Upal Basu

This is a good resource I've stumbled upon. It covers a plethora of VC and startup-related topics and contains links to expand your knowledge. https://lnkd.in/dqkdV4fA TL;DR: "It's the founders, stupid!" These two lines made me hover over: "I know the physical and emotional tolls that entrepreneurs face". "Resources for Managing Founder Anxiety and Depression" I've been one myself, and it's not for the faint-hearted. I struggled and failed many times. From the standpoint of a person working now for a VC fund, the ability to support a founder who was hit with too much at the same time, to know how to listen, mirror and label Chris Voss's style, and a bit of guidance to build confidence back can do wonders. Assisting portfolio companies doesn't have to be just intros and throwing money or unsolicited advice. And what about identifying troublesome founders before investing to prevent assisting portfolio companies from becoming a nightmare flop? Ahh, that's a tricky one. Startups fail for a variety of reasons. At the early stage, we should look at many things, to name a few: product-market fit, go-to-market, blue ocean or zero to one, CAC and LTV ratio, CAP table, passion, leadership potential, intelligence, technical ability, and many, many more. Crunch the numbers. Sure. What about the early stage? Limited information and knowledge when a decision has to be made, and the outcome is impossible to predict because the future is unknown and unknowable. Examine the founders. If you don't read the founders right and overlook some hidden toxic traits and coping mechanisms that mask something that can derail the startup and founders down the road (vulnerable narcissism, antisocial tendencies, Machiavellism, blameshifting or more benign like anxiety-prone, conflict avoidance, burn-out tendency, inability to delegate, perfectionism, risk aversion, etc.), the chances that it will be your next outlier significantly diminish. How many of you saw dead equity on the capable, founders' clash, low morale, a founder playing the sunk cost game with the fund after burning cash, lying, or even more brazen behaviours like experimenting with horse tranquilisers and smoking weed on a podcast? A "Sudden" shift of values with a splash of megalomania could lead to a CEO removal attempt by the board. Or stealing "HER" voice. It is fun to watch as a TV drama, not to deal with as your portfolio. We won't be able to see it all during a few conversations with the founders and not everyone is Wendy Rhoades from Billions. Knowing how to ask a question behind which is a hidden question and being able to detect when founders say what they think we want to hear to get the funding is a good start. Spending extra time learning that is a good investment. A splash of psychology, empathy, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence to become an excellent GP won't harm your ability to identify and help the right entrepreneurs build great companies.

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Great episode for early stage VC's and capital allocators to check out. https://lnkd.in/ekz7JHJd #vc #fundraising #venturecapital

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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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At an LP’s annual meeting: ~100 quality VC and growth equity firms gave brief overviews. <5 said they invest in consumer. The consumer is the engine of the economy and 2/3 of GDP but is a bad word. Watch - we’ll look back and this will be a great time to invest in consumer.

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Let's finally get rid off the "VC alphabet song" and redo the system to become more founder friendly. "The benchmarks set by funding stages are often arbitrary and not necessarily aligned with the actual development needs of individual startups." #vc #venturecapital #founder #fundraising #startups #fundingstages #funding #fundingrounds #pitchbook

