All Raise’s Post

Just over 8 years ago, on February 3, 2016, Kevin Patrick Mahaffey texted me and asked if I’d meet him at the Creamery on 4th st in San Francisco. Without hesitation I jumped in a car and went to meet with this interesting human who I had just met a couple months prior to that. Instead of regular “catching up” Kevin opened with “hey, do you enjoy what you are doing right now at [your current company]?” After my lack of resounding “Yes!!!” he then simply said “Why don’t you quit the job you are not enjoying, today, and go start a company. I will be your first investor with $150k. Go incorporate today and send me the docs. Let’s go build something big together.” Knowing that Kevin has my back, I resigned on the spot… …and that’s how People.ai got started the same day. 8 years, YC, $200M in funding across 4 major rounds (where Kevin supported us every time, without hesitation), long bet on AI being right despite everyone (including a major investor) telling me to pivot away to PLG, cadences, forecasting, [insert another Silicon Valley term du jour], countless adventures together, and all the way to Kevin co-organizing my surprise bachelor party, I consider myself extremely lucky to have had Kevin as my first investor, mentor, advisor, “VC guardian angel” and one of the closest friends for all these years. His number is on my top 3 “call in case of emergency before you break the glass” numbers. With all of that, the only thing that doesn’t make sense is how come Business Insider managed to miss him all the prior years from top 5?!?? Well deserved, Kevin, and cheers to many more cycles around the sun building and having fun together! https://lnkd.in/ekBj3Fts

Day 4 of fundraising in public: I spoke to over 10 early stage investors yesterday and this is what I've learnt: 1. We are down-playing ourselves by calling ourselves a sales tool. We are creating new tech, new LLMs designed to change the way we interact with our computers and we need to make that the core of our business. 2. We need to narrow our GTM strategy. When a pre-seed investor is asking for our GTM strategy they are really trying to answer the question "where is my money going?". 3. The reason why pre-seed funds are asking for traction is because of LP pressure. VCs are being treated like startups by LPs. LPs are waiting to see fund performance before investing. Bonus: Kraft ventures's Lainy Painter Singh gave an amazing presentation that gave us a really strong insider scoop into the mind's of our decision makers. Sales leaders are very concerned about the efficiency of their sales orgs as they scale, we need to figure out a way to show quick & direct ROI to sales leaders using rhetora.ai. Finally, founders matter now more than ever. I've been getting a lot of feedback from founders liking the series and finding it inspiring. A big thank you to everyone supporting. A support system is crucial to staying sane. Big shoutout to Aliou BA, Federico Ken Kawashima and Fernando Corral for being an amazing friends and world-class founders. Psst investors, they are raising too ☝

You ever have one of those weeks where the last day is the craziest, busiest day of them all? It's one of those. Met some great people over the last week building great tech, onboarding onto the new Magic Sauce Online platform, reviewing it with investors, and generally helping us with feedback (yes, we've had hiccups, all part of the rollercoaster!). Chatted with a fair few founders who had a tough, tough January. So much that it seems a theme. I'm always able to make half hour in the diary if you're feeling burned out. Met some awesome ecosystem people like 🌈 Mike 🦴 Bank at the Underdog Accelerator helping people from 0 to 1. Also great to be onboarding the first people to the Diversity-X Investor Readiness spring cohort. Met with some great Raise Ventures alumni today that have some products that would benefit the IT reseller/distribution channel well now they have customers and a proof of concept (Tim Swainson can we have a virtual coffee soon? 😁 ). All that and managed to put an investor update out before the end of the day. I need coffee now. Keep fighting the good fight! What's your wins and challenges this week, and what's been bugging you? *edit..also found time to get involved with the Tech East fintech initiative on Thursday to create an environment for more fintech talent in the region. #startupstories #startuplife

From 0-10 mio dollars in revenue in 1 year! Last week I talked to a couple of VC's who had turned down this company in their early beginning. The reason was that the tech was not overwhelmingly good, it was AI but not something that really brought attention to the eye. The founders seemed great and had clear knowledge within the field. Yet they had very low traction. They received numerous rejections yet ended up finding someone who believed in the idea, them as founders and the market. They ended up raising a 2 mio dollar pre-seed round, then they launched their beta. Then came a 19 mio dollar Series A. Then a 80 mio dollar series B. Execution beats everything, technology market etc. If you find entrepreneurs who can execute and execute fast, they will typically make things work. Today that company is worth more than 1B dollars with investors like Andressen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital and it is called ElevenLabs. Thanks to the trust and financial help from Credo Ventures and Concept Ventures they were able to prove themselves and scale! Moral of the story, keep going, iterate and perfect your pitch and vision until you hear the magic words: "Yes we are in. "

Dear VCs and Analysts, It would help tremendously for new founders if you adhere to the below illustration. Please refrain from comparing new startups with big names that roll out of your mouth. If you know these big names because you read a lot about them, then you know jack. Here's a thought...what you know of these big names now, the big names didn't know it then. Sincerely, New founder...🤣 H/T to Pejman Milani for the illustration.

