Saying “No”
I recently finished a two-week process with a great early-stage founding team that was solving an long-standing, exciting consumer-facing problem within a large market. I initially briefly met the founder and his entire team. We had two follow-up 45-minute conversations. He was prompt in our discussions, sent m
Funding Round Names Are Broken — Here’s a Proposed Fix
Why do we still have a myriad of confusing names for funding rounds in the private market? Each day we read about early-stage rounds labeled “friends and family,” “angel,” “seed,” “seed extension,” “seed prime,” “gap,” and “Series AA” just to name a few. And what exactly qualifies a
What Silly VCs Say (and What Founders Think)
It’s fun to bag on VCs (we deserve it). But some VCs ask silly questions. If you are a founding team, you’ve heard all of these at some point I’m sure. Hopefully at Promus Ventures we aren’t on this list.
Tweener Rounds
As we continue to move to a Frictionless Financing environment, there has recently been a lot of talk about “gap” investing, or what I call “tweener” rounds. At Promus Ventures, so far 25% of our new platform investments fall into these gap financings. We generally invest a minimum of $350K at the seed