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Here’s a question investors are often asked: When evaluating early stage companies, how much time do you spend on due diligence around future exits? It’s not surprising we hear this question a lot. Also not surprising: it’s got a wide range of answers depending on the firm. Some don’t spend much time here at all. Others make it a point to put meaningful time in as part of their process. Our current thinking: take the time to do the work on public market comps. At Alpaca VC, we spend significant time understanding how public market investors will  realistically value a business based on margin profile, product, business model & TAM. In short, we want to know: how will this company be valued at scale when we get taken out? Yes, we can acknowledge that the journey toward exit is a windy road and that there may be pivots along the way, but there are still public market companies that have a business model similar to the early stage company you're evaluating. And you can always look at gross profit multiples if you think the margin profile will change over time. So we still do the work on the comps. Quantitative metrics we look at when making the comparison to public market comps include EBITDA multiple, revenue multiple, Gross Profit multiple or all of the above. As part of this process, it’s also important to factor in the public market company’s year-over-year revenue growth as this will also significantly impact the multiple it trades at. Simple example: if you have two public market companies with similar business models and similar margin profiles, but one's growing 100% year over year, and one's growing 50% year over year, then obviously the DCF (discounted cash flow) analysis is going to spit out a very different valuation for the one that's growing faster. Why this matters: When you take all of that information into account as you evaluate an early stage business, you can begin to create a realistic picture of how this company will be valued in the public markets at exit - or how an acquirer will value the company for an acquisition. Strategic acquirers may, of course, pay a premium, but we won’t underwrite for that. This allows us, for example, to form conviction around valuation based on revenue and gross profit predictions. If we think they can do $100M of revenue five years from now, we use this diligence process to form a thesis about whether the characteristics above (product, margin, business model, etc.) will cause the company to be valued at $200M vs. $500M vs. $1B at exit. Curious how other early stage investors think about underwriting an exit and how much time they’re spending on public market comps even though these companies are in their infancy.

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What do you do when a radical new technology puts your main product right in the crosshairs of disruption? Listen to David Okuniev — co-founder of Typeform | Ask awesomely — discuss the challenges of innovation within existing structures. David shared a game-changing insight: Radical innovation is really, really difficult to do inside your own product. He emphasized the need to break free from the constraints of familiarity and embrace change from outside the box. Henrik Werdelin and I have both seen our fair share of this in our respective careers. What struck us most was how David leveraged structure to overcome the innovator’s dilemma. By creating a culture of experimentation and providing space for bold ideas, he propelled Typeform beyond incremental improvements. What other hacks have you seen or employed to help your organization overcome the innovator’s dilemma? Share your stories below! 👇 And if you want to dive deeper into our conversation, click the link in the comments to catch the full podcast episode!

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"Industry leaders, especially within financial services, are positioning AI at the center of their application modernization strategies, yet they tend to focus on the prototyping and deployment phases of AI applications. Unfortunately, the underlying data infrastructure is often overlooked and leads to underperforming applications”  Many Global 2000 brands trust Hazelcast, with two-thirds of the world’s transactions passing through its Hazelcast-powered applications. With its market-leading technology that is setting the standard for consistency and performance for data-intensive, mission-critical AI workloads, companies using the Hazelcast Platform can simplify and accelerate application modernization – at a lower total cost of ownership – and achieve results such as:  Processing more than $1 billion (USD) per minute for a global financial institution; Boosting loan conversion rates by 400% through personalized offers on the spot, in the moment of need; Avoiding losses of $100 million a year with improved fraud detection; and Reducing operational costs by 33% by optimizing the use of equipment and resources in real time.

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I've seen NO ONE read this correctly; the headline is pure clickbait. More GPs are planning to fundraise now (as they say "nearer") than last year. This is the largest YoY jump, instead of not planning another raise. Why? The data here suggests those who pushed a decision further out have decided. • Not decided: from 44% to 27% • No plan to raise: 6% to 13% = 2x increase • Deciding to fundraising now: 4% to 12% = 3x increase https://lnkd.in/gkAC6GGr

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Thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks at Emergence Capital. This comprehensive report dives deep into the metrics and trends shaping the early-stage enterprise cloud market. A huge thank you to our VC partners and contributors for making this possible! Here's a sneak peek of our findings: --> 60% of companies have already integrated GenAI into their service offerings, with another 20% planning to do so this year. --> While most companies use OpenAI as their primary LLM, many are experimenting with multiple models. We’re seeing a trend toward intelligently routing GenAI inference requests based on cost, performance, and security. --> Companies that have implemented GenAI are showing promising results, with a 7% higher NDR compared to those that haven’t. Beyond Benchmarks goes further with more GenAI trends, insights on the current fundraising environment, and key performance metrics. Our goal is to provide founders and their teams with valuable benchmarks to help them make better-informed decisions. At Emergence Capital, we're committed to helping founders build iconic companies. Dive into the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g6bnvAZM

