(repost from innovation.firstrepublic.com) From San Francisco to New York, more than 250 micro venture capital firms now actively invest in early stage startup companies. Micro VC firms, which typically raise funds under $100 million, represent an extremely valuable option for entrepreneurs seeking the strategic financing and expertise to help grow their businesses. To better understand the micro VC market, and to identify some best practices for new managers seeking to raise their first fund, Kathryn Gould, Co-Founder and former General Partner at Foundation Capital, and Ashmeet Sidana, Founder and Managing Partner of Engineering Capital, offered a fresh look at the space and what it means to launch a new micro VC firm in today’s market. When it comes to the micro VC sector, how did we get here and how did we come to have so many? Kathryn Gould: The increase in number of funds can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis, the subsequent increase in liquidity and complete lack of yield from the global financial system. During this time, Silicon Valley, and more broadly, startups, were perceived as one of the few areas of growth. Money rushed in, leading to an unsustainable increase in the number of funds. Another important enabler is that the cost of starting a company dropped dramatically due to the success of lean startup methodologies… though the cost of scaling a company has arguably increased. Additionally, high-quality limited partners became more comfortable backing a single general partner, recognizing the benefits of not having a large partnership-overhead. Finally, several established partnerships went through large rounds of fundraising making it difficult for them to commit to and help entrepreneurs at the truly formative stage. All these trends created a gap that has been filled by a new class of professional, but small, partnerships — the micro VC. Fundraising can be very challenging for first timers; what advice would you give general partners on formulating a fundraising strategy? Ashmeet Sidana (@ashmeetsidana): Identify an experienced mentor. I was fortunate to have Kathryn as a mentor helping me start Engineering Capital. Kathryn is an experienced venture capitalist. She is one of the rare people who has helped start multiple venture firms, which gives her a unique perspective on the landscape. Whoever you choose as your mentor, be sure that they have well-rounded experience in the field. Gould: Identify your differentiation from all the existing funds you will be competing with, and then make a compelling case for the value you will add. [The idea is that] the best entrepreneurs will choose you over established brands. But without a crisp differentiation and compelling value-add, it is too late to start a first-time fund in Silicon Valley. What would you...

A lot of new Micro-VC firms have been formed over the past couple of years. A lot. For some, it may seem like anyone that has a good story and a PowerPoint can raise a fund. Having lived through the process vicariously through dozens of new managers, I can tell you that raising institutional capital can be very tough for first time managers.   And in many ways, despite the bull market we’re in, it’s much tougher to raise institutional capital today than it was 3-4 years ago. Some institutional LP’s have placed their bets within the Micro-VC sector and are in wait and see mode while others struggle to differentiate between the constant inflow of new manager slide decks. To get into the heads of institutional LP’s around Micro-VC, I took some time over the past few weeks talking to several about how they analyze new (and often unproven) venture managers. For ease of readability, I’m narrating the collective thoughts of the institutional LP’s I talked to in the first person. Motivation One of the things I’m going to be very interested in is understanding what inspired you to start your own firm/fund. As an institutional investor, I’m looking to invest in your franchise and not a single fund. As such, I want to know that you have been thoughtful around why this is the direction you’re taking your career. In a bull market like today where the velocity of capital is high, it’s sometimes difficult for us to differentiate between managers that have true conviction to build a great long-term franchise versus part time hobbyists who are cashing in on the current wave. Make sure it’s a question that you ask yourself before pitching. On what is important to us? 1/Founder endorsements – Assuming I get this far in my diligence, I want to hear that the entrepreneurs you’ve backed are your biggest cheerleaders. While I want founders to say great things about your character and acumen, I’d really like to hear tangible examples. It could be how an entrepreneur went to bat to protect your pro-rata or how you were their first call when they started a new company. 2/Hustle factor – Pure and simple, Micro-VC investors need to convince me that they have the same hustle as the entrepreneurs they invest in. I want to feel that you’re going to run through walls to make the firm and all of its constituents successful.   With the level of competition for the best entrepreneurs, we’re going to lean heavily to those firms whose core philosophy is built around outworking the competition and being resourceful. 3/Differentiation – The most interesting funds to us are ones those...

