Just say no

Between Techstars and Founders’ Co-op, I spend a lot of time helping early-stage companies raise money. I also hear a ton of pitches myself, and (for reasons that I try hard to be transparent about), my answer to the question “will you invest” is almost always “no”. Since I see both the buy + sell side of the continue…

More bad startup ideas

Garry Tan published a great piece yesterday titled “Travel planning software: the most common bad startup idea“. And while I strongly agree with his (dark) assessment of that category of opportunity and have seen my share of related pitches, there are several other equally bad ones that I see even more often. Inspired by Garry’s continue…

Treat your sales engine like a product

I had a great meeting today with a portfolio company CEO I hadn’t seen in a while. We covered a bunch of ground in the meeting, but the statement that stuck with me the most was how he described the company’s approach to scaling their sales capacity: “We treat sales like a product and invest continue…