Unusual Ventures

Founders, we need just a few more responses on our survey about how you choose investors! We will be sharing the results within the next couple of weeks. Thank you if you have already filled out this survey! We appreciate your time and your insights.

Don't miss the latest episode of the Startup Field Guide with Kareem Amin (CEO and co-founder of Clay). Listen to the entire episode on Youtube: https://lnkd.in/e3yuJiC2 An AI-powered platform for sales prospecting, Clay gathers data from over 75 sources to build lists and help growth teams. In a wide-ranging conversation with Sandhya Hegde, Kareem discusses how Clay chose the right customer, given the extreme flexibility of their core product, and the team’s vision of empowering more people to programmatically execute ideas ⬇.

How do you build a visionary company? 📕 On John Vrionis's recommendation, our team recently read 'Built to Last' by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras to help us answer this question! A key theme that stood out to us was the difference between "time-tellers" and "clock-builders": ⌛ Having a great idea or being an innovative leader is “time telling” ⏰ Building a company that can prosper far beyond the presence of any single leader and through multiple product life cycles is “clock building.” Clock-builders lead visionary companies. To learn more about these ideas, check out our review, and if you are ever in our offices, keep an eye out for a free copy of the book 😉!

Calling all founders! Our team at Unusual Ventures put together a very short survey to hear what's important when you're deciding to work with investors. We would appreciate 2 minutes of your time to share your input - thank you!

Founders and founding teams — we’re in need of some help. The team at Unusual Ventures are running a short survey on what founders look for when choosing to work with investors. The survey should only take 2 minutes and I’d appreciate any insights offered. Thank you for the help! Survey: https://lnkd.in/eKykQK3G

Founders, we need your help! Please take our anonymous survey to help us get a better understanding of how founders choose investors. Thank you!

M&A is not for the faint of heart! As Lars Albright explains, M&A can be an emotional journey with plenty of twists and surprises. While news headlines may highlight M&A transactions that seem to have happened quickly and easily, most transactions take considerable time, effort, and luck. In his latest blog post, Lars provides 10 tips to help founders increase their situational awareness while navigating M&A! His recommendations include: ➡ Identify product advocates early, willing to take the risk and stand strong against any negative pushback. ➡ Run a time-boxed process, and mutually agree upon a timeline ➡ Embrace the challenge. Focus on what you can control instead of only thinking about the end game. Read all 10 tips! Link in comments! ⬇

Customer discovery is THE critical ingredient for building a successful startup and finding product-market fit. As John Vrionis explains, when founders embrace the customer discovery process, they are willing to iterate and adjust their assumptions so that they build the right product for the right customer. In the Unusual Ventures Field Guide, John provides 5 critical tips to help founders validate their insights with customers: ➡ Don’t waste time building things on speculation. Validate the problem with the customer first and show them early mockups to confirm it’s something they want before building. ➡ An early UI/UX hire can be a critical team player to quickly iterate and confirm with customers what a sellable solution would look like. ➡ Use the interview process to disqualify customers and understand the core problem you’re solving. This means being much more disciplined in asking questions where you might not like the answer. ➡ Drive your customer interviews toward design partner status and quickly iterate with 3–5 confirmed design partners to create an early product. ➡ Create a structured sales process and begin scaling the team to bring a 1.0 version of your product to market. For more insights, check out the entire article in our Field Guide (link in comments)!

Jyoti Bansal (founder of Harness and Traceable) learned the hard way that an effective sales strategy matters. For founders who may be sales skeptics, Jyoti offers 4 concrete steps to help you embrace founder selling. Step 1️⃣ Accept that sales matter Step 2️⃣ Build your sales machine Step 3️⃣ Relentlessly focus on people (and champions) Step 4️⃣ Remove surprises from the sales process Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eZKM_EQa