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What does the future hold? 🤔 According to top VC Vinod Khosla, it's looking optimistic! In a recent article, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures shared his views on our plausible futures in 2035-2049, and it's a nice counterbalance against the too-pessimistic doom thinking out there. ⚡ Khosla believes that entrepreneurs, with passion for a vision, invent the future they want. And if we allow it to happen, abundant, awesome, technology-based, “possible tomorrows” are likely ⚡ ----------------------- Are you interested in building the future with/ for your company? Take the first step here 📆 https://lnkd.in/e6kjakzF Let's make the future happen! 🚀 #Future #Venturing #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #Technology #Possibilities

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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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Here’s HBR’s take on some of the ways VC and PE firms are deploying an alternative data strategy to gain a competitive edge for their brand and portfolio: 1. Algorithmic sourcing - distilling the novel from the noisy: detecting patterns, trends, anomalies. 2. Due diligence - the old school way is often constrained by time and resources: VCs are deep diving, deploying LLMs to do a full analysis (see pharma example in article). 3. Portfolio company value creation: VCs and talent sourcing, Eg; one VC aggregated Google Scholar, GitHub, Quora, Kaggle, and LinkedIn to identify specialized talent to help assemble strong teams for their port cos to kick (and reach) their goals. Even with AI, effectively harnessing the vast amounts of external data is no small feat. Info is highly fragmented and uneven in quality, and demands dedicated resources and expertise to assess what’s most likely be useful, and navigating the thousands of products on the market. Onwards! #AI #Investing #PrivateMarketInvesting

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A good dataroom makes a great impression, but is not that obvious what that looks like and what consumer VCs are looking for! Having gone through hundreds of these at dmg ventures and seen the good, the bad and the ugly we want to help entrepreneurs putting their best foot forward. So Taos Edmondson, CFA wrote a great piece on how B2C founders can build data rooms that investors will love. Have a read!

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"If we’re measuring velocity in days or weeks, it might seem obvious to directly tie a startup’s velocity to the number of hours you work each day. But startup velocity is far more than just hours worked (a nuance that many adherents to startup “hustle” culture get wrong). Velocity is not only about how hard you work, it’s about how you work. At a fundamental level, startup velocity is a measure of a company’s sense of urgency." https://lnkd.in/gV9Z_ift

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Seed VCs are turning to new ‘pro rata’ funds that help them compete with the big firms Alpha Partners, SignalRank and now SaaS Ventures help seed VCs pay for shares when big VCs try to price — or push — them out Lee Edwards, partner at Root VC, has a saying at his firm that “pro rata rights are earned, not given.” That may be a bit of a stretch since pro rata refers to a term that VCs put in their term sheets that gives them the right to buy more shares in a portfolio company during consequent funding rounds to maintain an ownership percentage and avoid dilution. Still, while these rights are not exactly “earned,” they can be expensive. One of the latest trends in VC investing these days are funds dedicated to helping seed VCs exercise their pro rata rights. https://lnkd.in/dRM3RvdA By Christine Hall

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Great analysis by the AGC team on SaaS public company comps. It's worth a look as we recalibrate mid-way through earnings season. The analysis aligns with the broader Nasdaq equity performance, where the Mag 7 (or fab 4 now :-)) have shown more resilience than the rest of the market. #AGC #SaaS #EarningsSeason #Nasdaq #EquityPerformance

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The company-building journey features many inflection points and transitions. Like going from startup to scaleup, building to selling, local to international, or from co-locating to distributed teams. But handing over leadership in the business you founded is one of the most difficult but least discussed of these existential changes. Evgeny went through this very transition himself and experienced firsthand the challenges and complexities of handing over the reigns - hard even when you know it's the right thing to do. Today's he's launching "Startup CEO Succession: A Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition" - which provides a practical framework for founder CEOs and their boards preparing for a CEO succession. I know the care, heart, blood, sweat and soul Evgeny Shadchnev PCC poured into this - bringing together his own experiences and that of many other founders with the goal of paying it forward to help others in their journey. Get your copy today and get the help you deserve in your own transition 💙 https://lnkd.in/gss6Y7HY

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