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Founders might have to do 50 meetings to get a check. But you can make those meetings 10X better and up your odds of raising money by changing how you answer investor questions. Picture Francis sitting on Zoom. I have a list of 8 questions I want to ask the founder in my trusty composition […]
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Entrepreneur / Finance / Investing / Money / Small Business / Startups / Tech / VC / Venture Capital¶¶¶¶¶
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Antonio Garcia Martinez sold his startup for $10 million to Twitter just a year after founding. Then at Facebook, he was part of the rise of the most successful startup in the last 20 years. This week, I dug into Chaos Monkeys, his inside story of how startupland really works. The Biggest Problems Are People […]
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Entrepreneur / Facebook / Finance / Google / Investing / Money / Silicon Valley / Startups / VC / Venture Capital¶¶¶¶¶
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iWashie was raising $600,000 at a very attractive valuation. It was growing like crazy. But I passed. This company is a composite and I changed the name and some identifying details. But it illustrates a key point: the size of the market matters. An Amazing Startup iWashie is a SaaS product for car washes. It […]
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Entrepreneur / Finance / Investing / Money / Silicon Valley / Startups / Stock Market / Venture Capital¶¶¶¶¶
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How do you know if one of your investments is a winner? And when you find one, what’s the best way to double down? I dug into some real venture capital inside baseball with top angel Jason Calacanis on the latest This Week in Startups. One of the best ways to increase your returns in […]
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Want to make that 3 or 4x fund an 8x? Then you better have reserves. A new report from Primary Venture Partners shows that reserves strategy is one of the biggest drivers of returns in venture capital. Let’s dig in… From Good to Great (Funds) Partner Jason Shuman analyzed over 150 mature VC funds with […]
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Investing / Venture Capital / Finance / Startups / VC / Entrepreneur / Silicon Valley / Startup / Private Equity / LP¶¶¶¶¶
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I work for myself. That means no juicy bigco health insurance. But I’ve found another way — a Christian health share. Since 2018, I’ve been using a service called Medishare. Medishare is a collective of people that share each other’s medical bills. Health shares will usually exempt you from any penalties under the ACA or […]
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This morning, I opened LinkedIn and saw 26 new connection requests. Here’s how I decide who I’m actually going to meet. My Checklist 1) Launched product. No matter what kind of company you have, you eventually need to launch a product. I invest in software. Most technical founders can pop up a basic product in […]
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Corporations / Entrepreneur / Finance / Investing / Money / Silicon Valley / Startups / Venture Capital¶¶¶¶¶
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Yesterday, I was chatting with a wonderful young founder in New York. I mentioned trolling Crunchbase to find startups. “Wow, we need to get on there,” he replied. Today I’m going to show you the simplest way to get investors contacting you. It’s free, and it only takes about 15 minutes. When you’re done, your […]
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I started investing in startups in April of 2021, like a lot of other angels. But looking around 3 years later, many of them seem to be gone. I found an interesting data set from Jason Saltzman at Live Data Technologies. It shows a huge slowdown in new angels. The data shows how many new […]
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Angel Investor / Entrepreneur / Finance / Investing / Silicon Valley / Startups / Tech / Venture Capital¶¶¶¶¶
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“Cynicism is the coward’s way out.” Jason Calacanis Last week, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be on This Week in Startups some day? Maybe many years from now.” A couple days later, it happened! Jamming with JCal Host and angel investor Jason Calacanis was doing a Q&A session with some rabid fans. I […]
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