Yep, I personally reply to every email I get from a founder. While I’m not quite ready to pledge a response time to those emails, I will take responsibility for having a public email address. The quality and thoughtfulness of a response will vary, for sure, but here are some ideas for you as … Read more
I hope to add more ‘Bee Partners Pledge’ blog posts over the year, but I’ll start with a lingering frustration with other VC websites: “Bee Partners will show every company that it ever invests in on its portfolio page, both past and present.” You’d be surprised how many portfolio pages have been sanitized by … Read more
Today, Tom Post at Forbes wrote a post titled: Are You an Entrepreneur? In the post, they reposted a survey written by Alana Muller, president, Kauffman FastTrac®. My quick response after reading this was something like: If you have to take a survey, you’re not an Entrepreneur. Look, I know at bit of entrepreneuritis is going around … Read more
(This post does NOT pertain to fundraising. If you’re fundraising, avoid naysayers like the plague.) All too often, entrepreneurs are told to find their customer(s) and then focus on them, and them only. I have an alternative recommendation: Once you find your customer, seek out “over-the-hill naysayers”. I recently experienced this first-hand: I myself am … Read more
Today, a founder named Matt (edited for anonymity) dropped by my office to say hi. I left our first meeting a week ago with a positive bias towards supporting his vision and potentially making an investment. However, I also left with skepticism that Matt was holding something back, that the story had been edited and … Read more
I spend most of my time with genesis- and seed-stage entrepreneurs. But today, I had the opportunity to attend a major technology conference here in SF, and hear from various executives from large private and public companies, including Tim Cook from Apple and Steven Cakebread, Pandora’s CFO. I was struck by their incredible poise and articulate comments – … Read more