The Importance of Momentum
I was visiting with the founders of a company in the Promus Ventures’ community last week. The KPIs of this company have been growing well week over week until the last four to six weeks where the numbers have started to dramatically increase. There have been continual improvements to the product, but general
Top 15 Most Ridiculous Startup Phrases
Every industry has its impressive panoply of words that somehow become basic nomenclature. Startupland has its doozies, and here are the ones at the top of my list.
Tackle the Hard Stuff Head On
What coaches first teach you when learning to play football is how to properly tackle an oncoming player. Head up, back straight, make direct contact, keep your feet moving, and drive the player into the ground. If your approach is wrong, you can get hurt badly. Once you feel a stinger down your spine because o
Startupalooza
The annual Lollapalooza festival was just held here in Chicago with a record 300,000 attending the three-day event. I remember attending Lollapalooza in St. Louis back in 1992 w/ Pearl Jam playing a summer afternoon set supporting their still new “Ten” album. Me and by buddy Jeff in the 3rd row watching one
The Four Horsemen: Mobile + Cloud + Data + Design
The new paradigm is upon us. Just as social media is no longer an investment trend but now an essential tool in every business, so go the new four horsemen of software startups: mobile + cloud + data + design.
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
Frictionless Financings
I have been fortunate to invest as a VC and participate in startup boards for the last 10+ years. One of the many things that has changed (for the better!) is the continued smoothing of early-stage discrete financing events. But I believe we can do better.