It’s safe to say that despite less than a full presidential term in existence, venture firm Formation8 has made quit the impact on the industry. With a rock star team, stellar early performance with exits from portfolio companies Oculus Rift and RelateIQ, and now nearly $1B in assets under management, it’s no wonder that they were dubbed by Fortune as the “hottest” venture firm since Andreessen Horowitz. With two successful entrepreneurial ventures in Palantir Technologies and Addepar, along with an executive roles at the Peter Thiel led companies Clarium Capital and PayPal, Formation8 co-founder Joe Lonsdale experience certainly belies his relative youth. Recently, Joe was gracious enough to share his thoughts about entrepreneurship and venture capital at his home in Silicon Valley. On the decision to become a venture capitalist and on raising a $448MM first fund For me it was natural evolution in my career. With the companies I started and worked with, I had an opportunity to work with some really talented people. Unsurprisingly, many of these talented people went off and started great companies of their own. A couple of great examples are PayPal and Palantir, which have spawned at least 15 or so really impressive companies from ex-employees. As people branched off Palantir, I realized that I really enjoyed mentoring these individuals and was fortunate to invest in many of their companies. As I thought about the investing world, it really aligned with where I was already spending more and more of my time. So, it just made sense to start investing and working with founders full time. At the time we raised Fund I, I didn’t realize how large our first fund was relative to others in the market. I just knew that we were going to invest in big ideas and that thesis was going to require certain levels of capital. Also, the fund size allowed us to write meaningful checks alongside the firms we admire and co-invest with such as Andreessen, Greylock, Accel, and Founders Fund. The first fund was really difficult to raise, but we were fortunate to get great LP’s and we were recently well oversubscribed for our latest fund. Why you place an emphasis on companies that aren’t afraid to tackle big, complex problems Well, it’s what I’m passionate about and what I’ve seen in the past.  When I was working at Pay Pal, we met individuals from the Secret Service and FBI and discovered how archaic and dysfunctional their technology was. Many of them actually asked us to interpret data and provide them guidance. After 9/11 happened, we watched the government spend billions building these solutions that were ineffective, broke civil liberties, and had...

Walking into the Homebrew (named after the famed 1970’s hobbyist computer club) offices in SF provides for a very different experience than what would be normally expected from a typical venture capital firm. Amidst rows of desks reserved for Homebrew portfolio company teams, sit Homebrew founders Hunter Walk and Satya Patel.  No opulent Partner offices and no unnecessary frills. Consistent with their operating DNA and Homebrew’s entrepreneur-first mantra, the office feels more like a small start-up than investment firm. Recently they were gracious enough to share with us their thoughts on the early stage venture market, startups, and what makes Homebrew different. Why Homebrew was created At first, we just wanted to figure out a way to work together again based on our friendship and the positive experiences we had together through Google and as co-investors. We realized it was now or never because we’d be consumed by the next thing for a long period of time. The most exciting part for us was starting Homebrew around a theme that we were very passionate about. On the “bottom’s up” economy investing approach At a macro level, there were a couple of key themes that we observed from our personal experience at YouTube, Twitter and Google. First, we saw how technology platforms were fundamentally leveling the playing field. Our view is that as technology continues to get cheaper and more accessible that it allows the “little guy” to finally reap the same benefits that big companies have enjoyed for years.   This will allow for massive advances in innovation in untapped sectors. The second theme we saw was that the work contract between employer and employee had changed. People used to work for the same company for 40 years and earn a pension. Now as we move towards a more knowledge-based economy, entire categories of jobs are going away or becoming lower paying. That’s creating the economic necessity for people to figure out different ways of generating income, monetizing their time, their assets, their knowledge, and their skills. Combining these two themes created the core drivers that serve as the wind in the sails of what we now call the bottom-up economy. There are lots of sources of capital out there but there are very few sources of capital that are willing to be accountable for the early years of a company’s life. For us, that means leading the seed round and taking a board seat when appropriate. Probably, most importantly being willing to roll up our sleeves to help on a day-to-day basis. On why they are transparent in an industry that has historically been opaque I think we’re part of a wave of venture...

