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Gone are the days of the startup launch party. Remember those nights of trying to explain to a Techcrunch reporter why your app was going to change the world over thumping music and bad venue WiFi? RIP. Most startups know not to blow a bunch of money on a big party before they have their first users, but legitimate questions remain about what you do in its placeand how you open yourself up to the world that gets attention.
How do you get 150+ VCs to show up for something? Promise them some good deal flow, of course. nextNYC, the startup events platform I run, produces the largest formal VC/Founder intro event at NY Tech Week. Last year, over 150 VCs participated and were looking forward to having even more. ( Investors can sign up for a two hour slot here to get six intro meetings to founders.
You might feel like an imposter interviewing someone really successful, but its actually a great way to level up your own brand. In 2015, a then 18-year-old Harry Stebbings launched The Twenty Minute VC from his bedroom in London. No background in venture capital. No industry connections. No podcasting experience. Just a cheap mic, an internet connection, and two things: Curiosity and initiative.
In almost every single investment I’ve ever made, I can think of a singular moment in my relationship with a founder that, no matter what came before or what might come after, defined our relationship. Often times, it came in a very vulnerable and down moment for the founder—perhaps they just lost out on a big opportunity, had someone from the team leave, or they’re running low on capital before sales have come around.
This week, I got my wisdom teeth outall four of them. You might be wondering what took me so long. Im 45 and most people have them out between the ages of 17 and 25. One helpful bit of context is that until very recently, I hadnt been to the dentist since 1998. Heres what happened I never had a cavity growing up. I did a lot of things pretty perfectly growing upstraight As, never got into trouble, never started drinking, etc., and I got a lot of love an affection from my parents because of it.
Is your firm feeling like Two VCs enter, one must leave given the limited number of partnership slots? It doesnt have to be that way. Venture Capital Is a Team Sport: Navigating the Partner Track with a Collaborative Mindset I was talking to one of my VC coaching clients a recently promoted young principal at a firm that's likely to raise a much bigger fund next time around.
Recently, Lightspeeds Mercedes Bent offered founders some reasons why a VC might ghost a founder. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation that basically boiled down to VCs are busy and theres no upside to hurting your feelings or getting into a debate. The post was met with a bunch of founders responses, mostly from men, that equated a lack of response with disrespect.
I’ve made over 100 investments in my career and nearly half of those went into diverse teams. I’ll be the first to back up the notion that diverse founders have just as much ambition, drive, intellectual horsepower, creativity—you name it—than anyone else. In fact, you could make the argument that, because of their lack of advantages in other areas, the ones who make it to a venture pitch actually have more of these raw ingredients because they’ve had to in order to make it to the same destinati
Being a VC means not only honing your skills as a judge of character, assessor of business models, and calculator of risk, but it’s also a lot of difficult interpersonal communications, narrative creation, and long-term goal setting and positioning. While some of the hard skills and prerequisites to do the job can be taught by those around you with more experience, the latter activities often have to be figured out in a way that is extremely tailored to you as an individual—so it’s just not goin
These are the first marketing images of an upcoming movie that I star in with my daughter Mirren about an aging superhero that is absolutely too old for this s**t that winds up having to save some mystical star child. Or, it’s just what “generative AI” does with a series of uploaded images of the two of us if given some creative prompting. Enthusiasts will tell you that this is the beginning of being able to insert yourself into video games, recreate scenes of things that happen to you in the pa
A few years ago, I was at Techcrunch Disrupt and this guy taps me on the shoulder as I was chatting in a group. He simply extended a handshake and said: “Hi, sorry to interrupt. My name is Alan. My company is Bread and we make ad creative super easy. I’m sending you an e-mail with early access to the application because I see that you’re busy with this group, but I just wanted you to match the name and the face.
This is my daughter, Mirren. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Charlie O'Donnell - VC (@ceonyc) She’s the best. She was born 10 weeks early, on Labor Day, and like startups never are, has performed up and to the right nearly every single day that she’s been alive. We are incredibly lucky that she’s doing so well and we hope to have her home at the end of the month.
In June of 2019, I got a cold e-mail with a single link: “My name is Braeden Kelekona and I’m the founder of Kelekona, a drone service for passengers and cargo. Below is a link to the pitch video. I look forward to hearing back from you and hopefully scheduling a meeting here in the city.” I don’t have the original video, but from what I remember it was just an animation of what looked like a flying bus.
In February of 2017, Susan Fowler’s description of the pervasive cultural issues at Uber, after the company’s abject failure to address her sexual harassment complaints properly, finally broke through in a way that garnered the tech community’s appropriate attention. The company’s bad behavior was nothing new. Just weeks before, Uber was fined $20 million for recruiting drivers while publicly exaggerating claims of their earnings potential.
