Edward Lando

If you're building a fintech startup, you likely know of this investor, but just in case... This week's findfunding.vc spotlight is on Neil Kapur from TTV Capital. He: 🛫 Is based in SF & Atlanta 💲 Has spent time at Google in consumer-facing payments & at two fintech startups  🏔️ Loves alpine mountaineering and has climbed Kilimanjaro, Denali, Rainier, and more!! Amongst founders, Neil and the team at TTV Capital , including Gardiner Garrard, Mark Johnson, Sean Banks, Lizzie Guynn, and Laney Lewis are known for saying “lift, not lean.” They believe that their job as investors is not to create work for founders, but instead ask the right questions and help navigate to the best outcomes. Knowing Neil well personally, he's not only my go-to person for anything related to fintech but I can also highly recommend having him on your cap table - he's the kind of human you want to have in your corner during both good times and bad. Make sure to: ✉️ Pitch him at nkapur@ttvcapital.com ➡️ Follow TTV Capital on LinkedIn For more, check out our funder spotlight card below along with TTV Capital's profile on findfunding.vc (link in comments).

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After building 5 businesses over 20 years, I launched a VC fund with 2 friends & colleagues. Since then, we've funded 15+ companies & deployed over $20M, backed by a powerful community of founder/operator LPs. Here's our story, and how you can create your own VC fund in 2024: In 2021, my dear friends & fellow founders Josh, Kurt & I were hanging out in Mexico. We discussed our experiences as entrepreneurs & what our dreams were for the future. It was clear that supporting founders was a key priority. So we decided to build a new kind of investment firm. We pooled together 60+ experienced founders, operators & friends to invest in tomorrow's top entrepreneurs. And called it The Family Fund & Founder Community. Would you love to do this? Let's dive into how to create your own VC fund: 1. Invest first Invest for 5-10 years & create a successful track record. Whether this is angel investing with your own money or serving as an investor for another firm, you have to cut your teeth on the street. Josh and I had been angel investing for ~10 years before launching F3C. 2. Build a network Build a network of people who trust you & like doing business with you. Raising money from people primarily comes down to trust, and trust is created through: (a) Competence: People must believe you have the skills/access/intelligence to invest in the right companies. (b) Authenticity: They must feel that they’re dealing with the authentic you and someone comfortable in their skin. (c) Empathy: Care for others and want the best for them, not just for yourself. 3. Access is king Put yourself in a position where you have great access. Regardless of what people tell you, access to the best deals still matters most when it comes to investing. If you don’t have access, nothing else really matters. Here's how to create access: Put yourself at the intersection of where deals happen. This is either at an existing PE/VC firm or in another type of company whose business is to be around founders before or after they’ve raised money. 4. Gain specific expertise in a field Note: Just because you're a great founder or company builder doesn't mean you'll be a great investor (founders are often too optimistic when they first invest). But deep experience & expertise where you're investing is a requirement. My partner Kurt built & sold Vital proteins. He is a CPG product, manufacturing & brand wizard. My partner Josh is a master of community, talent & connection. The best I’ve seen. And I live & breathe marketing, GTM strategy & scale (with an obsession around health/wellness which is where we invest). What's your advantage? This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it can get you started on the right track. — If you enjoy this, ♻️ repost to help your network. Follow me Sean Kelly for more insights on health, investing & entrepreneurship. To learn how to achieve breakout founder performance sign-up for my free weekly newsletter: https://get.founderiv.com

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Southeast VC Update: Q2 2024 PitchBook Venture Monitor Highlights The Southeast continues to hold its position in the VC regional landscape #5 in dollars raised for Q2 2024 🥉 #3 in deal count (just behind the West Coast and the Mid-Atlantic) H1 2024 Southeast Breakdown:  📊 10% more deals than Northeast  📈 30% more deals than Mountain region, 20% more than South  💰 5% more dollars raised than Mountain region  💸 23.5% more dollars raised than South YoY Funding Trends:  📈 Southeast: Up 29% 📈 Mid-Atlantic: Up 136%  📉 Midwest: Down 67%  📉 New England: Down 11%  📈 West Coast: Up 59% Key Trend: While closing in on Mid-Atlantic numbers, we are seeing more deals but smaller rounds. This could indicate strong activity occurring in the seed & early-stage funding, despite the macro challenges. (Pitchbook classifies the Southeast as AL, FL, GA, KY, MS, NC, SC, TN, Puerto Rico, & Virgin Islands) #BuildInSE