Founded by Jack Ma in China in 1999 to becoming the largest IPO in U.S. history, Alibaba represents one of the most compelling tales of a Asia based start-up that has had a significant impact on the U.S. market. However, U.S. based tech startups continue to be the dominant source of disruptive technology for global markets. Perhaps surprising to many, early adopters of newer technologies typically have not been U.S. or Europe based companies, but rather larger Asian multinational companies, specifically ones that are located in Japan, Korea, and China. Such cross-border synergies have enabled U.S.-based start-ups to hit scale they would not have otherwise been able to achieve had they followed solely a domestic sales strategy.  Of course, navigating through the Asian markets typically represents a choppy and uneven exercise given significant cultural, business, and regulatory barriers. Palo Alto based Translink Capital employs a very unique strategy investing in and assisting U.S. based start-up that view the Asian markets as a potential core building block for expansion. Below is a transcription of my conversation with Toshi Otani, founding partner of Translink Capital, on how he and the Translink team view opportunities that U.S. companies have within the Asian market (or in some cases, when to steer clear). What was the gap you were looking to fill when you and the team launched Translink Capital? We formally launched Translink Capital in 2007. Our founding team was very close as we had known each other for a decade-plus. Most of our team had worked within corporate venture arms of Samsung, Mitsubishi, and UMC, where we were focused on making strategic investments here in the valley. There are clear benefits of corporate venture capital with regard to the unique in-house insights that can be provided along with the high-level connections. Of course, there are some cons to taking strategic capital as many strategic investments come with some strings attached. We saw an opportunity to expand upon the benefits and shed most, if not all of the red tape of the corporate venture model. We also saw the Asian markets as game changing for many companies here in the valley. That was really the genesis of Translink, which is a hybrid between a strategic investor and a VC firm with a focus of providing portfolio companies guidance and access to the robust Asian markets. Tell us a bit more about how you help companies that are viewing the Asian markets as a core growth strategy. First, we created an ecosystem of the 20 of the biggest corporations in Asia, and we have strategic LP’s all over Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. Second, we have a unique process where we will do business...

  Without equivocation, consumer technology has completely transformed our daily behavior over the past decade: It’s changed how we communicate to the world (Twitter/Medium). It’s changed how we share our lives (Facebook/Snapchat/LinkedIn). It’s changed the way we travel (Uber/AirBnb). It’s changed how we manage various aspects of our lives (Dropbox/Mint/Fitbit/GrubHub). As such, it’s easy to see why consumer technology start-ups have a held a special place in the hearts of entrepreneurs and investors alike.  The dream of building the next consumer behavior shifting mainstream platform is incredibly compelling.  No surprise that consumer start-ups make up the bulk of newly formed companies today. A byproduct of course is massive competition and very few consumer tech companies that make a discernible dent.  To discuss the current consumer sector, I sat down with the team at Maven Ventures. Called as a “must meet” investor by  500 startups founder Dave McClure and the 1st consumer tech only incubator and Micro VC, the Maven team has great perspective on the consumer space.  Below is a transcript of our conversation. Jim, what inspired you to start Maven Ventures?  I’ve spent the last 20 years of my career as an entrepreneur in one capacity or another – a founder, angel investor, mentor, and VC. For 5 years as an angel investor, I worked hands-on with about two companies a year, helping them to raise a round and acting as an interim COO to help grow the business. During that time, such companies as Google and Intuit acquired five of those ten startups for great returns (like the recent Check acquisition by Intuit for $360M). I decided to scale that model into something much larger and last year launched the Maven Ventures Fund and Growth Labs Incubator in Palo Alto. The Maven Ventures Fund is a Micro VC focusing primarily on Seed and Series A investments up to $250,000 per deal. We work exclusively with direct-to-consumer businesses with hyper-growth potential, which allows us to focus on what we know and have scaled successfully in the past. Maven also runs an in-house incubator through Maven Ventures Growth Labs where we spend time working directly with the startups to shape their mission, vision, marketing, and early-growth strategies. To deliver greater impact to our incubator and portfolio companies, we have also enlisted a group of 20 incredible growth mentors who spend time hands-on with the startups we invest in. These are some of the best and brightest growth hackers in the business who’ve previously scaled Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. You were amongst the very early team at Friendster. Despite being the first social network with a large installed base, both MySpace and (of course) Facebook overtook Friendster as preferred social networks of choice....

