Stephen Fleming @Boostphase
Changing your business trajectory. boostphase.com Tucson, Arizona Joined November 2015-
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Term sheets are important, y’all. Read all those obfuscated paragraphs and take the time to understand them.
Valar is good for America Day One is bad for America. These things were true when Day One wrote their first check. Neither is here nor there however in this dispute as framed by Isaiah. Instead the framing is purely about contractual rights so that is how I will comment on it.
Good review of the state of hard tech VC
State of Hard Tech VC Few things im seeing: > F*ck ton of capital out there. However, doesn't feel like it unless you're one of the companies everyone wants lol. Headlines make venture look like 2021 again. It isn't. Capital is concentrating into a relatively small group of
Good advice.
Bill Gurley made public a letter he wrote 15 years ago answering one question: "So you want to be a VC?" The parts that sting the most: ▫️ A VC job is 80% salesmanship. "You sell your way into deals, you recruit constantly, you help create bus dev deals. It's a sales job." ▫️
Good advice.
One thing deep tech / hard tech founders don’t appreciate enough: some of the best capital comes from family offices. Many are founder-operator types, think long-term, move quickly, well networked and generally understand industrial businesses better than VCs. Traditional venture
Sarbanes-Oxley was so obviously destructive that neither Sarbanes nor Oxley ran for re-election.
Sarbanes-Oxley turned going public into a $3 million annual compliance nightmare. IPOs dropped 76% in the decade after 2002 -- from 457 average annual IPOs in the 1990s to just 108 from 2003-2012. The compliance costs hit small companies hardest (obviously). Goldman Sachs
“The median growth-stage venture-backed company cannot go public at a valuation that returns capital to the late-stage investors.” True. And this is a real problem.
Good advice.
All the important discussions between founders and investors should happen BETWEEN board meetings. The actual board meeting should be (1) a fulfillment of legal requirements, and (2) a chance to have 2nd- and 3rd-tier managers present their work, and give them a chance to shine.
Most early stage founders are bad at board meetings. I was one of them! Not because they lack effort, but because they think the job is to impress instead of to operate. After 38 board meetings as a CEO, I learned the opposite lesson: the best board meetings feel boring,
@jefielding If you’re a pre-seed to series A founder, YOU need to be doing sales. Don’t try to foist it off on someone else. It’s a prime learning opportunity for you!
I used to phrase it as: Startup CEOs can’t share their troubles with their employees because they’ll quit. They can’t share with their investors because they’ll get fired. And they can’t share with their spouse because she will say “You never should have quit that job at the phone company!”
One reason CEO roles are so draining: There's no boss to give you positive reinforcement for good work
On the East Coast, if you make $10 million out of a deal, you disappear to your lake house with a Porsche and a pair of SUVs, and you’re never heard from again. In Silicon Valley, if you make $10 million out of a deal, you’re still paying off your second mortgage and your first wife. You might take six months off, but then it’s back to the grind.
talking to portfolio founder today about a $30M acquisition offer for his company, roughly 15x ARR. growth has been steady but not outstanding. he asked “won’t you be upset that we didn’t go for $1B?” my reply was that $15M (he owns about 50%) is a considerable sum for anyone, especially at this stage of life. i told him he’s giving himself almost infinite attempts at taking a big swing down the road, either self funded or with my partnership. in venture you play the long game but you never want to be in a position where you’re operating with your back against the wall there are entrepreneurs who have executed flawlessly in desperate situations but they are few and far between sometimes you need to take care of yourself first, build a foundation of wealth that provides agency and optionality - then go for the big swing.
Preference stacks can be really demoralizing for both founders and employees.
When you see massive fundraising announcements, remember that FanDuel sold for $450M, and the founders/employees made $0. How? Investors had a liquidation preference that entitled them to the first $559M of proceeds. The more you raise, the bigger the preferences.
My portfolio companies have received all of these.
Getting harder and harder for VCs to make money this way.
Periodic reminder that selling 30% of your company in a seed round is out of whack with today's market. Unless you're building nuclear reactors and there is just one VC interested, 30% dilution is too high.
Good lessons here.
Before AWS existed, one company ran the servers for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook's entire app ecosystem. They owned Node.js, invented containers 8 years before Docker, and Peter Thiel even backed them. Then something happened...
Useful list.
Finding funds that 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑙𝑦 invest in pre-seed is hard. Here's a list of some I know do A LOT of pre-seed (add to comments): Hustle Fund Everywhere Ventures Pear VC Wonder Ventures Precursor Ventures Wischoff Ventures Nido Ventures Plug and Play Tech Center Gaingels
These are massive changes.
Major Breakthroughs in Startup Tax Law. Trump just signed the biggest tax overhaul for entrepreneurs in decades into law. The QSBS expansion includes THREE game-changing benefits most investors don't know about yet. You won't believe what you're about to hear. A Thread 🧵
There’s a big hole in the VC market right now.
Just talked to an AI founder who was ghosted by funds for his Series A; he went from 0 to $4 M ARR in 2 years. he is shocked. They told him he wasn’t growing fast enough (these funds had AI companies that went from 0 to $50+ M in 18 months). This is the benchmark now. This is
This anecdote is from a different world, but this is pretty much my attitude towards startup business plans.
On ships, we have to prepare a detailed voyage plan. Once, a young officer wrote a half-decent one, then spent 30 minutes printing it on fancy paper and arranging it in one of those glossy presentation binders. He left it on my desk with a nice note. I walked past my office that
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