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We believe in extreme vetting of our founders. You can't build a unicorn if you spend time on silly stuff, like seeing family and friends. Grow up, and focus on investor returns. #vc #startups #investment

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Tiferes Ventures is an AI-centric VC firm founded by Clark Valberg, co-founder and former CEO of InVision. Tiferes believes in eating their own dogfood, and recently organized an internal hackathon, in which all team members had to experiment with creating Custom #GPTs for the respective processes they ran. Michael Rubin, SVP Strategy and Chief Legal Officer, put together an excellent presentation for the hackathon on how the Tiferes team can and should use #AI throughout their processes.  This presentation covers:  -Best practices in prompt engineering for a VC firm -Creative ways to use Custom GPTs  -And provides many sample prompts At Coolwater Capital and PEVCTech, we strongly encourage all of the funds we work with to rethink regularly how they run their firms from the perspective of: how we can use AI to enhance efficiency? Link to slide deck in first comment. Disclosure: I’ve advised Tiferes on various matters in the past. #venturecapital #vc 

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Great time on the Embracing Erosion podcast w/Devon O'Rourke! We talked about: 🚀 How to scale a company from concept to 9-figure exit 🔄 How to break away from the traditional consulting model and apply product approaches ⏩ Why it’s important to iterate quickly and often with messaging 💸📈What signals are important to pay attention to when investing in startups and much more!

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In the second quarter of 2024, global startup funding saw a significant increase to $79 billion, marking a 16% rise from the previous quarter and a 12% increase compared to Q2 2023. AI sector funding notably doubled to $24 billion, comprising 30% of total investments, the highest quarterly amount in recent years. The quarter also witnessed heightened M&A activity, particularly in large deals, which injected liquidity into the venture capital market. Read More Here: https://lnkd.in/e-JYcy2g Crunchbase News Today Gené Teare #venturecapital #investments #AI Branded Hospitality Ventures Hospitality Headline Newsletter #MandA ChatGPT OpenAI Kunal Gandhi Jason Kwon Jonathan Lachman Varun Shetty Tadao Nagasaki Sterling Douglass Brizo FoodMetrics

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Some thoughts on the following post regarding the "Secret YC SAFE" o  Isn't the whole point of a SAFE the fact that it is not debt or equity so it is only convertible based on a future fixed valuation (priced round), less whatever discount is stated and therefore requires only minor legal review. o  A valuation cap if attached to the SAFE only guarantees a maximum price for conversion. o  It therefore is not a fixed percentage of the cap table but on a post money SAFE it would guarantee a minimum percentage of the post total equity. o  There are legal, regulatory and tax consequences to buying or selling straight equity or debt. o  A SAFE agreement is neither, and therefore you only have fluff until there is a priced round that triggers the SAFE and locks in a fixed price for conversion to equity on the cap table. o  What if instead of the standard SAFE terms, (discount and or valuation cap) the 'Secret YC SAFE' simply locks in a post money percentage of equity. o  In that case you might as well subscribe for straight equity and purchase common or preferred stock. o  This however will have legal, tax, and regulatory consequences that the SAFE was designed to avoid. o  Why then, if the price is fixed and you are an accredited investor would you want to hold a SAFE that has no value until there is a priced round. o  If there is no priced round there is generally no guaranteed conversion. o  As a possible solution we have added a clause to a standard SAFE agreement to cover this obvious shortcoming;  “If this instrument does not otherwise expire or terminate prior to the two-year anniversary of the issue date, the company will, at the sole option of the Investor, and prior to the provisions of any subsequent 'Events' as described in Section 1(a)(b)(c)(d) below, issue Common Stock at a Conversion Price determined by and equal to the Safe Price.” o  This may potentially create a grey area where it could be argued for tax and regulatory purposes that the price of the offering had an ultimate fixed price and therefore did not meet the ambiguous price certainty that sets a SAFE apart from being painted with the same brush as Debt or Equity. o  A SAFE agreement that is altered to state only a definitive percentage of total outstanding equity, post money, becomes a fixed value security with the exception that it may have no guarantee of conversion prior to a fixed price round of financing. o  Taking away the ‘discount’ from a future priced round erases a key incentive for an early investor without having to negotiate the price per share upfront. Investors should want the discount in the scenario that a priced round valuation comes in lower than the valuation cap or it at least guarantees them a substantial discount to the priced round investors that come in much later at less risk.

