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Today I’m handing her the largest A-round check I’ve ever written as a VC as we lead her $10 million A-Round at uBeam. As I’ve written about recently, at Upfront Ventures we started talking a couple of years ago about wanting to fund stuff with more meaning. Meredith came to see me along with the CTO Marc Berte.
The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. You join teams that got good write-ups on TechCrunch, have great VCs, have star CEO’s, whatever. Working hard together at a big company just isn’t the same.
By spending more time educating your board on your business you get more valuable advice from them. Your goal should be to turn your VCs into extended members of your team to get real value from them. He did it yesterday, “Mark, I’m going to write a blog post following on from your VC’s aren’t dumb.
Now, I think we're seeing major companies who see that this is great, are doing pilot projects, and see the value they are getting, and realize what they need to do is go mainstream, and broaden access to all of that data to a much larger part of their organiation--and do that, ideally, without hiring hundreds of data scientists.
Now, despite bootstrapping, you actually have some connections to the venturecapital world, don't you? Ramit Varma: I've been sort of in and out of the venture space since we started. My brother is actually at Anthem Ventures, working with Bill Woodward, and I was an intern there in business school.
Messenger : Thorsten von Eicken , RightScale’s Co-Founder and CTO, Chief Architect at Citrix Online (formerly Expertcity) and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and UC Santa Barbara. That led us to venturecapital as opposed to trying to bootstrap ourselves. Hiring is difficult no matter where you are.
At CallWave, Colin was CTO, Jason was CFO and I was in charge of product marketing and customer acquisition. When we raised our Series A, we put a lot of effort into meeting with VC’s to find the right fit for us. We met with a ton of VC’s and angels. We’re always hiring great people.
We've got a nice API with ties to the enterprise class applications. I just went out to a VC conference out in New York, and what I'll say is -- it was just too damn easy. There were companies at the VC conference starving for money, but I think we could have raised $20M like nothing. The final thing is our business model.
So yes, I want to hire somebody with really high IQ and EQ but not somebody who is more knowledgeable at your specific skill set than you are. I learned that I wasn’t the strongest kid in class but wasn’t a wimp either. I thought you were supposed to be VCs? You know, ‘venture’ capitalists?
August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. m the f%*kin’ boss.”.
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