Let’s say you have a really great startup idea. All things being equal, you should get funded. However, investors keep passing, and you’re wondering what are you doing wrong? Raising money is unbelievably hard. In fact, it’s so hard that the odds are about 100 to 1 against any single…

Before you decide to raise money from angels or a venture capital fund, you need to make sure you understand how this will affect your startup’s exit. Then you can decide whether it makes sense to take funding from an angel or VC, or whether you should continue bootstrapping your…

You’re going to get lots of advice from lots of people about what your pitch and pitch deck should look like. The problem is some of the advice will be good, some of the advice will conflict with other advice you get, and some advice is dead wrong. It’s really…

Credibility. Integrity. Trust. When you think about your relationship with your investors, this is what you want. Yes, you need to execute your plan. Yes, you need to recruit and build your team. Yes, you need to grow your business. Every startup has problems. And somehow or other, these problems…

Every time I raised money, there was drama with one of my co-founders. It’s a nightmare because you’re worried the drama could cost you your funding. Since at least 50% of all co-founder relationships end up in failure, you have a pretty good chance of having co-founder issues happen when…

You would think that having an investor tell you “no, we’re not interested in investing in your startup” would be the last thing you would want to hear when you’re raising money. When we were raising our initial funding, we pitched 63 investors that passed on investing. That’s a lot…

I was recruiting a really good engineer to join our team. His previous employer was another startup that had just closed its doors. I asked the engineer what had gone wrong? He said, “The two founders were fighting all the time. No one could anything done.” This rang true to…

Imagine this scenario. You’re an investor, and a startup CEO is pitching their company to you. The company seems to have game breaking technology. The market is huge. Everything seems poised for success. Then, the CEO gets to the Go To Market Slide, and it’s clear the CEO has no…

It took me three founding teams. Yes three, before I had a team that clicked the first founding team. Even though we had worked together previously, we didn’t mesh as a team. The second founding team just wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t until I built the third founding team that…