#Scratchpad crunchbase how to

#Scratchpad crunchbase how to

The only people who do are the founders you invested in, but they would rather that you do your pro-rata… New founders want to learn from you and how to get money from you asap so they can focus on, you know, actually doing their fricking job which is building 10x value to customers Write to your audience: Founders do not care that you’re excited to invest.I swear, I say what I think to help you, I make the most complete content, I whatever else I am to you. I’m a nobody, but you know exactly what you are getting with me. He just puts out content which is good enough and that’s how you win (with the “be everywhere” strategy). I know “I can make better content” but the thing is “done is better than perfect”- whilst I’m thinking about being better, he has posted 10x more. tweet about product vs distribution… cough, Atrium?). It’s not that great, but he just keeps turning up and he even admits when he is wrong (i.e. Jason Kan is a little annoying to me, but the dude keeps making content fricking everywhere (he’s not an investor). The entire point of writing is to build a relationship with founders so they come to you for money when they are fundable to you. Know why you’re writing, be personable, and show up Think why you like their blog, come back to it, and copy them shamelessly till you know better and have your own style. Mark Suster at Upfront always does a great job. I like Rob Go at NextView because he typically writes what I would. I won’t go so far as to feel “I know them”. There are some VCs I know I will enjoy reading. They do not break through the noise.įor example, I’ve been reading and making content for a long time. The best sites are remembered.Įh sites are eh. I’ve learned that if you write awesome content worth reading it gets read. If you are going to make your partners/principals/analysts and god forbid, paying some content monkey to do it for you (Don’t bother- it’s a waste of money as the content isn’t worth reading) the content needs to lead to the specific outcomes you are looking for. It doesn’t have to be crazy long, it needs to be “worth reading”. This is the single best piece of advice I can give you. We will talk more about being interesting in other points If you write genuinely quality content, you can demonstrate you are a thought leader so you are more than a checkbook (allegedly). The best founders will probably check up on you. Prospective founders to invest in: Your other audience is founders who are getting to know you before you know they are interested.Prospective LPs: They check up to see how smart you are, especially if you tell them that your content gets you deal flow.If you’re a VC reading this, don’t be that dude.Īlways think about why you are writing these blogs. No one gives a shite about a press release. I mean the full-on normal press release with the about sections, quotes etc. One weird thing I find is that some firms write PR statements. Understand your audience / DO NOT write press releases Here are some observations having done a massive amount of dull as balls research and copy/paste.

Tips on writing your “why we invested” blogs a16z aren’t terribly interesting, but because I know everyone will be interested, I included them anyway Don’t ignore smaller firms just because they aren’t a big brand.

Quality does vary a lot! As one might expect, some of the large funds do a consistently solid job, but smaller firms actually can often deep dive into far more detail.

If their blogs looked like a press release, they didn’t have a snowball’s chance of being included.

Maybe they might have a few good ones, but life’s too short…

If blogs from a firm looked rubbish I didn’t include any.

The mega list of “why we invested”: I’ve split up all of the VCs’ blogs by firm and chucked in the logo to make things a little more pretty.

This is likely to be of very little interest to founders. Some pointers: I got annoyed looking for all these blogs and wondered why the heck write them if they are so hard to find? So I started writing, and well I ended up on a rant.The benefit to startups is to understand what VCs look for so you can get funded too. The value for investors is to gather learnings for your own decision-making process. This is a mega-collection of VCs sharing these thoughts that I spent a few days collecting. Tl dr: If you are interested to know why venture capital firms invested in startups, fortunately, many VCs write blogs I term “Why we invested” since that’s often the title they use.