Recently, I penned a few notes regarding recent exponential rise of “Micro-VC” (loosely defined as firms that raise sub-$50MM-$100MM funds to invest in seed stage companies). According to CB Insights, at least 135 firms such firms exist today! Jeff Clavier, founder of SoftTech VC is without a doubt a pioneer in the institutional seed investing space. The SoftTech team has made over 150 investments since inception (including companies such as Mint, Fitbit, Wildfire, and Brightroll) and recently closed their 4th fund with $85MM in capital commitments. Personally, I’m a big fan of Jeff and the SoftTech story and he was gracious enough to share with us his unique perspective on the ever-evolving seed stage financing market. As a first generation “Micro-VC”, you have seen the evolution of the seed-stage market first hand over the last decade. Can you give us some background into your journey? When I started full-time angel investing in 2004, things were certainly very different than they are now. Back then, seed rounds were smaller, and typically took many angels to fill up, most of whom were brought into deals based on whom they knew rather than the relevant experience and value they brought to companies. Party rounds, which I think are terrible, were certainly the standard. Some full time angel investors like me became known as “Super Angels”. Some of the most successful investors within this group then began to raise formal venture vehicles and became the first generation of what we now call Micro-VC’s. It was actually a small group up until the last 2-3 years, when an influx of supply (new fund managers) and demand (from limited partners) created the current explosion we’re seeing within Micro-VC. Not surprisingly, I now often meet people who either want to be entrepreneurs or VCs, and sometimes both. The explosion of funding opportunities certainly provides entrepreneurs with more choices. In addition, the reduced barriers to entry have allowed some talented young investors start their own firms, many of which bring a fresh perspective to start-ups. With the explosion of Micro-VC funds and the availability of other retail financing solutions, capital seems to have become a commodity, and not a particular scarce one. How has SoftTech become a desirable capital source for entrepreneurs? Yes, capital is definitely a commodity at the seed stage. The best companies and entrepreneurs will have no problem raising given the number of seed investors, retail and institutional. Adding value through relevant connections, sector expertise, and operating experience is paramount today. We are fortunate to have become one of the established seed stage venture brands and our pitch is simple. We have demonstrated success in helping over 150 companies develop...

