Danial Hashemi

An important message for any investors reviewing startups, corporate partners considering a startup pilot, or customers considering becoming a startup’s client: PLEASE MOVE FASTER (if possible). It’s a tough market for startups at the moment, and every day you do not act results in the startup burning cash, putting them in a worse position. Not everyone has the ability to increase their operational pace, but if possible, it would be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Every Startup Founder PS: Thanks to Peter from Carta for the perpetual data-backed wisdom. PPS: This is exactly why we launched Scorecard.vc — to help investors and startups manage the fundraising process more efficiently. Sign up for free at http://scorecard.vc

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Founder-Turned-VC Investor Raised $150 Million for Her New Fund💰 Masha Bucher, ex-entrepreneur and founder of Day One Ventures, has raised $150M for her new VC fund. Founded in 2018, Day One Ventures focuses on early-stage startups, offering initial investments ranging from $1M to $2M. Notable companies in the firm’s portfolio include Worldcoin, legal services company DoNotPay Inc., and AI assistant You.com. 📝Diverse Investments and Real-World Impact Day One Ventures supports startups across various industries, with Bucher particularly drawn to founders tackling real-world challenges. “From profound wealth disparities to the urgent threat of climate change and the growing sense of social isolation, tech founders will be our lifeline toward a more abundant, diverse, and sustainable future,” Bucher stated regarding the new fund. 🏆The firm’s track record is impressive, with six of its investments achieving billion-dollar valuations and 22 companies either being sold or going public. This success highlights Day One's knack for identifying high-potential startups. 🎯PR Expertise and Strategic Growth Before transitioning to VC, Bucher founded a PR firm that managed communications for numerous tech companies. She has leveraged her PR expertise to coach startups on media strategies. “If you look at any business problem you want to solve and any business goal you want to solve, 90% of the business problems are communications problems,” Bucher explained on Bloomberg Television. “I think this is something we train founders on and something that we help them to do.” 📈Growth of Day One Ventures The new fund is Day One’s third and largest to date. Fund I, closed in 2019, was nearly $20 million, while the second fund in 2020 totaled $52.5 million. This latest fundraising effort saw contributions from US and European institutional LPs, as well as 14 of Bucher’s own portfolio company founders.💰 “When you are building a firm with value add and staying close to founders, you can attract a lot of capital from your own network,” Bucher said. Notably, she made a concerted effort to include female investors, securing backing from 9 female LPs. Significant in the male-dominated VC industry, where female founders received just 2% of the total capital invested in US startups in 2023, according to PitchBook.🤷‍♀️ 🤝New Investments and Future Focus Day One has already made 5 investments from its Fund III: Cradle, an AI startup focused on human longevity; Rainmaker, a Los Angeles-based company working on cloud-seeding technology; Affiniti; Astroforge; and Layer N.  🚀🌍 ✅ Looking to raise capital for your #VCfund and increase the international pool of your LPs?   🤝 Need warm #LP introductions?   📝 Selling #secondaries to increase liquidity?   🧐 Looking for co-investments (Series A/Series B)?   ▶ G+QUANT's link for inquiries and fund decks: https://lnkd.in/gjC_EuTE #VentureCapital #TechInvesting #FemaleFounders #StartupFunding #Innovation

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My biggest win when I was in college: - Starting a podcast 1. Got the chance to interact with legends in the industry People like Pomp, Casey Adams and more 2. Grew the YouTube to 100 + subscribers - 100+ views on podcast content alone on YouTube - 6k + Impressions on YT 3. And Podcast Channel on Spotify to 1000+ Impressions over last 30 days 4. Ranked in charts of several countries over years Massive amount of learnings, and upside over the years My key learnings: 1) Podcast discoverability is not very good Growth happens through the guest, and word of mouth, compounding and network effects 2) Events for your podcast = new fans, connections, people interested - Magic is in the event attendees mixing, and talking with each other 3) KPI's for me for podcast: -> Quality of the content -> DM's 4) Going from 0-1 is hard - Growth is hard - Getting guests is hard 5) Learn the art of cold emailing 6) Experiment a lot

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Founders, don’t make this common mistake early on (#4 in series): Rely too heavily on referrals without any process. Every founder knows referrals are the holy grail of hiring. Who doesn’t want a warm intro to a strong candidate that comes vouched for? So founders ask their team for referrals anytime a new role opens up. Maybe they’ll get a few leads. But without structure, referrals stall: • Current employees get distracted by their day-to-day. • They forget to tap their networks. • High-quality references dry up quick. Your new goal: Systematize referrals. • Set aside dedicated time every quarter to re-engage your team on referrals. Remind them of open roles and relevant skill sets you seek. • Provide clear guidelines on who and how to refer. For example, share ideal candidate criteria and specifics on where they should introduce you. • Incentivize referrals with gift cards or team rewards. And track submissions to notify when a referee gets hired. Putting a structured referral program in place reduces ad-hoc asks and motivates your team to proactively tap their trusted contacts. You’ll see candidate quality and hiring velocity increase overnight. P.S. This is post #4 in my series uncovering common founder hiring mistakes that burn cash. Follow me to catch the rest of the series.

