The startup world is one where it’s easy to miss the forest through the trees. Starting something from nothing is extremely difficult, and the time and detail it takes in raising capital, coding, talking to customers, and hiring a team in the early days is immense.

Life is just too short to work with jerks. The idiosyncratic risk of working with egomaniacs is real and sometimes unknowable after the docs have closed. Egos can take a company down. Founders can turn rogue and go their own way because of course who knows better than them how to run a business. VCs can for selfish reasons turn on a company and create such massive negative signaling risk (if they are leads or large enough on cap table) that a founding team can’t raise additional capital needed to finance their current scaling growth.

What is the best question founders can ask a VC before bringing them onto their cap table? Easy: “Tell me about how you helped a startup through difficult times, even through a shut down. Could you intro me to that founder so I can get their thoughts?”

You and your team have just closed on a new round of capital. Some of you are tired and weary. All of you are glad to have it done. Now you can keep the momentum rolling and do the things that you’ve been wanting to do but didn’t have the capital to previously execute.

The world has a communication problem. At the slightest sign of battle or a hard conversation, many revert to a text, email or even not following up at all.

At Promus Ventures, we believe that having a well-thought out thesis on the macro economy and markets is key to navigating the path ahead. So we make it a point every quarter to refine our thoughts on the setup and make sure 1) our investors know our evolving thesis on macro outlook and 2) our portfolio founders also know these thoughts as well as the reality of the venture market.

There’s a myriad of considerations when investing in a startup but the “People” variable of the “People. Product. Potential” formula is by far the greatest and most important.

I recently had a first board meeting with a talented startup team. The deck was not overly lengthy. The meeting did not last more than two hours.

I was at a board meeting the other day of a startup scaling well, and we were discussing their external sales team and how they were quantifying and qualifying new inbound customers. The Founder/CEO stated the company was going to run a competition between existing investors as to who could bring in the most new leads in a year. At the end of the year, that investor with most legit intros would win.