  New start-up formation has happened at breakneck speeds over the past few years, thanks in no small part of course to game changing advances in technology and early stage financing, (Amazon Web Services, open source computing, Micro-VC, etc.).  And these shifts have given rise to massive innovation across a variety of sectors. One area that’s particularly interesting is the burgeoning urban innovation sector.Tumml is an accelerator program based out of San Francisco that provides financing and mentorship to companies of a very specific type – ones that develop solutions around urban impact. Said another way, these are companies that are introducing technology based solutions to solve real urban area problems. And unsurprisingly, it’s a sector that venture firms are taking notice to. After all, these are companies addressing major pain points in large and expanding markets. The following is a transcript of an interview we conducting with the founding team at Tumml, Clara Brenner and Julie Lein. It’s a great read as it provides insight on how technology has and will continue to drive urban innovation in major cities all over the world. Can you please tell us about Tumml and the inspiration around starting it? Julie: Tumml is a non-profit urban ventures accelerator with the mission of empowering entrepreneurs to solve urban problems. We’re here to support the next generation Revolution Foods and Zipcars – companies developing consumer and business-facing products and service that solve community problems in cities. Going back several years, Clara and I met when we were at grad school at MIT Sloan and discovered that we both shared similar perspectives on what we’re now calling the “urban impact” Space. Clara had previously worked in real estate and sustainability, and I have a background in local politics and governance. We both cared a lot about the future of our cities and believed startups had an important role to play in making them better – because they are nimble and super scalable, and they are attuned to the needs of their customers (i.e. themselves, as well as their neighbors, friends, family, etc). But we didn’t see many entrepreneurs starting companies in this space. As we started researching this issue more, we found that there are two distinct barriers in the urban innovation space: Funding and Mentorship. So we decided to start Tumml around our personal passion for urban innovation and to address the two major gaps in the market. Now that you’ve spent a few years providing mentorship and assistance to startups centered within the urban Innovation space, what are the 2-3 dominant themes that you’ve seen emerge in this sector? Clara: There are urban innovators working on a wide range of verticals, but...

  We recently sat down with Ann Miura-Ko, General Partner at Floodgate, as she gave her views on the evolving nature of entrepreneurship within tech. Named as the most powerful women in startups by Forbes, Ann has led investments in several disruptive companies, including Lyft, TaskRabbit, and ModCloth. Ann also teaches entrepreneurship at the school of engineering at Stanford. Can you share Floodgate’s history and investment thesis? We emerged amidst the global financial crisis in 2008 to fill what we viewed as a gap in the financing market. This gap was triggered by the fact that traditional Venture Capital firms going up-market. And since angels were similarly facing the impact of the financial crisis, we felt we had an exciting opportunity to be disruptive within the seed market. We typically invest between $500K to $3MM in the initial round of financing as lead investors. We are looking for what we believe can become one of the top 15 companies in any given year. We feel very fortunate to have worked with some great companies and to have built a solid reputation within the entrepreneurial community. The cost of launching a start-up is exponentially less than what it was 10-15 years ago. As such, we’ve all seen massive growth in the formation of new start-ups. What is your take on the current state of the market at a high level? I think there is both a very positive side and a potential negative side to the exponential growth of new startups. On the positive side, I believe that the mass democratization of entrepreneurship we have witnessed over the last 5-10 years is as significant historically and economically as the Gutenberg press or the Ford Model T. With the Gutenberg press, we had the democratization of ideas – what used to take hours or days to copy could now be copied by the hundreds and distributed to the masses. The Ford Model T made a car affordable to the middle class and literally transformed the layout of our cities and suburbs. In a similar way, the Internet (and mobile) has enabled supply virtually through anyone can find demand anywhere.   This has enabled a new generation of entrepreneurs – those who are located outside the geographical reach of Silicon Valley, those without access to a mentor who could make a quick call to a top tier venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road, and even the micro-entrepreneur who can now leverage platforms like Lyft, TaskRabbit, Etsy, or Chloe and Isabel to completely redefine the notion of employment so that it is fully on their own terms. At Floodgate, we believe that these trends point to the fact that the next...

