Paris Rouzati

A Founder’s Guide to Seed Fundraising by Mike Wilner and Max Nussenbaum This book is for founders who are considering raising money, founders who are in the middle of raising money, and founders who have already raised an angel or seed round but find themselves needing to raise another one. It covers everything from the basics of seed fundraising for first timers to the advanced tactics that enable founders to create urgency for investors and close rounds quickly. This book is broken up into six chapters. If you’ve never fundraised before, you should read all six chapters. If you have fundraised before, you’ll get the most value out of Chapters 2–6. Chapter 1: Seed Fundraising 101: This chapter will give you a baseline understanding of the seed funding landscape, along with the implications of seed funding for founders, angel investors, and VCs. Chapter 2: How to Run a Swift Seed Fundraise Chapter 3: Fundraising Narrative Preparation Chapter 4: Researching & Engaging Angels Chapter 5: Researching & Engaging VCs Chapter 6: Pitching & Closing This book provides simple answers to address all of the issues. ~~~~~ ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost it so your network can learn from it, too. And follow me, Fazlur Shah, for more content like this. #startups #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #investing

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Sequoia Capital’s Product-Market-Fit Framework... Sequoia Capital’s Arc accelerator team put together a framework for early-stage founders that outlines 3 ways to reach PMF: 1️⃣ Hair on Fire: You’re solving an obvious but important problem in, likely, a crowded market and do it better than anyone else (example: Zoom, during the pandemic) 2️⃣ Hard Fact: You challenge a conventionally accepted fact and demonstrate an alternative (example: Superhuman). 3️⃣ Future Vision: You skate to where the puck is going. Your customers don’t even realize how much they need your solution until they use it (for example: Tesla). The Arc accelerator team at Sequoia Capital has explained each of these three ways with a case study. This is a must-read guide for all founders... 👇 Recently, we shared a financial model template and a database of 35+ different investor contacts in our Venture Curator newsletter. Check it out, link is in the comments. . #startups #founders #venturecapital #vc #product #founder #investors #funding

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We're excited to participate in the $26.5mn Seed round of Inversion led by Dragonfly alongside Faction VC, VanEck, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Metalayer Ventures, Volt Capital, HashKey Capital, Race Capital, Portal Ventures, Moonrock Capital, Breed, Topology Ventures, Bodhi Ventures, Lvna Capital, Escape Velocity (EV3), Folius Ventures and leading angels Inversion is pioneering a unique private equity-style model to make blockchain technology "invisible" to the end user. The company's strategy focuses on acquiring traditional, low-margin businesses and integrating blockchain solutions to enhance their efficiency, speed, and cost-effectiveness. This innovative approach aims to de-risk institutional investment in the crypto space by offering a familiar private equity product with a clear "margin of safety." The newly secured capital will be used to establish Inversion Capital, a separate fund of at least $500 million, which will finance future acquisitions. Inversion has initially targeted South American telecommunications companies and has submitted several acquisition bids, as blockchain could allow these companies to lower their data purchasing costs, among other improvements. The company's plans to target both private and public companies with large user bases, particularly in sectors such as payroll services, supply chain management, and consumer financial services. The company's first acquisition is expected to take place within the next year, paving the way for a new era of mainstream crypto integration. More here: WSJ: https://lnkd.in/dDWvKm-s Ventureburn: https://lnkd.in/dQ9efYfh

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Firstly, this isn't a post about Europe vs US. They're different beasts at different stages of development… However, as a European VC, it's critical to be connected to the US VC market. If you are, on average, you'll get bigger markups for your portfolio by taking advantage of the UK/US arbitrage among other things. Two examples of this are Lawhive and StackOne from our portfolio. Both have founders who've moved to the US and both have raised from GV (Google Ventures) with deep US ties of course. Same with companies like Mimica (Khosla Ventures), Carwow (Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel) and many more. You need to be able to pick the phone up to tier 1 US VCs and get them to meet your portfolio. So when Adam Shuaib, PhD, Millan Suri and I went to SF a few weeks back, we tried to cover as much ground as we could, meeting about 40 of the tier 1 US funds like Founders Fund, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz…. It takes time to build this network but the rewards are great. As you can see, we also went surfing.

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Myth #1 about Venture Studios “Studio investors are also funding the studio’s operating costs.” False. In a dual-entity model, investors don’t fund costs they build equity. Here’s how it works: suppose the Studio holds 30% of each startup. If the Fund owns 35% of the Studio, then the annual capital deployed into the Studio translates into roughly 10.5% ownership in every new venture. This isn’t an additional cost it’s an alternative cost of equity creation. The cost per equity point is actually lower than what a traditional VC pays to acquire stakes on the open market, often in startups that are not yet validated. And there’s more. Each startup built through the Studio generates learning, improving the quality of every subsequent venture. At the same time, the Studio itself accumulates assets, processes, and capabilities that create residual value making the Studio itself a valuable, sellable entity. Studio investors, therefore, are not paying for operations. They are backing an investment thesis: building equity instead of buying it.

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We had Tom Charman (Co-founder at Blok) on Ventures, Fresh out of stealth having raised $7.5m He explains why their star-studded team is building Blok "A lot of companies aren't particularly good at predicting how their customers are going to behave, but more importantly, they're not necessarily targeting the right customer." "Most companies will optimise for short-term benefit as opposed to long-term gain - what's actually happening is in the long term they're shooting themselves in the foot." "Nine in ten experiments are failing, it's taking too long to run experiments, teams don't know which experiments to run." "If we're going to move towards a world where it's multimodal interfaces with lots of different UI, knowing what to generate for who and when is going to become significantly more difficult." You can watch the full conversation by searching "Tom Charman, Co-founder @ blok: How We're Predicting User Behaviour Before Writing Code"

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