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Also you may want to take a look at https://www.botfactory.co


You may also checkout https://weatherxm.com


Yes – and I’m using Writeroom.


Bota Systems (botasys.com) to the rescue! Force-torque sensing can truly deliver in such cases! (Disclosure: I am an investor in the company.)


When it comes to giving robots a "sense of touch", you may want to check out Bota Systems (botasys.com) – already deployed in hundreds of research and industrial robots globally.


For what's worth, Katara means 'curse' in Greek ;)


Reminds me of Sega's Game Gear – oh, the memories!


I get more of a Sega Nomad vibe from it -- take the games you can play at home with you on the go, and you can even play them on a big TV (or monitor, in this case) when you travel, but the portable experience will have some notable caveats in terms of ergonomics, heat, weight, and battery life.


I'm a fan of Writeroom for Mac (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom).


That's a fantastic explainer, thank you. In general, VC is by nature a game of ownership.


Hi graycat, I'm the author of the guide. You refer to a number of issues, I'll try to reply to some of them:

- 'Fast' progress, i.e. weeks (I mentioned a couple months as your target): If a deal is hot, things can happen even faster. If you don't have progress within such timeframe, chances are the round is not moving forward at all.

- 'Full time job', 100+ meetings, months of time: If you take a closer lok, we are not necessarily in disagreement with this.

- Requests from the founder: This guide does not describe what we 'ask' from the founders of our portfolio companies, but addresses a much broader audience. Indicatively, we make intros to ~30 relevant VCs in each case and book initial meetings/calls, then the founders take over.

- I agree that advice varies on the internet with regards to what makes a good pitch deck. It is also subjective at some extent. I provided a very high level guidance (and definitely did not request a blockbuster movie production)... At the same time, the deck is what will help you make it through the first stages of the funnel; its importance should be straightforward.

- Re traction requests: VC requirements and the definition of a Series A round may vary per geography, industry or firm (or even per case); what I'm trying to stress here is that such reqs differ compared to a Seed round (i.e. "we want to build this" vs. "here is something that works and we want to go faster")

I hope the above clarify things further. Thanks for your comment!


I can be more specific:

> If you raised a Seed round, sooner or later you’ll be fund raising – again.

This statement is very eager just to assume that each successful information technology (IT) startup will, naturally, of course, be doing round after round of equity funding.

I've been to enough yacht clubs to see a lot of people who have done really well in business but never accepted an equity check.

Yes, there is the view that a startup is necessarily some solid fueled rocket on a 10 G acceleration into orbit or bust, but that situation is rare in business. The last one was, what, Facebook? I'm reluctant to count AirBnB or Uber due to the risk of their being regulated out of business.

> sooner or later you’ll be fund raising – again.

Hopefully not and maybe not: For some really good projects, e.g., Plenty of Fish, maybe won't need the funds. For a business that grew to pre-tax earnings of $20 million a year, maybe the growth is then too slow to attract VCs. Or maybe the business is about to fail.

Or, "sooner or later you will" see a dentist but not necessarily a VC.

> A core part of a CEO’s job is to secure the resources for your team to execute the company’s mission.

But for a startup with the traction that it appears is coveted by VCs for a Series A, those "resources" might be available from the seed round or organically, that is, from current revenue.

> You should expect that you will be spending a significant part of your time on fund raising-related issues going forward.

Hopefully, maybe not: Maybe there are plenty of funds from the seed round or current revenue.

> At the same time, being successful in fund raising is a big part of building a successful company – there is no shortcut or workaround, and this is not time wasted.

There is a "workaround": have a startup that doesn't need equity funding.

> Fund raising is about being religious in doing the small things right; as long as you establish a discipline about it, things become straightforward.

On the one hand, it is commonly accepted that running a new business is running at full speed all the time, putting low priority work on the back burner or the trash and doing the most important things ASAP.

In that situation, there's not a lot of opportunity to be:

"religious in doing the small things right".

That perfectionistic work approach may have been crucial for some of the tricky core code of the startup. But for candidate investors to ask the founder of a promising IT startup far enough along to get a Series A to be so perfectionistic is, as I wrote, "asking too much".

For

> i) Deck – This should include some context about the problem (why it’s big), your approach (why it’s unique), your team (why you’re the ones), early validation (how it’s winning), next steps (where you’ll be in a year or two) and grand vision (your version of the world). It should be easy to read and appealing enough to get you a meeting.

If the only goal is a meeting, okay, do whatever gets the meeting and leave everything else important for later.