I remember looking at other people on the street the day after 9/11. Everyone was just so sad. It was a shared moment in time where nothing needed to be said, and all we could muster was a slight nod to acknowledge that what you were feeling, everyone else was feeling, too. It felt like things would never be the same. Yet, it wasn’t very long after before I was on a plane.
Every election cycle, you hear the same thing—Republicans are good for the economy and electing a liberal will tank it. This is especially the case this time around as we’re in the middle of the longest running expansion this country has ever seen—and no one wants the other shoe to drop. There’s a lot of fear that making the wrong choice will mess things up.
Across the world, various economic development organizations, government agencies, and non-profits are putting in admirable and well-intentioned efforts to develop startup ecosystems. They’re building campuses, districts, buildings, spaces, as well as running new educational efforts and contests—basically anything they can think of to foster the growth of new and innovative companies.
Board meetings at @amplehills are dangerous. A post shared by Charlie O'Donnell (@ceonyc) on Dec 20, 2017 at 8:06am PST When you're Ample Hills Creamery , the #1 rated ice cream shop in the country you can pretty much throw everything you've been told about fundraising out the window. Nothing seems to apply--you're not a tech company, you bootstrapped your way to millions in revenues before taking on capital, and you sell mostly through brick and mortar.
Classpass is nothing short of phenomenon--and it's particularly noticeable to me because I passed on its seed round. In my defense, I passed when it was Classtivity, a completely different model focused searching for classes. Obviously, the pivot worked out for them. Still, it's a bit frustrating to see them end their "Unlimited" option to the chagrin of many of their users--just a few months after raising their prices.
That was a question posed to me by a new analyst at a venture capital fund. Admittedly, I finished this person's sentence after their long pause. but the word "jerks" was agreed to as the direction they were taking the question. While there are lots and lots of really kind, generous people working in venture capital--the recently retired Howard Morgan, Hunter Walk, Brad Feld, and Karin Klein for example--it's really tough to argue that there isn't widespread jerkery.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio is on the verge of making NYC one of the most unfriendly cities in the world for technology companies to operate. It first started with Airbnb, which got caught in a crackdown aimed at people who turn "affordable" residential housing into full time hotel space. Don't concern yourself with the fact that Airbnb is simply an outgrowth of the lack of affordable housing--where no one would ever bother renting out their place if they didn't have to struggle to afford to live here.
'I''ve known Hunter Walk for almost a decade. He found me through my blog and I didn''t think he was real. Hunter Walk can''t be any blog commenters real name, can it? Turns out that not only is he real, but he''s one of the most genuine, thoughtful, and egoless people I''ve met in the startup world--a real breath of fresh air. I look forward to connecting with him when he''s in NYC and when I head out his way.
'The other day, I got a note asking whether I''d be willing to meet some "Head of New Things" at a big telecom. That wasn''t their actual title, but it was something like that. You''ve met them before. They''re new to the gig, super excited about all its potential, and getting out there selling founders hope for that one big gamechanging deal. But I''ve seen this movie before, so here''s how I responded: "Hi!
'There''s been some writing about how VCs and founders interact with each other and it inspired me to take a step back and reflect on what my role is supposed to be with regards to the investments I make and the founders I deal with. Here''s what I came up with. First, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my investors who entrusted me with money in the first place.
'The 1970''s was a boom for minicomputers. Minicomputers were "midrange" machines that were used in all sorts of industrial applications--manufacturing process control, telephone switching and to control laboratory equipment. " In the 1970s, they were the hardware that was used to launch the computer-aided design (CAD) industry ," according to Wikipedia.
'Last week, there was a Business Insider article measuring the percent of female founded companies that NYC seed funds invest in. Brooklyn Bridge Ventures came in first, with a whopping 61%. Lerer Ventures was second, with just under 20%. So, clearly, I''m making some kind of a portfolio-wide bet there, right? Nope. Well, it''s gotta mean something, right?
'I''ve closed three investments in the first Brooklyn Bridge Ventures fund that haven''t quite been made public yet, bringing the total to 13 companies. These companies didn''t announce their financings right away, and for good reason. They''re building up their PR plans to make the financing announcements part of a larger story arc. Announcing your funding without a larger PR plan is the equivilant to George Costanza saying "I love you" to his date and not getting it returned--"that''s a pretty
'Facebook is an incredible thing in many ways. It has over a billion people on it--a reach unlike anything in the social software space we''ve ever seen. The numbers of photos uploaded, likes per second, page views, etc are absolutely staggering. Its sheer growth is truly an accomplishment. Yet, when I think about its impact on our lives and what it enables people to do, I can''t help but be underwhelmed.
