Miles 𓂀

answering "why now" with some form of "other teams in our space are raising" is nuts That's literally saying other people are raising money so we should too. I get FOMO, like the fund is missing the next OpenAI, and its supposed to look like a safer looking bet, since everyone is getting funded so the space must work but those rounds only show the space is real, and a fund that took the call usually believed that already. it still has to decide why you and if others are raising, maybe the investor should have put the money into that project instead of yours?

Founders ask me about smaller exits too. I went through two early exits myself and both happened because selling made the most sense at that point. At pre seed its nice to have an idea who buys you, but it prolly wont play out that way. so when an offer comes it pretty much comes down to whether you believe the company keeps going up. tho for a fund its easier to say keep pushing

in lisbon for @WebSummit next week, mon to wed at @HorusGroup_ we commercialize and invest in seed-stage tech, from our own balance sheet. mostly fintech, AI and infra looking to meet: - seed funds and angels in those spaces - founders in the same spaces with a working product, raising their seed dm me and lets meet there

nobody remembers launches. no founder has ever told me a whole story about theirs, its "we launched and then we did this and that". it only feels big in my first two ventures we didnt even have a launch. no big stress, no telling everyone were launching. we built it and got customers and users as fast as we could, thats it. marketing was barely on our radar (which is probably why they failed) im a fan of that approach. i meet teams that just put something out, it works at small scale, and thats fine i dont see a launch changing much, its mostly optics. if you want to show investors a big push, sure. but if you hype it like crazy and nothing comes out of it, whats the point, and that big push is everything that materializes after

Everyone says companies will just build their own software in-house now. Id ask first whether they should, and whether they have the people for it. A lot of the processes they want to automate are messier than they look. Id guess a wave of them finds out its not that easy, because a) the build crap and/or b) the process isnt right. Easiest example - outbound. Done for a well-oiled GTM machine - sure, it'll 10x your results. But done for a spray-and-pray GTM, it'd 10x your mess. And then, at a big bank, at enterprise scale, buying is the easier way out, e.g borrow the reputation of a vendor that already does this than to back the person who'd build it in-house. And a really big build goes to someone who does it all the time and learned it at tens of companies.

"we're better than them and they raised 3x what we struggle to raise" I dont buy it. teams set out to raise different amounts, and the goals, the ambition and how they think about valuation can just be different. but if you assume more money raised = the better, then the other team is just stronger. if they were below your level, theyd have raised another amount or not raise at all. so if I were you Id ask what they had that got them that round, and you dont. and if you say "it was the network they got from X" - someone might as well say the same about your round too when it's announced.

Went through my notes from October calls with founders. 26 teams, 22 had no lead. 12 of the 26 had paying customers. 9 of those 12 had no lead. From what Ive seen a lot ofthat is the fund list. Teams with real traction pitch whoever takes the call, mostly funds that dont know the space (= need more education), and nobody wants to go first. Sure you wont fill a whole round with experts in your niche. but the lead and the conviction youre looking for come way sooner from someone who already knows it So it comes down to research and being more intentional about who and where you pitch.

[why your GTM and tools suck] Most sales tool pitches go "we do the heavy lifting so sales get easier". imo thats a shit value prop With just a CRM and a tool blasting customized outreach, youre testing copy, and the copy is the last step. the more sales gets professionalized, the more people go for the simple parts Ive done b2b sales my whole career, its where I started, and commercializing products is still my thing. Its also why at @HorusGroup_ I personally lean to b2b products, because its easier for me to tell if the GTM makes sense. The real heavy lifting these tools do along the way is bulding your ICP with you and thats backwards. An ICP starts from a problem you understand and think you can solve better than others, and its often already sewn into that problem. Your network, competence, a problem thats especially big in one niche. So narrowing it comes from there. Then from plain sales data, who pays the most and how customers behave, and thats stage two, always ongoing. Automating outbound and research, great. tying it together, multichannel, a CRM with the whole context per client, the event, the call, what someone told you, all great, im not knocking it. Though as our GTM wiz @K3vBiz notes, you rarely get to do deep analytics one a single platform, so things can slip as you scale your sales. And you tell the tool "i sell this, and some other AI told me to sell to X and Y", plus some criteria. not bad. but then you form theses and test them. So you spend time clicking around until you get a profile and customized outreach. It's all made up and thats just busywork. writing and managing the outreach is 10% of sales A tool that worked through your theses with you, on your context, would be something else. but thats know-how, and most AI doesnt have it because theres no data to train it on. the best data is yours So your ICP should come out of everything you know. E.g we pulled every call we had with founders, so we know how they talk about their problems, and we follow what happens to those startups after. how they think about their rounds and their GTM, what worked, whether we saw it work. that way the ICP comes out of everything you learned, and you become a great data source yourself

Founders will tell you 10 reasons why their valuation should be $20M but have 0 idea on how much (and when) to pay themselves. Here's my take as it's rarely brought up.

