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As we celebrate the seventh anniversary of The Seraf Compass, created to demystify and professionalize early stage investing, we wanted to acknowledge a number of related milestones achieved in 2021.
We sent out a survey to our Seraf Compass subscribers to ask for tips and advice for first-time entrepreneurs. We asked the question: "What advice do you have for entrepreneurs seeking angel investment and how can they best prepare for pitching investors?” Here are some answers we found to be helpful!
“This process works whether you’re enhancing a small community or an urban core neighborhood, and we’re proud of our partnership with Kankakee and Belvidere to make local resources visible to area entrepreneurs via Compass (in Belvidere) and the Kankakee SourceFinder.”.
She has an amazing ethical compass with heart, compassion and drive. So mostly we just had to listen to customer feedback from founders, VCs and LPs. Kara is a natural leader and loves taking ownership of tasks and over-performing. She’s empathetic and brings great humor to her work as well. I remember years ago trying to recruit Kara.
At least that’s where my internal compass lands. But let’s also put this into perspective. They were a little too fierce in their competitive practices against Lyft to sign up drivers. They seemed a little excessive in trying to make it hard for their competitors to raise capital. But let’s put this into perspective.
An opportunity to lead with compassion and set an example. Your workers will follow the lead, potentially driving commerce through your acts of compassion and goodwill. To make bold choices despite the business-related challenges you face, I recommend considering these hopeful (yet pragmatic) opportunities. It doesn’t have to be.
Wishing you peace, compassion and strengths. Today’s news is sad because it’s a side of the cycle we hadn’t really seen for a beloved San Francisco institution. It will help Twitter get healthier. And my best wishes to those affected by the correction. Transitions are hard.
It is incredible how much compassion I find when I am willing to put myself out there. Over a 15-week period, I call one person per week to catch up and share ideas with. I often express my fears or anxiety, looking for experience-sharing that could help me get back on track. Identify your energy buckets.
In a recent Q&A with EO members on Facebook Live, Rustand recommends compassion, both for ourselves and for others. In terms of pandemics, we remember avian flu (1997), SARS (2003) and MERS (2012). Think of the challenges you’ve already faced,” Rustand says. It makes perfect sense to be fearful at a time like this, he says.
A strong business plan and a realistic budget are essential for any startup – they act as a roadmap and financial compass, guiding your journey towards success. It forecasts revenue streams, anticipates expenses, and facilitates informed decision-making regarding investments, resource allocation, and financial management.
Creating a company culture that values the growth, vulnerability and compassion innate in all people. It is about performing actions that harmoniously impact the 3 P’s : people, profit, planet. Specifically, it means: Using companies as a positive force for the environment. Elements of Circularity philosophy have been in existence.
So, we’ve consolidated our investment knowledge and best practices into the Seraf Compass, a well-organized and easily searchable collection of articles, courses, toolkits, ebooks and books to help early stage investors make better investing decisions, minimize risk and improve returns.
Communication and Compassion. We’re considering staggered shifts of workers, so that there are less employees in the office at a given time. We’re reinforcing the importance of staying home if you are not feeling well or if someone you have come into contact with has tested positive.
This vision will serve as your compass, guiding all the decisions and actions you take along the way. Establish what you want to accomplish by laying out all the key s teps necessary to launch a successful business.
Consumers will find new opportunities for connection and belonging, as the fundamental human need for compassion and fellowship is increasingly facilitated by AIs that are infinitely empathic to everyone’s unique forms of weird. And consumers will have access to richer opportunities for personal development and self care.
Lead like a woman As a female leader, Saichelle believes in leading with empathy and compassion. Figure out what you learned – because there was some learning involved there — then move forward.” She understands the importance of connecting with her team on a personal level and fostering a culture of trust and collaboration.
Even contrasting views bring more empathy and compassion to a Forum when shared safely. Focusing a retreat on different beliefs is a rare type of “5%” focus and an excellent way to bring a tenured or stale Forum closer.
It’s the compass that navigates a startup through uncertain terrain, helping it avoid pitfalls and capitalize on opportunities. Real-time data analytics will allow startups to make quicker, more informed decisions, improving scalability and efficiency. As startups strive to scale, they’ll need precise financial forecasting.
Emphasize Human Traits The closing thoughts from Mo’s book, Scary Smart , highlight the irony that our human traits—happiness, compassion, and love—are crucial in an era dominated by advanced machines.
Every day, I feel like Im building toward a future where we combine science, imagination, and compassion to become real-world superheroesempowering frontline medics with tools that give them a fighting chance to save lives when secondsmatter. What has been your biggest challenge when growing yourstartup?