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8 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐁𝐞𝐧 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐳, 𝐆𝐏 Andreessen Horowitz. 1) CEOs are not born. 2) The only thing that can train you to run a company is running a company. 3) Managers have one skill: make things extremely clear. 4) Experience and skills are two totally different things. 5) Involve multiple people in brainstorming but make the final decision solo.  6) Your lens determines your perspective. 7) Feedback is a dialogue, not a monologue. 8) Flowers are cheap; divorce is expensive. #startup #business #venturecapital #lessons

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To become a successful entrepreneur, one must be resilient, coachable, visionary, and more. But what makes a good investor? It's often overlooked how much learning and practice is required to become a successful investor. Those who understand the points made by Harry Stebbings in his three-step programme are on the right track. As a former VC, I can testify that pre-seed investment is the most people-centric business you can experience in any industry. If you have the right founding team with spot-on chemistry, you win - simple as that. I created ETA Technologies to help investors quantify and measure the people element, allowing them to benchmark teams as smoothly as they do EBITDA or ARR. #venturecapital #fundraising #startups

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Bold prediction for 2025: Investors will pay founders to access their venture data. Founders own their data and grant access to investors for a fee. This shift promotes transparency, trust, and efficiency in fundraising, while giving startups a new revenue stream.

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Wiz - $0 to $23B in 4 Short Years + The Actual Reason Why Alphabet Inc. is Happy to Make it Happen Alphabet is likely buying Wiz for $23B - an insane amount of value created in just 4 years since its founding in 2020. For context, it took OpenAI 7+ years to get to $20B. Alphabet buying Wiz at $23B puts a fantastic comp out there for investors to underwrite to and justify insane valuations (kinda kidding, kinda not). Currently, Wiz is over $500M in ARR (~46x) but plan to get to $1B in ARR by the end of '25, which would put it at a bit more reasonable 23x, but still a steep price and certainly an indication of conviction in the strategic value of Wiz. So why could Alphabet spend such an insane amount to buy Wiz at such a hefty price? Because the actual golden goose here is winning market share in the ~$300B/yr Cloud Services market that is growing at an insane 21% YoY. The means nearly $60B in new TAM will be up for the taking the next 12 months alone.. Today, Google Cloud (11%) is a distant 3rd in market share behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) (31%) and Microsoft Azure (25%), but it is growing the fastest at 28% YoY. If buying Wiz can help Google accelerate their growth and continue to gain share, they'll be able to capture a bigger slice of that fast growing Cloud Services TAM. And with a market that big growing that fast, there is almost no price too high. Every marginal point of market share is worth at least $15B of EV (assuming 5x). Alphabet currently trades at 5.5x revenue so assuming they can get a marginal $5B of ARR out of the deal over the next few years, the economics make sense almost immediately. Google Cloud is also Alphabet Inc.'s best hedge against AI's potential disruption to their core search business as more people turn to generative AI instead of that trusty search bar to answer their questions. This will be Google's biggest acquisition ever by nearly 2x, and it will be a massive, much-needed replenishment of funds into the venture ecosystem (Index Ventures Sequoia Capital Greenoaks, Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz) Fun aside - Wiz has some wildly notable angels on the cap table like Howard Schultz and Bernard Arnault. If this deal goes through it's going to be a huge win for a bunch of founders, investors, and employees and an overall great mark for the early-stage technology ecosystem! All of this is assuming Lina Khan lets it happen!

