The complete fundraising guide, with strategy, rationale, and examples to help build your unfair financing advantage
Let’s be candid.
Fundraising is damn hard.
Especially as a first-time founder.
My first time, I pitched over 100 investors. I flew from California to Charleston, from Chicago to Austin, trying to find the right investors.
It took 6 months of full-time effort, sometimes having up to 10 different video…
It’s the investor version of “It’s not you, it’s me”, and a cover for the real reason
While fundraising, particularly for first-time founders, it’s not uncommon to hear the following phrase from investors when they pass on your investment opportunity:
You’re too early
However, in my experience, this isn’t really a reason. Rather, it’s a red herring that feels like an acceptable reason to turn down an…
4 next-gen banking tools you can start using today to improve your finances
If you have cash sitting around (i.e. not in an investment account) that isn’t earning 10% interest annually, today is the day to change that.
How, might you ask? It’s all made possible via defi and crypto lending. If you’re new to the space, I have another article coming shortly…
The visual “get smart fast” guide to understanding your options and key questions you should be asking
We’ve been hiring a lot lately for our companies, Learn In and BookClub. One of our founding principles is to bring people on who are aligned to our mission, and one way to help do this is by offering stock options as part of every compensation package.
Many of these…
Learning how/when to employ “Top-Down” v. “Bottoms-Up” communication styles is a priceless skill that will pay lifelong dividends
We all have an innate desire to be understood. There’s a reason supervillains are known for monologuing — they want someone to understand the genius of their brilliant plans.
In real life, a similar phenomenon occurs in communication where people believe it’s critical for others to understand the context of…
Figuring out what to do next depends on your physical and mental energy
I recently had a conversation with a first-time founder whose tech startup was on its last breath. She could see the writing on the wall and was trying to decide what to do next.
She had a handful of concerns she wanted to discuss, among them feelings of inadequacy and…
It’s selfish, and here’s why
As a pragmatic utilitarian with a lean process-oriented mindset, there’s much for me to love about the FIRE movement.
I love that it advocates for people to take an earnest look at their wants and needs and figure out every opportunity to eliminate waste.
I love that it encourages people…
The key is determining where to flex (hint: use the Triangle of Constraints)
When I was a kid, we had this huge golden retriever named Chance. Even though he was a bear of a dog (he weighed over 90 pounds), he had a relatively small mouth. …
And answering the question “When is the right time to quit”?
The idea for my first business came to me in January of 2014. I was working with my 6th manufacturing client at McKinsey, and realized the fundamental behaviors driving the problem we were there to solve mirrored the previous 5 companies almost to the “t”.
My engineering brain went into…
Determine if a business idea is worth pursuing by evaluating “tenability” v. “competition”
There’s a simple framework I’ve found helpful to work against when evaluating a new business idea — specifically when trying to answer the question:
“Is this idea worth pursuing?”
I use the axes of “tenability” and “competition” to provide an insightful evaluation of the idea.
