the drawingboard [dot] me
Long Form
What the VCIC can teach us about Finding Good Investors.
Finding an investor for your startup is hard, and as I partly covered in my last post: What Tier is your Investor (or what to look for in an investor)? It involves taking a lot of meetings and dealing with a lot of rejections while at the same time ascertaining how much value-add the investor you are [...]
What Tier is your Investor (or what to look for in an investor)?
One question that I often get from founders is what ‘tier’ a prospective investor is. As in, what differentiates their prospective investor over another as ‘better’ or ‘worse’, relatively speaking, and on what basis. Just to clarify, although there is no formal ‘ranking system’ for the tiers of investors, generally speaking, every investor sort of [...]
The Importance of Good Mentors
The importance of having great mentors in your career or company cannot be emphasized enough. Mentors can generally provide you with a structure and feedback that school or books alone cannot provide. If you don’t have access to great mentors where you work, look for them in structured mentoring programs such as Seedcamp’s if you [...]
How do you issue the right number of shares/options to an employee or an advisor?
Most founders have desire to share their equity with people that helped them along the way, both as a thank you, but also as a motivation tool. However, how to share is always a big question mark for every Founder. The two most frequently asked question is, “How much equity should I assign an advisor?”, [...]
The Best Ways to Reach Out to an Investor
Getting in touch with an investor is probably one of the hardest and most frustrating things to do. It is usually, step 1 in a fundraising process. As such, it isn’t to be taken lightly… The worst thing you can do, frankly, is the non-descript email to the info@investorsdomain dot com email that goes to [...]
Setting Appropriate Milestones in an Early-Stage Startup
When looking to plan for your company’s growth strategy or to go fundraising, it’ll serve you and your company well to break down what you need to do in terms of projected milestones. Technically speaking, I believe a milestone is a future ‘marker’ within your company’s stated growth trajectory. Therefore, milestones, in the context of startups, are [...]
Managing the Legal Process in an Early Stage Startup
One of the most time consuming things founders have to do other than raise money is deal with all the legal paperwork pre and post termsheet that fundraising typically generates. Not only can the legal process be time consuming, but also it can be emotionally difficult depending on how many items are being discussed [...]
Why European startups are choosing New York over Silicon Valley
Originally Posted on The Next Web. This is a post by Carlos Eduardo Espinal and Scott Sage. Carlos is a Partner at Seedcamp, an early stage mentoring and investment program based in Europe. Scott is an Associate at DFJ Esprit, a leading cross-stage venture capital firm that invests from seed to late stage in European technology and media companies. Historically, when deciding where [...]
How much money should I raise from an Early-Stage Investor?
Raising money for your startup is never fun. It takes time, distracts you from developing your product, is fraught with emotional ups & downs, and doesn’t have a guaranteed outcome. Frankly, many founders would rather go jump into an icy lake than take another fund raising meeting where they aren’t sure what they should say [...]
How does an early-stage investor review your financial plan?
You are about to go meet an investor… you’ve read on the web and heard differing views from people on whether you need a financial plan… some say you don’t, it’s a waste of time as its all made up numbers anyway… others say, you absolutely need a financial plan… so you walk into an [...]
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