Decoding the VC Perspective: Navigating Startup Evaluation Memo

A VC memo is a crucial tool for venture capitalists to evaluate startups. It allows to:

• Document the thinking: The memo forces the VC to think critically about the startup and its potential. This can help them identify potential risks or challenges and make a more informed decision about whether or not to invest.
• Communicate with their partners: The memo can communicate the VC’s thoughts on the startup to their partners. This helps build consensus within the VC firm and ensures everyone is on the same page about the investment.
• Track their investments: The memo can track the VC’s investments over time. This can help them assess their portfolio companies’ performance and make adjustments to their investment strategy as needed. It also helps to debrief the decisions in retrospect.

Overcoming Limiting Factors: Essential #StartupTips for Success

In reality, we see many examples that too much capital makes your startup unfocused, and it’s a curse, not a blessing. Getting funds at the beginning puts you in the wrong position of ‘spending’ money and not earning it. Minimizing it as much as possible is a smart move that helps build a healthy business. One that is making money and spending only some of it. It sounds too basic, but you will be surprised how many founders forget it after raising the first round. You wish to start lean and mean and keep it as long as possible.

Limited capital makes companies focused.

This is important when you wish to build a business and make it profitable in a limited time.

The main limiting factors for startups:

1. The management team – Can the founders and other leaders make the right decisions and drive execution that is focused and moving the needle to customers?
2. Focus – Focusing on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do is critical.
3. Part of that is keeping to play to your strength, not responding to others in the market, and failing to play their game. You can go deeper on the topic in Malcolm Gladwell’s book: “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” in a nutshell, you (as David) want to move the battle to your expertise so the odds to win will be in your favor.
4. Time – You got funding, and it’s buying you time to execute. If you can’t reach the milestone you put to yourself, it might lead to a path you wish to avoid (e.g., more rounds and no profitability).

As Henry Ford said:

“If you think you can do it or think you can’t do it – you are probably right.”

It’s always easy to come up with excuses and ‘reasons’ for why: more of X and more of Y could have been helpful, but if you are resourceful and got grit, you can win.

Knowledge, in this case, is half the solution.

Take ownership, focus like a laser, and good luck!

You Don’t Need Status Meetings

The most valuable and scarce resource is time.

As a young startup you must do your best to use it as efficient as possible because you have limited time to show traction and become a profitable business.

Now, there is no doubt that you need to focus and try to spend most of your time on real work. However, we all did it in the past, we get into a room of 5-10 people and everyone is telling the group what they did.

It’s such a waste of time! Even if each person is talking for 5-10min you got here 50-100min of boring meeting which is equal to a waste of time.

Why not have this updates in a tool that let everyone in the team to see what all the others are working on?

Lean Canvas Basics

The lean canvas is a tool that helps entrepreneur with forming their idea into a macro plan and later (hopefully) a full function service or product.

You can use something like a good pitch deck to do the same. The core in these tools is to help you articulate what are you going to do and how you are going to win with it.

Let’s have a look at the page below. You can click on it to see it on a full page. If you wish to work with such a template – scroll down and print the clean one that we got in the bottom of this post.

The idea here is to think on our idea and to break it down to the different aspects.

We will fill in short bullet points each section. If you have a co-founder or advisor/mentor to consult with, please do so. It will improve the final result. Also, show the result to many people that you respect. Each might give you a point of view you didn’t think about.

Google Launchpad Accelerator – The 3rd Class

In the past ten months, I’ve been busy working with startups in Google’s new program for startups, which we call: “Launchpad Accelerator“.

What?

In this unique program we doing our best to help tech startups build successful business.

How?

We are running this program by working closely with these startups and helping them with the most critical challenges. The analysis and guidance are being done by mentoring sessions. In these sessions we leverage the vast experience of Google’s engineers and other external mentors from top companies and venture capitals in silicon valley. Their value is huge and I’ll update here with specific examples.

