Hot in Enterprise IT/VC - What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #266
The pace is only accelerating for startup funding, and it’s hard to keep up with the deal flow, private valuations, FOMO, events, crypto madness and everything else in between. Looking at my Twitter feed, chatting with investors about each new insane round of funding after another, and watching the sky fall 📉 for lots of SaaS stocks can be enough to drive one absolutely insane. Fortunately for now, as I look at my current portfolio and talk to other investors what’s happening in the public markets is still divorced from the private markets. Valuations continue to be incredibly robust and there seems to be no slowing down. To that end, I was meeting with an emerging manager the other day, and he asked me what’s next for boldstart especially as it relates to $400M seed funds and intense competition at every stage. And my answer was this: Staying disciplined in frothy markets for investors is super hard
A good rule of 👍🏼, never take so much 💰 that you wake up feeling pressure to put it to work. Constraints lead to patience + discipline. Helps u stay in your swim lane + partner with right founders at right time While the advice sounds basic, it does allow me and boldstart to focus on the signal from the noise. By knowing what you love to do, you can easily say NO to everything else that does not fit your focus. This means you can really focus on the 5-10% of founders and new opportunities that really matter, the ones who equally want to partner with you on their journey. I’ve always told our LPs, I never want to wake up feeling pressure to put money to work and only want to take enough to execute on our strategy. Here’s a slide from our annual meeting which was held a couple of months ago with respect to every VC investing in seed and how we stay focused and calm: In addition, as one raises more capital it becomes easier and easier to start paying higher valuations upfront, to write bigger checks upfront, and fall into the trap of as long as I own X% and if this is huge, it doesn’t matter what entry price I pay. Yes, for now it’s working for many but in the long run things will adjust. You will also F*^# up and miss out on some opportunities but by staying focused, you should hope that you will partner with more winners than ones you missed out on. Just from this past week alone I can name 2 companies we passed on by staying in our swim lane but at the same time, we are incredibly 🔥 up for the founders we did partner with. You can’t win them all and you can’t invest in everything so constraints force you to focus. Before you raise your next fund as an emerging manager, think long and hard about what your swim lane is. It’s different for everyone and should take into account understanding your own super powers, what you love to do every single day, how you like to work with founders, focus, strategy on leading vs. co-leading, firm building - solo vs. partners, etc. But one common theme is to not take too much money as it can cause lots of bad habits. As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues. Scaling Startups
Enterprise Tech
Markets
If you liked this post from What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC, why not share it? |
Older messages
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #265
Saturday, November 27, 2021
🎢 Strap it on for a bumpy next couple of months - but opportunity abounds in the long term + fun matters
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #264
Saturday, November 20, 2021
The impact of lofty expectations for investors and founders
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #263
Saturday, November 13, 2021
Going down the crypto 🐰 hole...
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #262
Saturday, November 6, 2021
Breaking down HashiCorp's S-1 + playbook for building a massive OSS company + The 🐮 Case for Cloud Native and Infra
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #261
Saturday, October 30, 2021
🤯 ☁️ + 73M developers on Github with 84% of Fortune 500 using
You Might Also Like
84 new Shopify apps for you 🌟
Thursday, March 28, 2024
New Shopify apps hand-picked for you 🙌 Week 12 Mar 18, 2024 - Mar 25, 2024 New Shopify apps hand-picked for you 🙌 What's New at Shopify? 🌱 New login requirements for the Order Status Page Changed ⸱
We've Been Tinkering
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Join Our Beta! ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
AMA with Chiedo John, Director of Growth @ GitHub
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Live on Wednesday, April 3rd, starting at 9 AM PST͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
red hot startup intel
Thursday, March 28, 2024
FULL SWOT analysis on Ramp, Databricks, Cohere, Devoted Health, and Coalition inside Scouting Reports on 🔥 Startups Download Now Hi there, Psst. Want competitive intel on the top 5 industry leading
The Ultimate Amazon Guide: Strategies For Sellers In 2024
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Learn from Melisa Vong for FREE in the Start Your Ecommerce Business Summit ! Another day, another exciting opportunity to introduce you to one of our 20+ ecomm trailblazers in the Start Your Ecommerce
[SaaS Club] Overcoming Early Struggles to Bootstrap to $22M ARR
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Hey Reader Let's connect on LinkedIn! Follow me to stay in touch! Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club: 🎧 Podcast Hubstaff: Overcoming Early Struggles to Bootstrap
The ultimate 9-5 escape plan
Thursday, March 28, 2024
This is from THIS episode - Spotify - iTunes Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) once said “Entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute as you go down.” 😅🪂 I don't know
The Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon 💪
Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Entrepreneur's Secret Weapon 💪 u/Electrical_Ad_7754 Hey friends! Welcome to The Slice, a weekly curation of cool bootstrapped startups and actionable reads. We've got AI tools for
📂 Treat content like its your product
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Embarque 🎉 For two years in a row, SaaS founders and marketers reported content as the #1 driver of growth according to the State of SaaS
The ultimate 9-5 escape plan
Thursday, March 28, 2024
This is from THIS episode - Spotify - iTunes Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) once said “Entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute as you go down.” 😅🪂 I don't know