☕ This morning I was able to attend the "New to VC: Taking the Platform Route" hosted by nextNYC !! "New to VC is an educational series for a group of relatively new investors who want to be exposed to the best venture and startup thinking. Each event is attended by accredited investors and non-partner VCs that skew intentionally, but not exclusively, toward underrepresented backgrounds." 🎤 Charlie O'Donnell is a phenomenal moderator and brought the audience together to discuss the platform role in VC and the career paths around it with 3 venture professionals who have experience on both the investment and platform teams. 💸 The panel consisted of Olivia O'Sullivan, Partner at Forum Ventures, Cat Middleton, GP at The Venture Collective (TVC) and Lexi Quirk, Head of Product and Platform at 645 Ventures. 📓 It wouldn't be one of my event recaps without some takeaways right? ⬇ When discussing the importance of nurturing relationships in the ecosystem: “We ask ourselves, how do we get to know the people before they become the company?” When discussing what's the best way to move up from a platform role: "Have a very candid conversation with partners about growth early on." When discussing how to drive value to portfolio companies: "Try to be proactive... build a team and process that goes to the founders at onboarding and says 'here’s our playbook on X, here’s our playbook on Y' " 💥 And for my favorite - what to do to make sure you stand out to Partners? "You need to have skin in the game, and find a way to contribute to the bottom line as an operator." 💪 Be sure to follow nextNYC as well as these awesome professionals, especially if you're looking to learn from some of the brightest in NYC Venture Capital And stop if you've heard me say it before, Cooley LLP's NYC office is always so great to visit!! #VCplatform #venturecapital #nextnyc #newtoVC #femalefunders

New Post: Ex-Brex exec Sam Blond is already leaving Founders Fund just 18 months after he joined - https://lnkd.in/gq93yWEA - Sam Blond is leaving Founders Fund, as well as the profession of venture capitalist, just 18 months after he joined the storied Silicon Valley firm. In a tweet on Monday, Blond expressed his gratitude at the chance to work at Peter Thiel’s VC firm and explained, “Full time investing / being a VC isn’t the © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. - #news #business #world -------------------------------------------------- Download: Stupid Simple CMS - https://lnkd.in/g4y9XFgR -------------------------------------------------- or download at SourceForge - https://lnkd.in/gNqB7dnp

"Helping good guys win" That's what drives Tushar Agrawal , a seasoned investment professional. Listen in to this episode of Candid Bytes, as Tushar shares his insights on founders and startups, angel investing, the future of e-commerce and the role that tech and marketing has to play in it! You can't miss this one!

This week, the WSJ published an article about the rise and 'fall' of a well-funded unicorn idea, leader and leadership team, that has been labeled and praised as successful before even meeting the basic metrics of traditional business value creation and profitability. The failure rates in the investment world - a highly hush hush metric - are high and built into the investment business model with the 'winners' expected to make up for the losers. A quote from the article sums it all up: “Roelof Botha, a 23andMe board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, said the company’s big-spending strategy made sense when money was cheap. Now that it isn’t, “we’ve had to trim and focus on a smaller number of projects.” It's time to measure human capital and leadership team ability and capability thoroughly and systematically, just like financial models, quality of earnings and market size. At CapabilityIQ™️, we evaluate and measure human capital - leaders, and leadership teams' - ability and capability to execute their stated value proposition. As Peter Drucker or Edwards Deming said, "You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure." If the leaders of SVB, WeWork, Theranos, FRANK, FTX, and many more had been systematically evaluated and measured, would the business world have more "Unicorns"? We think so. Read the full article and learn how CapabilityIQ™️ can help your company evaluate and measure human capital and leadership team ability and capability: CREATE MORE UNICORNS!

Congrats to Angeline Vuong and Jaclyn Johnson on the launch and TechCrunch feature. If anyone is looking for a new way to Angel Invest, check out Cherub!