"nice project, but wed like to see the launch." when a lot of VCs say that on your pre-seed, ive seen founders raise only half the round they planned, launch, and keep pushing from there they never go back for the second half. the rest goes under the umbrella of the next round, at a different valuation pre-seed and seed money comes in at different prices anyway. a friend writes a check, some angels come in, it drags on, a rolling SAFE at different valuations. and you can go hard with different prices during a round too and its simple. no point standing still and burning cash when you could launch. its a legit play

"you cant really know a founder in 2-3 meetings" sounds right. but "really knowing" someone is pretty abstract. We go through all kinds of hell with founders once we're working together, and we still decide in 2 calls, max 3 So we keep a few criteria and poke holes in what the founder says. push back and see how they react. ask things they have to think thrigh on the spot. sure, 2-3 calls of a founder telling you waht they already know would be a wasted of everyone's time. And I dont think you ened to know who someone really is at this point. early on, the founder doesnt know that about themselves either. a lot of it comes out later anyway. Very similar dynamic to when you're hiring.

I dont like the whole "building in public" thing. It puts pressure on you, and you dont always win. Stealth comes in two kinds: - 6 months alone in your basement with claude, then you come out with a 50 page PDF on how great the build is. - or, you come out with your first partners already on board, maybe a first investor too. And thats the good kind of stealth, so you launch with a backlog of wins to share. Following that logic, complainign about VCs when you're raising is bad energy for no reason. Posting a loss is fine if you do it right, but rants read like youre losing. In public people should see you winning - and losses turned into wins, not the big grind people tend to romanticize.

Early-stage VC is weird, def not rational. but I dont think it should be all vibes either, esp now when its so easy to get to a point here you can actually sell something/gauge interest. Because you can be the same guy, but if you spend 30 minutes on how youre changing the world with an ARR chart going up can get you an eye roll from one VC and an applause from the next fund So thats why I always push at these proof points and disagree that no revenue is better than small revenue. But of course thats the famous VC "taste" talking

Having run 15+ raises, I can see one pattern repeat over and over again. First there's the prep work, then the first wave. So first interest, youre excited, maybe youre in IC, talking to partners, "was a good call!!" Maybe also the first check comes in, if thats your anchor, amazing. Then the dip. During the first wave you also hear your first nos, folks ghost you, the energy drops. You and the team start doubting it, "maybe we shouldnt raise now, maybe not yet". or one fund says you need X and you treat it like an oracle not knowing what else to do better. Thats when you CANNOT give in. You keep pushing as hard, to set of the second wave. That and the third wave is where the checks are. After the nosthe feedback and seeing how the calls go, you finally know how to tell it, what people ask, and what their problem actually is. Or at least your guesses are more educated now. It can go up and down for a while. At some point you want one wave to go higher than the rest, so you get to pick who you work with. Who gives more, better terms, who actually helps. And the GTM runs under all of it, the whole time. Every wave needs a new win to show. "We just got the first check in, we just did X" is how the funds from the first wave see you succeed and circle back.

if you're actually talking to customers, VCs, and users you know best. E.g ask yourself "so what" 3 times to go a few levels deeper next time when you pitch. e.g "we revolutionize XYZ by implementing AI-native systems" -> "this matters because people who do X today, get hurt by Y, so they can do Z now" Following that logic, you can tell when a founder message was written with AI. it sounds like it makes sense, and theres less substance in it With funds and with customers, show some emotion. youre excited about something, youre pissed, something went wrong, you rate the persons work. that lands with whoever is on the other side, and no AI orchestration gets you the same thing

Spent the day outside of my comfort zone, listening to concept/inception-stage pitches. I’d argue that most of the concerns that pop up in your head hearing these could be solved by the best shippable illusion: anything that looks like a product, as long as someone is actually using it

Some people roll their eyes at funds on their media arc, posting for LPs. But if that posting is them sorting what they know, it also does a lot for them E.g my articles and posts are inspried by convos and a lot of them are me organizing what I know and think. So on the next call I already have a clearer answer in my head. And when I ask people about their take on an article, I learn who actually knows what. This extends to portco support, intros and the substantive stuff are most of it. and the people who take the time to sort their knowledge and their network help a ton. So when a founder comes and says "lets talk about the next round", beyond whether the fund joins it, its great if the fund can be a sparring partner on a lot of things