  We recently sat down with Rob Siegel, General Partner at XSeed Capital, a seed fund based out of Portola Valley, to discuss founding team cohesion and the role it plays in a company’s success.  Rob’s investment areas include enterprise software, business operations where computational technology helps automate/improve company performance, and computing platforms that shape both business and consumer behaviors. He sits on the Board of Directors of Lex Machina, SIPX, Zooz, DropThought, CirroSecure and ZipLine, and he spearheaded XSeed’s investments in Pixlee, Chatous, Neon and Breeze. Can you share with us the XSeed Capital story?   We began operations in 2006 and were part the first wave of seed-focused Micro-VC’s. Our investment thesis is grounded in working with companies where strong technology is the core component of differentiation. As such, we gravitate towards deals where the market problem/fit is understood, but the technology is challenging to solve. While we tend to be very engaged with our entrepreneurs, we also know when to hang back and not get in the way. Our team is comprised of former operators, so our goal is to enable our entrepreneurs to make original mistakes, but also help them with missing the avoidable mistakes that we made in our pasts. Our initial check sizes tend to be in the $500K-$1MM range, but we are flexible to larger or smaller amounts when it makes sense. One thing that is unique to XSeed is the way that we leverage our talent, which includes EIR’s, advisors, and Fellows. Unlike traditional firms, these roles are integral to both our decision-making process and also to supplement our Partners in assisting our companies as needed. Aside from the core technology platform, it’s difficult to debate the importance of a strong and cohesive founding team as perhaps the most important key driver to the success of the company. What are the top traits you look for in founding teams? We actually look at the founding team very carefully before we make any investment. For us, we view the world through the lens of the team’s experiences and personality traits. Regarding previous experience, our focus isn’t restricted to working with teams that have run successful startups in the past, but rather we focus on where we find people that have successfully leveraged their experiences to grow critical skillsets and that are passionate about their domains. We love teams that are authentic to the markets they serve, are driven to have a huge impact, and want to draw in others to help achieve their goals. From a personality standpoint, we look for people who are forceful and strong, but are also open to rigorous debate and divergent viewpoints. We gravitate...

A couple of weeks ago, I published a post which posited that Venture Debt at the early stages is overused in today’s market and listed out some key considerations that companies must understand prior to taking on leverage. One consideration that I’ve opined on repeatedly is the concept of lender reputation and the necessity of choosing a Venture Debt provider that is aligned with you on all fronts, from personality to business philosophy. Western Technology Investment (WTI) without question, is one of the benchmark Venture Debt investment firms in the world, and has provided over $3B in debt financing across a 30+ year history to companies at all stages of development. Companies such as Facebook, Google, and Palantir have chosen WTI as their debt partner. The below is a transcript of an interview with Dave Gravano, who has 17 years of venture lending experience and is currently an Investment Partner at WTI. WTI has been in the Venture Debt Market for nearly 35 years and has been through several economic cycles.  Can you give us some perspective on how the Venture Debt market has evolved over the years? In 1980 when WTI was founded, capital was far less available than it is now and ironically, companies were much more capital-intensive. We actually started out leasing server infrastructure, computer hardware, and lab equipment. There weren’t a lot of venture debt players until the mid-1990’s when venture capital dollars started to significantly ramp. Then, when the dot-com bubble burst there were several venture debt firm casualties. Today, the market is as crowded as ever with both venture debt firms and banks aggressively playing. WTI has invested capital in hundreds of game-shifting companies, including   Facebook and Google. With the myriad of options that companies have for debt financing, why has WTI been able to be so successful in attracting top companies? I think the mark of a great lending partner is one that operates consistently and communicates with its existing and prospective portfolio companies in a transparent way through good times and challenging times. Our partnership has deep domain and operational expertise, and we aren’t afraid to roll up our sleeves to help our companies optimize for outcomes. This approach has earned us a great reputation and has built up a lot of loyalty with entrepreneurs who have experienced working with us first hand. Many of them come back to us when they start new companies. Can you articulate how your capital and approach differs from others in the market? At WTI, we seek to provide much-needed risk capital to emerging growth companies in exchange for an acceptable return to our LPs. We believe that our capital is significantly more flexible than all other forms of...

