Working with Investors
Premature Scaling Kills Businesses
Venture capitalists sometimes make an error in directing their portfolio company CEOs to push resources to the limit and scale the business to immense size quickly, all to seize market share.
8 Questions to Help Set Expectations with Investors
One of the big questions that every entrepreneur struggles with is how much funding they should request from investors in the first round.
10 Ways to Make Your Investor Pitch More Effective
The average length of a funding pitch to Angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes.
Stay in Touch with Your Investors
Investors as a group have a common gripe—almost universal. Information flows from the company irregularly, in fact most often when the company is urgently in need of more money.
How Do I Make a Good Pitch Deck for Investors?
Don’t confuse the two: A pitch to be read must be very different from a pitch that supports a live presentation with you talking. Different media, different styles.
Why Bother with a Board of Directors?
No matter what your size, if you intend to grow your business into more than just a lifestyle workplace, you should create a board of directors. If you take money from knowledgeable investors, you will be required to create a board as a part of the investment process.
Investors Consider These 7 Elements to Be High Risk
If you aren’t willing to take some risk as an entrepreneur, then don’t expect any gain. Yet everyone has limits, and every investor implicitly has similar limits on what makes a startup investable, or one to avoid at all costs. If you need investors, it’s important that you understand their filters, and even if you are funding your own efforts, you need to recognize the red flags.
Quick Quiz: What Do Investors Cite as the Common Cause of Failures?
What do venture capitalists and angel investors cite as the common cause of the failures in their portfolios? That’s a great question, which somebody posed in Quora. And as I write this post, it has several really interesting answers.
Investors Measure Entrepreneurs by Cashflow Mileage
Cashflow is a basic survival metric for every startup. Investors check your burn rate to assess your efficiency, and project your remaining runway before you run out of money and into a brick wall. Don’t wait until you are almost out of cash before managing every dollar spent, or looking for the next refueling from investors. Desperate entrepreneurs lose their leverage and die young.
6 Important Questions for Your Potential Investors
There are no “right” answers for any of these questions. It’s important that you know what type of relationship you’re entering. Your investors are going to be your partners for the long-run.
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