But some VCs don't like superficial decks just as a teaser to get a meeting and want enough to know to write a check or at least to get quite serious. Maybe when they say that they really are looking for educational materials to contribute to their "deep domain knowledge", but maybe they are serious and don't want a deck that is just superficial and raised questions instead of answering them.

I can believe that for a Series A a large fraction of VCs will need just the name of the startup so that they can try the product or service. Or, "don't TELL me; SHOW me", and with that common advice a pitch deck is not very promising.

But I was struck by the

"your approach (why it’s unique)"

sounds superficial. E.g., "unique" doesn't mean much. My view is that the "approach" is likely -- now needs to be -- the crucial core of the business, its ability to please the customers/users, to be difficult to duplicate or equal, and to provide a Buffett moat barrier to entry. So the "approach" needs a lot of attention; it might need a 50 page paper of original applied math and an NDA. So, okay, can't have the 50 pages or get an NDA in the first foil deck, but

"your approach (why it’s unique)"

still sounds superficial or, worse, that the VCs are not used to really serious work on "approach".

Or, I have this terrific idea for a startup: An airline that flies NY to Sidney at Mach 15 for $100 per passenger. The market is huge. The idea is "unique". Only problem: How to make money at only $100 a person and, really, how the heck to fly from NY to Sidney at Mach 15 at all. Or, it's easy to come up with fantastic ideas if we don't take fully seriously the "approach".

> A budget for the next couple years

How about, we have some cash in the bank, enough for a rainy day, week, month, or quarter (IIRC early on Gates wanted enough such cash for a year of zero revenue), and otherwise we spend money depending on current revenue and slowly enough not to dip into that cash. So, we don't really have a budget and instead have a dynamic, feedback control for the uncertain future. Or, since our rapidly growing startup is facing unexpected problems weekly or so, we don't know the revenue or unexpected expenses and, thus, can't fix a budget. Or, such a budget would be like asking a football quarterback to call all 4 plays on first and 10. Instead he calls the second down play after seeing the results of the first down play.

Or, my Ph.D. dissertation was in stochastic optimal control, best decision making over time under uncertainty. There it was more solid than granite clad in cast iron and Kryptonite that fixed plans in the face of an uncertain future commonly are very poor controls.

Sure, the founder knows his on-going monthly expenses and his revenue in recent months and the growth in revenue but, still, he may not have such a budget, may never have bothered to develop one. Really, that budget sounds like a lot to ask of a very busy founder and not much help for the VC. Or, what founder wants to report to a BoD with VCs who would take such a budget seriously?

> List – A list of all investors you want to go after, to be used in a fashion similar to a CRM (i.e., track progress across the pipeline, etc.); these are either leads you’ve been in touch with, or new ones you and your partners will be reaching out to.

From all I've seen, commonly VCs take great pride in being really difficult to get to respond at all. E.g., a "cold contact" can be treated as contemptible "over the transom" with some scatological implications. Or a founder who sends a deck to INFO@VCxyz.COM, if the deck is noticed at all, puts the founder on the dunce list. That is, the e-mail address INFO@VCxyz.COM is a honey pot for fools.

Sure, for the list, go to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and get a copy of their membership list. Presto. Bingo. Done. But to what end?

> make sure that everything is top-notch

So, we're back into this perfectionism stuff. Commonly "top-notch" is not so much good work as a sign of the anxiety disease OCD. My wife was really good at doing "top-notch": Valedictorian, Summa cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson fellow, NSF fellow (two years support in one award), PBK, top research university from world famous professors Ph.D. It was fatal: She never recovered, and missing her body was found floating in a lake. I have a good pure/applied math Ph.D. from a world class research university and, thus, know what "top-notch" work really is; I doubt that many VCs do know.

> Do the pitch to 3-4 friendly VCs that are not top of your list to make sure your narrative is clear and well-received, or fix any weak points that may occur (if the reception is not enthusiastic, you need to take a step back and iterate until it becomes such).

Where does a startup founder find "3-4 friendly VCs" when sending 100 copies of the pitch deck may result in 0-2 responses?

For the "fix any weak points that may occur if the reception is not enthusiastic", that's asking that VCs be "enthusiastic", and that was the source of my parody that the desire is a pitch deck like a summer blockbuster popcorn movie. I'm not sure even Spielberg and Lucas could develop a deck that would get VCs "enthusiastic".

That's enough.

From such considerations I repeated the common advice that a startup that might want a Series A might just f'get about VCs, concentrate on growing the business, and let VCs discover the company and show their interest by contacting the founder. E.g., some months ago at AVC.COM Fred Wilson told the story of a startup his firm USV pursued for some months and finally talked the founder into accepting a USV equity check.


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