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One of the most frequent questions our team gets from founders is… “How do I approach a token launch?” So we put together a playbook covering the how, when, and what, as it relates to token launches. Here are the posts: How to navigate token launch risks: https://lnkd.in/dG4cMSqQ Getting ready to launch a token: What you need to know: https://lnkd.in/dYNFwAZn 5 rules for token launches: https://lnkd.in/d_ZvShnT How to launch a token: Operational guidelines from creation to custody: https://lnkd.in/d9sS6A2t Miles Jennings, Adina Fischer, Justin Simcock

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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In our latest episode on the Practical Nerds podcast, Patric and I talk about our earned learnings on how founders (and other VCs) should choose the right (Co)Investors for their startup (Construction-tech or otherwise). Which of these do you agree with ? What did we miss ?

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What I've seen over the years is, early stage companies rarely grow beyond their founders’ capabilities; or at least, companies model after their founders really closely. If the founder is unfocused, chances are the whole company is unfocused. If the founder is incapable of making decisions, the company is likely to have meetings after meetings without clear conclusions. If the founder doesn’t put in 110% of herself in the company, it’s hard to expect anyone else at the company would. 1/ Having cofounders is advantageous in this regard, because no one is perfect and different cofounders can bring different skill sets and strengths 2/ Founders need to have good mentors 3/ Founders must set aside some time to constantly upgrade themselves and “sharpen the tooth”. 

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Pro-rata as a service? The concept is quite simple, but a bit more difficult in practice. Early stage investors (pre-seed/seed) typically have limited reserve capital for follow-on rounds at Series B and beyond. Therefore, they need to be selective in picking their winners. Companies like SignalRank, another data driven investor in the market, uses their proprietary algorithms to identify top Series B companies and partner with early-stage funds to get access to pro-rata rights. They deploy capital in the later rounds and share the incentives with the early-stage fund managers who would otherwise forego those rights. A classic win-win scenario 🤝 You can read more about pro rata funds in the full article below!

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VC funding in healthcare has been more resilient than in other industries. Here are some key takeaways from recent Carta data: 👉 At the priced seed, Series A, and Series B stages, dilution for health startups has noticeably decreased, while dilution for SaaS startups has stayed flat or increased slightly. 👉 In priced seed rounds, median dilution for healthcare companies dipped to 14.2%, compared to 20% for SaaS.  👉 The frequency of bridge rounds surged in the health sector in Q1, jumping to 44.3% from 36.9% in Q4 2023. This is the first significant increase in bridge rounds in healthcare over SaaS since early 2022. 👉 More founder-friendly terms for health startups may result from enduring VC interest since COVID. Healthcare has remained strong through economic turmoil, enabling higher valuations with smaller round sizes. What are the implications? The healthcare sector might see a rise in new ventures due to favorable investment conditions and lower dilution rates. The surge in bridge rounds suggests that certain sectors within healthcare face unique challenges that require interim financing solutions. Founders and investors in the healthcare space- what are your thoughts on this? I’d love to hear from you. If you know a founder innovating in healthcare, tag them in the comments! The Artemis Fund is especially interested in groundbreaking care tech companies. You can check out Carta’s full blog linked in the comments. If you haven’t read our latest blog on care tech, you’ll find that there too. #healthcare #caretech #fundraising

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Sometimes it feels taboo for VCs to talk about exit pathways. A decade of content marketing around great companies being bought not sold is probably true for the top 0.01%, but there are a lot of hard working entrepreneurs building valuable companies who can materially impact their personal outcomes by planning ahead. Some great advice from David Parfett below 👇

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The state of venture capital is wild right now. We are witnessing a surge of innovation across the spectrum: - Funds merging - VC doing PE - PE doing VC - Secondary funds - Buyout funds - Spin-out funds - Debt funds - Continuation funds - Infrastructure funds - GP turnover - Hard Tech surging - Family Office uptick

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Despite the headwinds many software companies (even public ones) are facing today, there are still those that are delivering great results. Check out how the top decile companies in our Beyond Benchmarks survey are performing. And don't forget to review the full report for many more insights on the state of private software businesses.

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Fundraising advice for new VC fund managers: Increase your minimums 2.5x-5x. This often leads to better results, as many first-time LPs tend to do the minimum. Remember, you can always make exceptions for "strategic" investors.

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As an economist, I obsess (probably a little too much) about profit, cash flow, and IRR. It's one thing to see gains in paper valuations, but those are just a proxy. Sure investors will vary in their preferences for liquidity, duration etc. but in the end they all require the same thing -- realized returns. There are a ton of companies in limbo right now where they can't quite exit nor are they in a position to generate a dividend. For investors, this is a tough spot to be in, and even more so when it's a systemic trend affecting their whole portfolio rather than a one-off.

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