Call Don’t Write
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.
The “Heads Down” Fallacy
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 founde
The Curious Get It Done
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.
Startup Investor Updates (If Necessary, Use Words)
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.
Gamify Your Cap Table Investors
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 ne
VCs Who (Not Really) Help Out in Fundraising
As a VC, one of my many roles is to help introduce teams in which we have invested to a small highly-curated list of other strategic and VC investors for future financings.
The Startup Table (Get Your Folks Together Often)
As we wind down the year and people go their separate ways to celebrate the holidays, ask yourself this: does your entire team meet often to discuss mission, vision and goals? If not, this should be a New Year’s resolution high on the list.
You Began Building Your Startup Years Ago (You Just Didn’t Know It)
We spend a lot of time at Promus Ventures getting to know the founders and their background. We talk a lot about Founder-Market fit, the how and why of each person working at a startup.
Investing in London-Based Behavox’s Series A (post Brexit!)
Alongside our friends Hoxton Ventures, we are privileged to co-lead the Series A for Behavox, a London-based company that is building the next generation compliance surveillance platform for banks, hedge funds, traders, brokers and other financial institutions utilizing NLP, voice analytics and advanced neural
Release the Robots!
We’re finally seeing real teams build real robotic products that are solving massive pain points in numerous different industries. Robotic startup funding (ex-Drones) increased from $273M in 2014 to $587M in 2015, with $1.4B in cumulative funding since 2011 (CB Insights, 3/23/16). We’ve watched many robotic