May
10
What’s the difference between founders and professional managers? While they differ in many ways from experience to risk tolerance, etc, you can boil them all down to one element – opportunity cost. According to Wikipedia, opportunity cost is “the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone [...]
May
03
This morning I gave a talk to the Founderfuel teams on how to get investor ready and more importantly – how to get funded. Demo day is May 23rd, so everyone is gearing up for fundraising. Here are the slides: Getting investor ready View more presentations from Mark MacLeod
Apr
28
Startup life often boils down to a few key moments. From incorporation to first hires, securing investments, key partnerships and hopefully a big pay day down the road. What all these moments have in common is that they involve lawyers. I have worked with some great lawyers over the years but I have never once [...]
Apr
13
What do Acquisio, Freshbooks, Hootsuite and Shopify all have in common? Well, for one, they are all kick ass, high growth Canadian startups. For another, they all started out as web agencies. i.e. service companies. Each has a different story for how they transitioned from services to product. But each one had the benefit and [...]
Apr
10
This feels like an appropriate post to be writing coming off a long weekend… Startups are male-dominated. Goto any VC/ startup event and its 90%+ male. Tackling that is not the aim of this post (though as an aside, I will share that I am involved in a project that is addressing this head on – more [...]
As I’ve mentioned many times before: churn (the rate at which customers cancel their subscription) is the most important metric for any recurring revenue business. This should make sense. The longer a customer keeps paying you, the more valuable that customer is. In a previous post, we looked in depth at churn. Most companies when [...]
VCs say “no” a lot. In fact, on average, we invest in one out of every one hundred deals we see. The is a little higher for us thus far at Real Ventures, but still, the overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs who come to us leave empty handed. As someone who has spent the last 12 [...]
Lots of people, myself included, have written lots of posts on how to get funded. In fact, a whole section of this blog is devoted to that topic. While all those details are great, it struck me recently that there are three keys to getting funded: Team: A founding team (being a sole founder is [...]
Mar
16
In this World of seed / micro VC funded startups, round sizes are smaller than they used to be. That’s a good thing. But it can pose challenges when it comes to building out your management team. Either you can’t afford/ don’t need a full time exec or those execs won’t join because you don’t [...]
I recently prepared this template for one of our portfolio companies and thought I’d share it. I’m a big fan of dashboards as a quick way to get a grasp on our companies. I believe all successful startups are data driven. So having a dashboard that everyone sees regularly keeps people focused. This dashboard works [...]
The model for funding tech startups has changed a lot in recent years. While angel investing has been around forever, Angel list is blowing it up, making it easier for angels of all shapes and sizes to find deal flow and come together. VCs are also getting in on the action with many VCs participating [...]
Feb
21
My first startup was a B2B Enterprise software vendor. In those days enterprise software companies went to market by building a really expensive direct sales force with sales reps and sales engineers out in the field in key cities. We had little visibility into which deals would close when. And we routinely had to replace [...]
Often when I meet new SaaS startups they tell me proudly that they have grown their user base without “spending a dime on marketing”. While that is a great accomplishment and a testament to the quality of the product (product = marketing for great web services), it does lead me to ask why! Did the [...]
Feb
10
I’m sure this post has been written by someone before, but here goes. A few weeks back we had an intense speed-dating week at the fund interviewing the finalist candidates for the next Founderfuel cohort. We met some great people and out of all those interviews selected a group of amazing teams that begin their [...]
Feb
01
Recently a CEO in our portfolio asked me a question that I get often: As a startup with limited capital is it better to be cautious and stretch runway or should you be aggressive and reduce runway? The answer of course is “it depends”.
