Many conversations I’ve had with limited partners, fellow investors, and portfolio company founders have centered around navigating the current environment. Given the level of uncertainty, many of these conversations come down to how people are making decisions, given how unsettled things feel. In many cases, people share the rules they use to make decisions. A […]
Read More “Why Principles Are More Important Than Rules In Times Of Great Uncertainty”
Discussing a bridge round or extension is one of the most challenging and important conversations between founders and investors. In the current environment, these conversations are happening daily. I wanted to share my experiences navigating these conversations and provide founders with some insights into how many investors think about when to provide additional bridge or […]
Read More “Tips for Talking to Your Investors about Bridges and Extensions”
I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, and I finally feel ready to post it. I have been a generalist VC for my entire career. I’ve invested through the early days of SaaS, the shift from desktop to mobile, the rise of web 2.0 and social apps, crypto (mostly sat that out), and […]
Every November, we host an annual meeting for all of our investors (limited partners) in the various Precursor Ventures funds. We typically don’t share any of the content we present outside of that group, but I decided to share a few slides to give folks a glimpse into some of the things we are seeing […]
The last year has been a tough time to be a public or private tech investor or tech company CEO. We have spent a lot of time discussing the quantitative elements that have contributed to a pretty depressing environment for investors and operators – low gross margins, high burn rates, rising interest rates, high inflation, […]
I have been investing in Pre-seed and Seed-stage companies at Precursor for the past five years and I come back to that conversation all of the time. While I am broadly supportive of all of the innovation that has happened in the early-stage fundraising market, nothing can change the fact that companies only have so much equity to dole out between investors, founders and employees. I’m watching this all play out right now and I’m seeing it cause a lot of heartburn for both founders and investors.
I write this recognizing that it sounds crazy to say that Notion, one of the hottest, most high profile startups might be underrated. I’ve been thinking about my experience using Notion and I am beginning to think I underestimated how much of my workflow Notion could devour. The more I use Notion, the more I […]
My last blog post was over five years ago. A lot has changed since then – I started my own fund and have been pretty heads down focused on building out Precursor and supporting our portfolio companies. I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop writing, I just felt like there was so much good […]
I’ve had this nagging desire to write about Evernote and the mess that is my online storage life for the last few weeks. I use the product every single day to take notes, scan business cards, and clip interesting things from the web that I want to keep for future reference. I have also paid for the Premium version for quite some time as the product delivers a lot of value and I feel good supporting them.
App unbundling and mobile first approaches for B2B software are really interesting to me. Awhile back I wrote a post about unbundling LinkedIn. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what it would take to compete with and ultimately dethrone Salesforce (or SugarCRM or Microsoft Dynamics for that matter) with a mobile-first approach.