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My newest startup did $60,093+ in 40 days. It’s our 4th product in the last 3 years on track to generate $1M in revenue in ~12 months. Here's our 5-step process to launch winning products: Last week, I sat down with David Kelly, the General Manager for AppSumo Originals to share how we ideate, build, test, and launch products. Context: The goal of AppSumo Originals products (TidyCal, KingSumo, SendFox) is to introduce people into the AppSumo ecosystem. 1) Use Prioritization Checklists Many founders and leaders are familiar with the RICE prioritization framework (Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort). At AppSumo Originals, we use a 4-step prioritization checklist: 1) Hyped AF - Are we hyped AF about this? “I’m always surprised and amazed by how many entrepreneurs build things they don’t really want,” David said. “But that’s a recipe for an unwanted and unused product.” Scratch your own itch! 2) New Buyers - does this serve the customers we want to attract? “We aren’t afraid to look at competitors,” David said candidly. “Competition means there is market availability and that we can approach it a bit differently.” 3) Ease of Creation - is this a relatively easy product to create? “AppSumo customers have begged for a Canva alternative,” David said. “But the complexity is way outside of our wheelhouse. We don’t want to spend years building in the dark.” 4) Word of Mouth - All three of our previous winners had virality baked into the product,” David said. “When people share their TidyCal link, send emails using SendFox, or share a document through BreezeDoc - it introduces the product to new potential customers.” GENIUS!! 2) Velocity to The Dollar The reason we’ve limited the number of failed startups at AppSumo is simple: We validate the idea BEFORE we fully build it out. Before building BreezeDoc, we asked people if they’d pre-buy a DocuSign alternative. Once we see enough interest in the idea, THEN we start to build it out. We started working on BreezeDoc at the end of January. “We keep the team small on purpose to start,” David said. “Just me, a designer, and a developer at first. When the team is too large, we get too many opinions, which leads to inaction.” 3) Work WITH Customers Our 30-day MVP process has 3 phases: Phase 1: First Beta Version The first thing we do is collect a lot of information on our customers. We TALK to them as much as possible (obviously using a TidyCal link 😉) Phase 2: Customer Feedback For BreezeDoc, we did about 6 weeks of beta testing and iterating. This is longer than usual, but we wanted to make sure to get REALLY great feedback. Phase 3: Marketing Experiments The goal for the first 30 days was to get 100 new customers. With that, we worked backward to put together a spreadsheet of marketing activities we could do. By the end of the month, we had 189 new buyers. Success!! Post continued in the comments 👇👇 Follow Noah Kagan for more content like this!

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Rent the Runway is having its lunch eaten by Urban Outfitters' Nuuly. Q3 '23 Results: -RTR $21.9M operating LOSS -Nuuly $300k operating PROFIT -RTR 6% revenue drop YoY -Nuuly 86% revenue increase YoY -RTR 132k active subs (down 2% YoY) -Nuuly 198k active subs (up 68% YoY) Why? Rent the Runway has three MAJOR cost centres to its business: 1/ Fairly high acquisition costs I still think RTR is in the process of creating demand, persuading consumers, and driving up GMV. This is proving costly. 2/ Very high R&D costs RTR is building and maintaining a lot of proprietary tech to service its business model as well as investing a lot into their ecommerce experience. This means they basically have the tech costs of a tech business. Case in point: $12M R&D spend in Q3 '23 alone (~18% of revenue) 🤯 3/ Thin margins RTR isn't a fashion brand in itself. Inventory comes mainly via purchasing stock from other brands at a wholesale rate. This leaves them with the R&D costs of a tech business mentioned above, but with the margins of a retail business. Now, let's contrast this to Nuuly: ✅ Lower acquisition costs Urban Outfitters already has a huge audience across its other brands that can be redirected and help drive down the cost of acquisition. 😕 Still relatively high R&D costs Urban has reportedly stumped up around $100M up front. ✅ Much better margins Nuuly doesn't need to source stock via wholesale from other brands. They ARE the brand (or, at least Urban is). Plus, stock can also often be sourced from cost centres in the other brands. E.g. returns at Urban can then become ready-to-use stock on Nuuly. This means MUCH healthier margins. The lesson here for other rental merchants? You HAVE to find a competitive advantage in AT LEAST one, but ideally two or all three of those cost centres: CAC, R&D, and margins. This will give you an excellent foundation for growth and the best chance of succeeding. #ecommerce #rentalcommerce #circulareconomy #sustainability

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Many creators get stuck around $1M/yr. You have to think differently to scale beyond $5M/yr. This week, I’m joined by Ricky Zhang to cover: 1. The exact skills you need to scale to $5M+ 2. Proven revenue models to maximize profits 3. How to break through the $1M–2M/yr ceiling

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Hiring a fractional marketing team as a founder can make a lot of sense if: 1) You don't have the resources to spend on a Head of Marketing/Content + junior associates + a freelancer/agency budget ($400k-$500k+) 2) You don't have the time to do it yourself/not a good use of your time (nearly every founder) But it's important that you find the RIGHT partner. In the past, I've brought on fractional marketing teams that didn't understand our product, nor understand the nuances of our industry. Needless to say, the copy was poorly written, the messaging was off, and the assets didn't speak to our investor base. It's not sufficient to simply bring on a marketing agency. An agency that specializes Ecommerce, for example, will not fit well with your fintech or VC/PE fund. Different audiences = different messaging, copy, storytelling At Ikaria Labs, we don't work with Ecom, health tech, AI, cybersecurity, energy, climate, etc. We only partner with financial institutions, because that's what we know.

