years ago, providing slide-by-slide guidance, and that helps first time entrepreneurs, but not enough to create great pitch decks. So… I’ve launched a Patreon to take this one step further, to provide one-on-one, slide-by-slide coaching for anyone who would like the help. I...
I do a lot of teaching and the latest topic for me is teaching early-stage/Angel investing. As part of that we talk a lot about “norms”, as most of system for investing in startups is wrapped around norms more than logic. I’ll go into why that is some other time. What struck me a few moments ago was an LLC Agreement I was reviewing for an investment. Normally the reasons listed...
One of my lessons in The Angel Accelerator is called “Seeing the Future” and the main theme is the fact that entrepreneurs need to be able to predict what is needed by customers a year or two or three from now. Along the way we talk about how almost no one predicted the pandemic in 2007-2009 when the financial markets nearly collapsed, we talk about flying cars and self-driving cars...
In a recent post Fred Wilson of AVC.com talked about typos in his blog, and how their existence is OK. AVC is me. I am human. Humans are imperfect. So AVC should be imperfect.So there it is. I am letting it stand. Back when I was a young entrepreneur in the 1990s I used to obsess on perfection in my work. One of the big lessons in thirty years of startup life is that nothing is ever perfect. Not...
The Future of Heart-Powered Entrepreneurship interviewed me about my work at Fledge, Africa Eats, and The Angel Accelerator. Takeaways from this podcast include: Luni works with mission driven for profit entrepreneurs to help them launch and grow their companies.He recently created an accelerator for investors to help them invest in conscious companiesWhen people think about improving the...
My biggest learning from nine years of impact investing is the complexity of the space. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a software entrepreneur, i.e. a techie, and in comparison with venture capital for tech startups, impact is an order of magnitude more complicated. Ultimately the complexity boils down to two issues. 1 – Geography It used to be that 90% of tech investing was...
For years I’ve been talking about California Capitalism, how the traditional model of venture capital doesn’t work outside of the Bay Area, New York City, and Boston, and rather than just rant I’ve been explaining and implementing alternative investment models including revenue-based finance and holding companies. The latest issue of American Affairs magazine includes a deep...
In 2011 I left my life as a tech entrepreneur and began my work as a teacher, mentor, and impact investor. That change meant building a new network of contacts, and I started that effort with just a few dozen curated connections from the first twenty years of my career. Ten years later, I’ve been keeping a CRM database of (almost) everyone I’ve met and today the 19,001st person was...