When people describe what they hate about networking, they often use the word “transactional” in a negative way. No one likes to sell or be sold anything—or to be only valued for your ability to exchange goods and services right there on the spot. That, however, is a very privileged perspective on time. People who can take the time to “get to know each other” without demanding anything right off the bat have both extra time and also enough stability in their lives to be able to forgo short term
I find level setting to be one of the most difficult things to do around any task or skill. Just how good is good? What are the best people accomplishing? How do you measure it? It comes up a lot with my coaching clients who aspire to be top VCs and are trying to figure out how to self-assess and goal set. I figured the best way to go about answering would be to ask the best of the best.
A lot of people ask me what I think of posting to Twitter these days… (I’ll start calling it X as soon as I learn to stop saying Battery Tunnel and Triborough Bridge). My general take is that it’s far worse than it used to be in terms of engagement and some people have for sure abandoned it—but it still really doesn’t have a replacement when it comes to timely events like news or sports.
The other day, I was watching an episode of Seinfeld and was struck by how dramatically different location-aware mobile phones have made our day-to-day existence. The entire plot was based around no one having a phone in their pocket. Watching the characters leave answering machine messages for people (and miss them), use paper maps, and get lost on the way to a cabin made it all seem pretty dated.
The pandemic and parenthood hasn’t been great for either my eating habits or my activity level—not to mention the two month grandparent visit when we brought Mirren home. Here’s my approach to my snacks: “I finished off this candy too fast. I can’t ever buy it again.” Here’s my father-in-law’s approach to my snacks: “I saw that you finished off the candy so I ran out and bought you some more.
“Personal Branding” The term is fingernails on a chalkboard-level cringe for many of the best founders—mostly because it feels most of the people who spend time building their personal brand don’t actually have much there there behind it. At best it’s boasting and at worst, it’s blowing smoke. Which means that most of the people who actually do have the most interesting and useful experience to add to the public conversation aren’t doing so.
In 2010, Antonio Garcia Martinez, the founder of AdGrok, wrote, “New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say.” That prediction obviously turned out pretty wrong, but it did drum up a whole lot of chatter about the right ingredients for building a startup community—about New York vs Boston on the East Coast and whether cities like Austin and Seattle would ever break through.
The science is clear… and so are the economics. Vaccines prevent the spread and severity of the COVID-19 virus with side effect rates at well below the instance levels of lots of other drugs people commonly take for things like birth control, erectile dysfunction or to keep their cholesterol in check. Yet, somehow, things like masks and vaccines have become a political hot potato—dividing the country in two on how to avoid a four (fifth?
Fundraising takes a long time. I’m a female founder. I don’t have a technical co-founder. I don’t have enough traction. These are all of the things I heard from a founder that I recently backed. She was pitching for a pre-seed round of $400k. I committed to the round, but I wanted to see her raise a bit more—at least $750k, but perhaps up to $1.5mm.
The other day, I was talking to a highly experienced female professional out raising money. It was super clear to me that she was incredibly qualified to tackle the problems that she was raising money to go after—but few people in the ecosystem knew who she was compared to other, more high profile professionals. There were other people who spend more time on social, doing the podcasts, videos and interviews—things that, while brand building, opened them up to more criticism.
Fund investing, like adulting, is boring. That’s the first thing anyone trying to raise a fund needs to understand, as well as anyone thinking about investing in one. The partner at the fund, the VC, gets to do the fun part—the meeting with founders, vetting deals, negotiating, helping, etc. You get, if you’re lucky, a Powerpoint and some financials once a quarter.
One of the core beliefs that I had when I started Brooklyn Bridge Ventures was that most of the next 50-100 important companies to be built in New York City were going to be started by people not on most VC’s radars today. To that end, my goal was to make the firm the most accessible VC fund in New York—showing up across diverse communities, getting rid of barriers to access like requirements for warm intros, and being conscious of which patterns of success I believe in and which only serve to r
There’s one thing that no one can ever take away from Adam Neumann—he was world class at fundraising. His ability to tell a story and gain investor confidence was unmatched relative to the underlying progress of the company. He exuded confidence told people he was going to change the world. It’s not actually surprising that investors bought into it, considering that for a long time, VCs have focused on one particular archtype of leader as being more worthy of venture investment than others—the b
I believe that the next generation of top companies are far more likely to be founded by people not on VC radars today. Today's top founders will undoubtedly start something new in the future, but they won't make up the majority of innovators going forward--just as prior generations of venture backed founders don't make up a majority of those who are succeeding today.
For the last two years, I’ve been pretty vocal about politics on social media , in my weekly tech community newsletter and on this blog. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more progressive—which is a big shift for me because I grew up conservative. More and more, I’ve felt the need to speak out—but the question was asked of me recently whether or not it does more harm than good for me professionally.
Whether you’re going through an accelerator or you’re at some kind of speed dating event, short “office hours” meetings present both an opportunity and a problem for investors. It’s a great way to get out from behind the e-mail and actually meet people face to face. However, it’s a terrible way to get your whole pitch in. There’s just not enough time to convince someone to invest and have a productive back and forth.
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