Approach each customer relationship as a unique opportunity Have you ever shopped somewhere and felt herded in and out or noticed a lack of compassion from the experience? They elevate the experience and tackle issues head-on. Every customer relationship is a unique opportunity, even when it initially starts with a negative experience.
My company culture — based on trust, openness, compassion and non-judgment — is directly informed by my Forum experience, which is also embedded in my experience with our Regional Council.
Their role is to navigate the energy and personalities of the Forum to enhance the trust and compassion of each Forum mate. Facilitators lead by example, unattached to relationships or a need for approval. Facilitators live in deep waters, and their 5% is going to be quite raw, as the Forum doesn’t have a history with them.
Over the last five years, the most active proptech acquirers have been: RealPage (nine deals), Lone Wolf Technologies (six deals), Opendoor (five deals), MRI (five deals), Elm Street Technology (five deals), Compass (five deals), CoStar (four deals), Building Engines (four deals), Lightbox (four deals).
In addition to articles and eBooks, the Seraf Compass makes various tools and checklists available for anyone to use. We have written quite a bit about the importance of thorough diligence and a professional and efficient overall diligence process. A key element is having a good diligence checklist.
In addition to articles and eBooks, the Seraf Compass makes various tools and checklists available for anyone to use. An area of diligence we talk a lot about is assessing the market and verifying customer demand. To help guide our investors through that process we have developed a Questionnaire for Checking Customer References.
When you’ve been through the trenches together you have seen one’s moral compass and know who you can trust in good times and bad. When it’s the former you find ways to work with them again and again which is why getting the band back together is often more productive than starting from scratch. Cherish them.
We sent out a survey to our Seraf Compass subscribers to ask for tips and advice for first-time entrepreneurs. We wanted to share some answers we thought would be helpful!
In addition to articles and eBooks, the Seraf Compass makes various tools and checklists available for anyone to use. As readers of our various articles know, we believe no diligence topic is more important than the evaluation of the team. So it comes as no surprise that we do not leave that important area to chance.
The shift from building a company to becoming an investor is an experience I’ve realized can’t all be learned from a playbook. It’s a massive shift I didn’t fully appreciate until I experienced it firsthand. As a founder, I was used to a fast-paced, high-reward environment.
In our business lives we’re having to deal with decisions that could have lasting impacts on our companies without any compass to guide us in the direction we’re heading . And they deserve compassion because whatever stress level you are under, your actions are going to make their stress levels just as bad if not worse.
Are you walking around looking for swashbuckling daredevils as investment targets? Do you assume that the process of innovation is a series of great leaps and brilliant insights? You might be making a mistake. Entrepreneurship is arguably much more incremental, and much less risk-centric than that.
But most importantly, how to make tough business decisions tempered with compassion for our people. We’re pressed to confront harsh business realities—how to keep the doors open, how to pay the bills, how to address staffing issues. Our People. The journey forward begins by recognizing that our employees are our lifeline.
Have you ever been in a situation where you are negotiating an investment with an entrepreneur and you can’t agree on the pre-money valuation? Any early stage investor who makes more than one or two investments will certainly run into this issue.
In Part I of this article we discussed several key concepts of fund investment strategy and how funds are categorized, whether it be by industry, geography, stage, specialty (e.g. social impact, corporate, etc.) or some other criteria. Now let's take a closer look at capital allocation strategy and the life cycle of a venture fund.
Early stage investors might not view it this way, but… until a company has some form of financial exit (e.g. acquisition or IPO), you are really more like a donor than an investor! Think of it this way: since there is no liquidity in early stage company stock, you can’t sell the stock and recoup any of your original investment.
As a deal lead, once you conclude that there is enough of an opportunity to merit potential investment, and around the time you start drafting the final report, you can push through the temporary euphoria and begin negotiating the termsheet.
As a newly minted manager of a venture fund, your initial response to the question “what are we busy about?” might be, “finding great companies, investing in them and waiting for big financial returns.” And, while your response would be directionally correct, it would be woefully incomplete.
Ari Santiago is an EO Connecticut member and CEO of IT Direct: A Compass MSP Company , a new company formed in 2021 after selling IT Direct, his original company founded in 2002. Getting to your highest and best use can be a long and winding journey. Here’s how to streamline that path.
Good decisions begin with good information. During due diligence, you will want to determine whether the risk level is low, medium or high for each area. For low risk areas, you shouldn’t put in any effort from a due diligence perspective. For medium risk areas, you might need to perform some cursory diligence.
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