Now is a great time to start a business but not for the reasons everyone talks about…

In this market the opportunity cost is low. If you don’t find PMF in 18-24 months, you’ll go under quickly and can move on.

Closed two deals this week (1 sales automation + 1 Latam fintech) and it’s only Monday. Let’s see what the rest of the week brings…🚀

Here we go again! Second earthquake felt on the upper west.

Teeth chattering in my first NYC earthquake! 😬

Received two decks this week where founders claimed to have hit product market fit. Yeah! 🚀 Only thing is that these were both pre-seed founders with early revenue / tiny ARR 😭

Upon reflection, I love the extreme optimism and hope that these founders can keep it up for the…

Every Seed investor’s dilemma:

All my Series A buddies want to meet my companies early!

All my companies are too early for my Series A buddies 🫤

Financial models are back!

For years founders rolled their eyes when I asked them to take me thru the model…. ‘I mean we have one, but we are pre-seed so it doesn’t mean anything’

Yikes noooo.

I pass on a lot of companies where I like some things about the deal but have not reached conviction. I offer to stay in touch.

90% of founders don’t do this (I get it).

But the ones that do, I always revisit the decision when they reach out - did I make the right decision,…

One of our portfolio companies just raised a new round of capital that gives the co 5 years of runway. No idea how the new investors (tier 1) agreed to that but I secretly love it. One way to win is to outspend / take market share and one way is to squirrel away cash 🐿️

A founder we backed was turned down by 100 funds before he got to us and a handful of angels who invested in the pre-seed round. Company is now past series B and doing great. I always remind founders that fundraising is just a numbers game.

Each year my list of VC collaborators gets longer as more awesome investors launch funds, share deals and support each other.

But each year my list of VCs who suck and don’t play the long game and who I won’t work with, also gets longer.

Remember that everyone keeps their…

Venture twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

I’m interviewing successful exited founders about their startup journeys and the drivers of their success. 3 of the 9 founders got choked up and shed tears during the interviews. 2 were men. Founding companies is crazy hard and reflecting on the journey is often painful.

I have…

Many over-educated founders don’t pitch well. They’ve been trained that smarter is better and more detail shows that you are smarter… so they often complicate the pitch. In startup land, less is more and simplicity wins.

As a startup, the team you start with is rarely the team you exit with. Always good to think about that reality when you pick your cofounder/s and make your first hires.

If you received a soft commitment by a VC and the round takes many months to come together, you can’t count on those early soft commits. I’ve been part of this dynamic recently and it’s not fun for founders.

Investor by day, spring-equinox flower child by night…

If you had to guess, how many people are running SPVs on the FTX stake in Anthropic?