The evolution of the Venture Capital industry has been fairly dramatic over the past several years. A trend that’s emerged prominently in the early stage market is the massive supply of seed stage companies relative to supply of Series A capital. Bullpen Capital is one of the early pioneers in providing stage specific financing related to this phenomenon. The below is a transcript of a chat I recently had with Duncan Davidson, Founder and Managing Director of Bullpen Capital. Duncan has over 25 years of investment experience and was previously a Managing Director at VantagePoint. By now, nearly everyone in the industry has heard of, and is likely fatigued of the term “Series A Crunch”. You and the rest of the Bullpen team identified this issue several years ago and developed an investment thesis around it.  Tell us more about the factors that led the team to identify the issue. We’ve now seen a decade long plus era of cheap – it now takes a lot less money to get a company started than ever before, which has created a massive increase in start-ups and seed stage focused funds. During this era, the ability to rent the cloud from Amazon and use open source software has dropped the cost of capitalizing a start-up from ~$5M in 1999 to $500K in 2010. Our belief was that with the mass amount of activity at the inception stage along with the concurrent consolidation of the old venture industry, there would be a fundamental and pronounced funding gap as the post seed level. The seed rounds of today are akin to the old Series A of yesteryear from a company development standpoint, but the A rounds are getting bigger, “Super Sized” and more like C rounds, waiting for the deal to be de-risked. Do you believe the relatively scarcity of A round funding will sustain? If you look back in history, every one of the tech booms were characterized by some fundamental change. In this case, the era of cheap has fundamentally changed the venture funding landscape. As long as that continues, the Series A Crunch will continue. This is not just a temporary problem of capacity in the industry. With this not being an ephermal issue then, how should entrepreneurs look at taking capital and planning out their seed rounds?   Well, raising seed capital is now a process and not a singular event. An entrepreneur needs to understand that they will never get out of the money-raising business. They will be raising money all of the time and in most cases, in a series of smaller raises. At Bullpen, we are late in the seed process once...

I recently sat down with Ullas Naik, Founder and General Partner of Streamlined Ventures, to discuss the current seed fundraising market. Streamlined Ventures is a seed stage firm that focuses on investing in business application and infrastructure software companies. Ullas has nearly two decades of investing experience and previously 12+ years as a senior Partner at Globespan Capital Partners. Tell us a bit about why you formed Streamlined Ventures? At Globespan, we primary focused on early/mid growth stage investing, but I always gravitated toward early stage investing. When I parted ways with the firm 2 years ago, I continued angel investing and realized that there were many interesting investment opportunities where I could invest my personal money and lead seed rounds. I started to think about raising a fund where I could lead these rounds and that dovetailed with a specific thesis that was formulating in my mind around business applications and infrastructure and how to get companies in these spaces to extreme scale with limited dollars. You’ve had a long history in investing as both an investor and as an angel.  What are the differences between investment philosophies between the two and should this affect the way entrepreneurs approach pitch meetings? It all depends on the stage of the business. A very early stage company with limited proof points is probably not ready for today’s institutional lifecycle VC. They may take a meeting because of prior relationships but it’s unlikely that they will invest. At this point, the most realistic option is to raise money from F&F/ angels, and potentially Micro-VCs. Although these days even the opportunities Micro-VCs are seeing have a lot of business progress and traction. There seems to be a fairly established fundraising pattern that companies follow where the first $300K-$500K is raised from F&F/ angels round, followed by 1.5M -$2MM from Micro-VC’s, and then a traditional institutional round. What are some of the other options for companies have proof points and are seeking to raise between $500K to $1M to get them to the next milestone? Micro-VCs and angels are probably the only option when you’re raising a pool of capital that’s between $500K and $1M. You might have some strategic investors corporate investors interested if the value proposition is synergistic, but I’d recommend companies tread carefully at this stage as raising from strategics early can create numerous unintended consequences down the line. What about crowdfunding platforms such as Angellist? I think crowdfunding solutions are good and fair options but it’s not 100% clear to me that those avenues can fill an entire $1M round efficiently and effectively. Plus, if you want an active investor, then the angel list syndicates...