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As an early-stage founder, you sometimes can feel lost. Years ago I saw the Y Combinator series on "How to Start a Startup" where Sam Altman points out simple 5 points. 1. Set the Vision 2. Evangelize 3. Raise Money 4. Hire & Manage 5. Make sure the entire company executes. I stuck it on the wall in front of my desk months ago while working on Dreel. Seems like common sense. But can do wonders. If you feel stuck, make an action tree out of this. It'll act as your compass to prioritize your tasks & plan out your day. #startups

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Over the last ten years, I’ve made 50+ Venture Capital investments (from 1000+ deal opportunities). My track record: 25% - Big winners (greater than 3x w/ 4 making unicorn status) 15% - Small winners (1x to 3x) 10% - Written off as a loss 50% - Still invested Most are SaaS, but I’ve branched into core AI, Data Science, Space, and Real Estate. My original objective (due to risk management) was to enter the seed or pre-A round. Then, exit (partial or in whole) at the A or B rounds with a solid return. In the short term, it provided valuable lessons learned and additional cash flow to redeploy. Yet I found this was a huge mistake, given the potential upside I missed out on, and necessary tax hit with gains. In my early investments, I looked for four non-negotiables: • Visionary teams • Unique, innovative ideas • High growth potential • Disruptive technology Then, exiting at series A/B felt safe. It seemed logical. But here’s what I missed by playing it safe: • Maturity: Early ideas evolve into companies with solid product-market fit and cash flow. • Growth: The real gains often materialize post-Series B, as companies scale and expand. • Timing: I learned that timing is everything. Exiting too early means missing out on a potential unicorn or IPO. So, what now? My strategy has evolved. It's not just about a ‘quick’ exit. It's about seeing the potential and hanging on for a few more years. Here's why staying invested pays off: 1. Higher Exits: From Series C onwards, valuations spike. You're in for larger exits. 2. Decision Power: Influence major strategic decisions. As companies grow, your impact grows. 3. Long-Term Value Creation: Benefit from the full value creation journey. It's a lesson in patience, vision, and the courage to stay the course. Investors, I'm curious: Do you take the same approach?

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Causal is my 1st company. Here's what I'd do differently as a 2nd-time founder: 1. Hire an EA on day 1 — founders shouldn't waste time doing scheduling 2. Spend 25% of my time at conferences — this is where commerce happens 3. Fly business class — self-explanatory What else?

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How to invest like a VC? ☕️ Ask a founder to brew coffee for you. If s/he doesn’t select maximum grind amount, pass If they can’t even max grind with you, what hope do you have when they are alone?

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SaaS founders that cracked $10M ARR have two things in common: 1/ Focus on Onboarding > Marketing  Churn is the obstacle for hitting 8-figures. Experimenting with pricing often and offering solid trials, educational materials, & customer support is key. 2/ Build a Great Team  You can get far with a tiny team, but there’s a threshold. To surpass $10M, you need to find top-tier talent and get out of their way.

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Fundraising for your SaaS startup? Memorize these benchmarks: 1. CAC Payback: 0-6 months 2. OpEx Efficiency: 1.5X+ 3. Net Revenue Retention: 120%+ 4. Time to Cash Out: 24+ months 5. Revenue Growth: 125%+ 6. Logo Retention: 95%+ These are the BEST benchmarks. Anything less is just... less. Investors have their benchmarks. You need to have yours too. Aim high. Grow fast. Retain customers. Be efficient. Then fundraise like a boss. 😎 The metrics tell your story. Make it a bestseller. 📈 — 📌 If you liked this (and want to support my work): - Like - Repost And follow me (Chris Tottman) for more B2B tips. Thank you! #BrainDumps 🧠 💩 // Brain Dump #52

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21 Ways to Kill Your Company Day 9: Poor Fundraising Strategy This means two things - be realistic about the benchmarks you need to unlock your next raise and then raise enough money to hit those milestones. Be great (and realistic) with financial planning. Don't forget those extra five months you typically need to raise. #21waystokillyourcompany #fundraising #venturecapital

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