This year I’ve spent some time talking to more experienced GPs and founders of venture firms about the things I should start thinking about now that I have a few funds under my belt. I’ve been very interested in learning more about how these folks think about generational transition and succession plans for their firms. […]
Read More “Succession in Venture Capital is a 3-Legged Stool”
Early in my venture career, I worked with someone who gave me a lot of great advice about how to think about being an entrepreneur and an investor who supports entrepreneurs. We had just finished meeting with a founder who was dealing with a tough set of circumstances and was trying to figure out how […]
I spend a lot of my time helping founders in our portfolio plan for future fundraises. Given that we focus on pre-seed and seed-stage companies, much of the fundraising focus is on what it takes to unlock a Series A round of financing. Most of the founders I work with want to know what metrics […]
It feels like we are in the very early stages of seeing what happens at the tail end of the latest venture boom. Stories are written about companies that falsified data, misrepresented financials, and otherwise weren’t what they represented themselves to be to investors, employees, and the public. I suspect we will hear many more […]
Read More “All Venture Booms End with a Return to Governance”
For most of my career in venture capital, I have felt that small firms (<$100M in fund size), medium-sized firms ($100M-$500M in fund size), and large firms ($500M+) are all part of the same venture capital ecosystem. Firms of all sizes had the same basic objective; find and support companies that could become IPO-scale companies […]
Read More “What Happens When Small and Large VC Firms Decouple and Have Less in Common?”
For nine years, I have invested in a roughly equal mix of B2B SaaS and consumer startups at the seed and pre-seed stages. At Precursor, we define consumer fairly broadly – we include CPG, consumer social apps, consumer digital health, and consumer subscription services under the broad umbrella of what constitutes consumer. One thing that […]
Read More “Will We Ever See Another Renaissance in Consumer Investing?”
“Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.” – Jim Barksdale, Netscape The background for this quote was the question of what Netscape would do if Microsoft bundled a browser (which they did) in the early days of the Internet era of the late 1990s and early 2000s. If […]
Many of the founders we’ve backed ask us one key question early in their company-building journey – what is the right burn rate, or amount to spend per month, for a company still searching for product-market fit? This is not an easy question to answer, but we have some data from our first 150 companies […]
I’ve spent the last few months talking to many other VCs who are founders of their own VC firms or have ascended to leadership roles in firms they joined. Each of them seems to have his or her own strategy and goals for what they want to build. The one common conversation we’ve had, regardless […]
I have been working on Precursor for over nine years at this point. I got a lot of very good advice when I was getting started. One thing that has stuck with me since the beginning was some feedback I got from Mike Maples at Floodgate when I was still formulating the plan for Precursor. […]
Read More “Fund Size Is Still Strategy – The Growing Disconnect Between Founders and VCs”