When your startup is selected to the program, you get a two weeks at Google Headquarters full of learning and networking opportunities. After that, you have another six months of work with Googlers on your objective and key results. In other words, you get access to Google engineers, resources, and mentors. Which are all aimed to help you do your things better/faster/cheaper and make your startup a success.

Want Great Startups Ideas? Think On Problems!

A question I get from time to time is going around “How can you come up with a good idea for a startup?”

It’s the wrong question. In order to get to an answer you do not want to think on a great idea for a startup. Because this won’t lead you in the right path. It might be a cool idea that you and your friends think is wonderful but if it’s not a real problem in the real world, most chances are that people won’t find it useful.

If it’s not useful, you won’t be able to monetize it and build a sustainable business. After all, a startup is a temporary organization in a hunt of scalable, repeatable and profitable business model. So you want to improve your odds in this hunt by identify a common problem.

It’s not only that the better way is to look for problems. It should be a problem that you have.

The very best startup ideas usually contain three aspects:

1. You (the founder) want to have it. It’s your personal pain point.
2. You can solve it.
3. Few others realize that these ideas worth the time and energy to pursue.

Startup Pitch Deck

In the past 5 years, I meet with hundreds of entrepreneurs and developers that were starting a new company.
In many cases, it was during a pitch or mentoring session.
I learn a lot from these meetings.

One surprising learning was a common intimidation from pitching your startup. If there is one thing that entrepreneurs are really afraid from is this moment of true, when they need to sell.

Let’s not get into the why here but focus on what can reduce this stress.

If you think about it, it’s a way for you to gain trust and show that you can deliver.
No one (with experience) want to see that you got all the answers but investors do want to see that you are thinking on the right issues and you have a plan. It’s true, that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” but it’s still valuable to see such a plan.

Here is the template for a good pitch deck.

The one I will use myself and tell my kid to use.
You can feel free to add slides but please keep in mind that your presentation should not be longer than 15 slides as you want to finish it under 20min and leave room for open conversation.

A New Space For Startups In San Francisco

Today we are opening our new Space for startups in San Francisco.
I can see that you are asking, what?

Well, it is a place to explore the latest technologies and learn how to build successful startups. It a great feeling to build new things and especially when you have the chance to dream about something and than move it forward so it become a reality. I am excited about this place, as it will give us a good option to help more and learn more.

Look below who open it 😉

How To Kanban?

Kan-what?

That is the first thing you hear when someone is hearing about this for the first time. In my last two startups,  I used it and it works quite good for us. Like in Agile / Scrum and all the other methodologies, you need to try and take what works for you. The magic in Kanban is the ability to keep most of the ‘things that works’ and gain productivity. If you like to do daily stand-ups meeting – keep them. If you push new version to production every week – keep it and the list goes on. The power of Kanban is in the ability to improve the communication and to put everyone on the same page, or a board in this case.

The Kanban technique emerged in the late 1940s in Toyota. It was their effort to invent a new approach to manufacturing and engineering. Line-workers displayed colored kanbans (=cards) to notify their downstream co-workers that demand existed for parts and assembly work. The system’s highly visual nature allowed teams to communicate more easily on what work needed to be done and when. It also standardized cues and refined processes, which helped to reduce waste and maximize value.

How to use it in your startup?

Super Bosses Playbook

Very few companies got super bosses, but do we know who they are?
How can we find them?

Think on SNL and their amazing process to share talent and collaborate while each team member needs to push her parts so they will be aired.

I enjoyed this book by Sydney Finkelstein (Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dart­mouth College).
In this book, he analyzes the qualities that are shared by rockstar leaders who’ve transformed entire industries. They share a common approach to finding, nurturing, leading, and even letting go of great people. He used few interesting examples from different fields like football coach Bill Walsh, restaurateur Alice Waters, technol­ogy CEO Larry Ellison and fashion guru Ralph Lauren.

What super bosses are doing?