The 2 best answers to "what is a startup"?

Steve Blank - What’s A Startup? First Principles. [2010]

Your startup is essentially an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. As a founder you start out with:

1) a vision of a product with a set of features,

2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s the distribution channel. How do we price and position the product? How do we create end user demand? Who are our partners? Where/how do we build the product? How do we finance the company, etc.

Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. 

Paul Graham - Startup = Growth [2012]

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. 

To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale. 

This was an excellent "Invest Like the Best" episode

Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan

Fitness landscapes, COVID, and markets [an unfinished post]

[Note: this is an unfinished, very rough blog post i last updated on 6-16-20. Some of the ideas still resonate with me, maybe i'll properly update/finish it in the future 🤷] 

"I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup."

Marc Andreesen, The Only Thing That Matters

Early-stage pitch deck review

I frequently review early-stage pitch decks and want to sharpen my ability to provide meaningful feedback to entrepreneurs. 

This is the start of my protocol for thinking about decks.

Angel Investing / Venture Capital - Foundational Resources

Here is a list of the best resources I've found to learn about about how to

• Think like a VC
• Assess early stage start-ups
• Run due diligence

May they be helpful to you too 💫 

[Acknowledgement: This post is a formatting frankenstein. Someday I'll tidy it up. Blogger makes it so this is not easy and will take me non-trivial time]

Early-Stage Startup Pitch Decks

Photo by Ramy Kabalan on Unsplash

The following resources form the backbone of my thinking on early-stage startup pitch decks.

Organizing them here in the off-chance they may be useful to others 💫

Early-stage VC - Foundational Resources

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

The following resources form the backbone of my understanding of, and thinking about, early-stage venture capital investing.

[updated here]

Note 7-16-23: I have no idea why I duplicated this post to the link in "here" and kept this post. No matter, I'm still leaving this one published too.

Some research on adding value post-investment

Behind the Scenes at a VC Fund, Part 2: Helping Founders and Time Allocation

How much do VC’s help portfolio companies

1. Respond to the “asks” in the monthly update emails
2. Reach out proactively when they have something they can offer 
3. A regular meeting cadence - founders will talk about how their business has been going for the last few weeks. As the VC listens, they'll ask probing questions -- both to understand the business better and to help the founder clarify their thinking -- and suggest ideas or improvements or potential intros

Ways to help

1. Intros to prospective customers, job candidates, advisors, service providers, other investors, etc.
2. Comparables and benchmarks for running your business, including compensation benchmarks, business benchmarks (e.g. typical churn levels or salesperson commission structures), and office space comps.
3. Feedback on website copy, sales and marketing materials, product UI/UX, etc.
4. General business advice, including tips for hiring execs, fundraising, choosing KPIs, and so on.
5. Interviewing and helping to close key job candidates. Sometimes talking to a VC gives an on-the-fence VP the push they need to join a startup.
6. High level strategic guidance. Experienced investors have watched 10+ or even 100+ companies grow (and struggle), and they can see early signs of challenges of opportunities. Sometimes the most valuable aid an investor can offer is explaining what's likely to be around the corner in 6-12 months at a time when the founder is spending most their time thinking about tomorrow or next week.

Extracting More Value from Investors

Introductions to…

1. Potential hires.
2. Specific customers or partners. ("Looking for an intro to a Director of Eng or higher at Foursquare.")
3. Customers in a specific vertical. ("Looking for intros to mobile gaming companies with at least $2m in annual revenues.")
4. Experts that could help your company. ("Looking for info on handling security questions from Fortune 500 companies.")

Comps for…

1. Leasing office space. ("What is a typical price per employee for SoMa/downtown Palo Alto/etc?")
2. Equity and salary grants. ("What is a typical comp package for a VP of Sales who is employee #8?")
3. Commission structures and goals for salespeople. ("What's a good monthly sales quota for a product with our target customers and price point?")
4. Company metrics. ("What is a good goal for my churn rate?" or "What is a typical CTR for marketing emails?")

Feedback on..

1. Website UI, UX, copy, etc.
2. Mobile app UI/UX.
3. Sales decks, pitch decks, marketing materials, etc.
4. Resumes of people you're thinking of hiring.

Advice for…

1. How to make the most of various growth channels. ("What are some best practices for using Facebook Ads?")
2. How to approach your next round of financing. 
3. Which vendors to use for PR, SEO, Health/Dental benefits, etc.
4. General company strategy: product roadmaps, expansion plans, customer segments to target, etc.

Note on venture capital portfolio management (pg. 7)

1. Financing or exit transactions
2. Strategic advice
3. Teambuilding/recruiting
4. Leveraging contacts
5. Crisis Management

Strategies For VCs To Increase Startup Success Odds

Ways to help

1. Team Building: Designing and recruiting for a startup’s most important asset, its human capital base.
2. Operations: Enhancing administrative, accounting, legal, and technological capabilities.
3. Perspective: Strategy, competitive positioning, defining the target market, and scoping the product.
4. Skill Building: Building the right skills, especially for senior management.
5. Customer Development: Identifying and gaining access to the right customers.
6. Analysis: How entrepreneurs measure, understand, and report the performance of their early-stage companies.
7. Network: The cheapest and sometimes most value-added service that an investor can provide is access to his/her network, particularly to potential investors and acquirers.

Mastering the VC Game (chp. 4)

Strategy

1. “The VC can become the CEO’s strategic thought partner, teasing out the key issues, challenging the major assumptions, and generally pushing the CEO to step back from the day-to-day tactical, operational activities and focus on the true value-creating decisions that need to be made”

Recruiting

1. Screening candidates
2. Pumping networks for leads
3. Selling prospective executive 

Business Development

1. Introductions to flagship customers, tech partners, channel partners, strategic acquirers
2. As salespeople 

Future Financing

1. The VC can be a helpful coach during the follow-on fund-raising process
2. Most obvious thing a VC can do is write another check from his fund
3. Less obvious: make intros to other investors, serve as coach during the due diligence and negotiations process

2 blog posts on technical due diligence

The two resources below are some of the best, most-concise posts I’ve found so far to lay out more on running technical diligence for early-stage venture capital investments:

How to Do Startup Technical Due Diligence

VCs typically want to know the following:

• Are the claims made by the team in the areas of technology accurate?
• Is the team technically credible and competent?
• Is the organization capable of executing on their current roadmap?
• What are the technical strengths, weaknesses and risks of the company?

The final report is a lengthy document that includes 

• a summary of the technology developed by the company and its underlying infrastructure
• technology advantages and risks
• external dependencies
• an evaluation of whether the technology is best in class and its future roadmap
• a summary of the organization and the team’s technical credibility and capability across all product and technical areas
• product quality and development process and the degree at which future plans seem viable

Point Nine Capital - Tech Due Diligence Calculator 

1. Assessment
1. Code History
2. Agility
3. Monitoring
4. Compliance and Security
2. Learning
1. Intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness
2. Processes and Tools
3. Organization
3. Teaching
1. Leadership
2. Hiring 
3. People Management