Competitive Positioning: Making The VC Comfortable

Barring unique regulatory or patent protection, no company has a perfectly defensible business model. This holds true for companies of all sizes; even significant portion of the Fortune 500 has turned over during the past century.

Management References: The Ethics Test

In order to invest VCs must trust that the entrepreneurs they are backing have the capacity to execute. VCs assess management’s ability in a few ways.

You can demonstrate your ability to think strategically through the quality of your…

Why VCs Want To Review Your Model

VCs can check a few different aspects of your business by reviewing your model.

First and foremost, they can assess your understanding of your business model (how you generate revenue). The logic in the math should demonstrate the drivers of…

The Ideal Times To Raise Capital In The Life Cycle Of A Fund

In theory, VCs have the same standards for making investments at any point in time. However, I am under the impression that this does not hold true in practice.

Mitigating Partnership Risk: Hearing It From The Horse’s Mouth

Some businesses rely heavily on securing key partnerships. While entrepreneurs will often make compelling cases for why the prospective partner will want to get involved, there are often unforeseen reasons why the partner…

Filling Information Gaps: Experts

While most VCs know a lot about running businesses and investing, it is rare that a VC will know more about a specific business than the entrepreneur who is launching a company. The entrepreneur typically needs to have a unique degree of expertise and knowledge about…

The Due Diligence Process

The due diligence process centers around the belief that it is more effective to assess granular aspects of a business than a business as a whole.

To illustrate this imagine that you are an automotive mechanic. One day a car owner drives up and asks you to…

Why You Should Use LinkedIn

A good friend of mind just asked me for some tips on how to use LinkedIn. I wrote him a long email and figure that I should share my thoughts on this with all of you. As a result, I’m going to do a short series of posts on my understanding of LinkedIn and how it can help many of…