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Funding Deal 101
Get upto speed quickly with the typical investment deal terminologies: SAFE, Cap table, convertible debt, pre-money valuation, anti-dilution provisions and more...
vc 101
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Choosing your Co-Founder
Are you choosing a co-founder just to raise funds? Or to actually add value? How do you split the equity fairly among the founding team?...
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The MVP Myth
A bare bones MVP may fly only in some cases. Today, the bar is set a lot higher and your interpretation of a minimal viable product may not suffice for the initial launch...
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No, They Will Not Come...
One of the biggest misconceptions and a sure way of setting yourself up for failure is believing you will attract customers just because your have built something really valuable...
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Selling a Dollar for a Quarter...?!
The recent funding-boom has ecouraged a lot of companies to spend (rather throw and burn) inexcusable amounts of funding money in "marketing", spending a lot more (multiples) on CAC (customer acquisition cost) than their best-case customer LTV (lifetime value)...
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Is Success = Funding Raised?
You are surely headed in a downward spiral, when your only criteria for success is the amount of funding raised (and that indirect validation by a VC)...
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Retaining the Customer
All the marketing dollars spent on customer acquisition are of no use, if you cannot retain the customer long enough to realize the life time value of the customer...
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Blitzscale Your Way to Oblivion?
We have heard pitches from umpteen startup founders that are hoping for a big funding round to just "blitzscale" their way to Unicorn status...that is just recipe for disaster, without geting product-market fit or positive unit economics...
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Strive for Product-Market Fit
Focus early on getting the product-market fit. We have even seen Series B & C companies struggling (and eventually failing), trying to get it right...
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Equity, Contracts & NDA
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of getting a good law firm early, to help you with incorporation, setting up the cap table and ironing out founders equity and early employee contracts...
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Principles of Product Gamification
Facebook is a great example of deploying game-design principles to drive virality and customer adoption - rewards and validation from "likes" and "shares" are some of the game-design strategies...
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Do You Know Where You Are Going?
You will save precious time and resources, if you know where you are going...the business plan is a venture's critical internal guide, and not just a fund raising tool...