Prioritize what you can control
Founders often ask what they should prioritize early in their lifecycle. For example, build the product out or try and sell what has already been built. This prioritization becomes even more important as the next fundraising milestone approaches. To help shed light on this I ask founders a few questions: What can they control?What takes…
Why we invested in LevelJump?
Answer: David Bloom We met David Bloom in March of 2016 when he had recently left Salesforce to build a solution to help sales teams onboard new sales reps faster. At the time it was called Lurniture, a plugin for Salesforce where sales teams could access ‘a smart YouTube inside salesforce’ and get feedback on…
Pitch decks – Tips for Founders
When engaging potential investors your slide deck should be concise, with the goal of generating enough interest where the investor seeks to find out more about your solution. You want to convey that you are solving a big problem, you have the team to execute, and the market size is significant enough to generate substantial…
How to Write Great Investor Update Emails
As we are often the first investors in our startups, we find many are new to investor updates emails. We don’t force a template on companies, but do provide them with guidance when they are missing some items, or haven’t yet started to write them. What’s great about the discussion is how it forces founders…
Successful Startups Are Super-Charged By Strong Teams
What makes for a successful startup? It is an interesting question because startup success is not a science; it is a combination of different things, and often being in the right place at the right time with the right product. One of the most important things that we seek in startups is strong founding teams.…
Continue Reading… Successful Startups Are Super-Charged By Strong Teams
Our investment in Ada
Why we invested in Ada? The short answer is the team – Mike Murchison and David Hariri I met Mike Murchison while he was part of the Next36 program, following that program we stayed in touch, Mike started a consulting business called What’s Next Labs which he later shut down and then in January 2014…
Raising capital for your enterprise software technology Startup? Here are some questions
As a founder, when raising capital for an early-stage enterprise technology company, there are many questions you will need to answer. Below are a few topics that will be covered by investors. Think of these as a starting point for any conversation with an investor. Be honest in answering these questions, if you can’t answer…
Questions founders of early-stage companies should ask themselves
Fastbreak Ventures is a pre-seed stage fund so we meet a lot of very early stage businesses, too often, we meet with founders looking to raise money who have an interesting concept, a rough prototype, a few early customers, but haven’t asked themselves some of the most important questions about how they’re going to attract…
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Why startup founders use options to attract top talent
Ever heard of David Choe? He’s a graffiti artist who was commissioned to paint some murals in Facebook’s first offices, and was paid in options. When Facebook went public seven years later, those options were worth $200 million. You’ve likely heard stories of early employees of startups becoming wealthy via options—and that can include contractors…
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The Biggest Marketing Mistakes Made By Startups
Too many startups take a shotgun approach to marketing, which is riddled with mistakes and missteps. The all-too-common approach is running madly in different directions, and then wondering why their efforts are failing to generate dividends. It’s a sad state of affairs that shows a basic misunderstanding of how marketing works. As well, it’s a…
Continue Reading… The Biggest Marketing Mistakes Made By Startups