What I wrote about last week...

September 9-15, 2024.

Last week I really focused on some key aspects of interacting with Venture Capitalists and gave some examples of good and bad behaviours you will meet.

Venture Capital

I built on top of David Schneider 's visualization of some VCs as Seagulls who come into a meeting and take a s$%t, talk a lot and leave. He made that comment during his appearanece in the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings . Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to meet many seagulls both as founder and investor. I added some details about two specific types of Seagull investors that I have met in my lifetime, and why this is a red light for ongoing engagement with those VCs as your board members and partners.

I also covered a really big topic in the relationship between Venture Capitalists and founders - Term Sheets. I was inspired by Chris Smith 's post about how his venture fund Playfair made their term sheet visible and available online. Transparency during the funding process is a big issue of building trust between founders and investors, and having things simple and open is a great first step to a healthy partner relationship.

There are not many funds that make their Terms available online, and I gave some examples from Pale blue dot , Founders Fund , byFounders and other funds and the discussion in the comments was very helpful as Farid Haque said he does not see this issue in the ecosystem, and Scott Newton shared that Techstars have their term sheet available and Kenny Walker-Durrant shared the example of Cherry Ventures as well. Michelle Aguinis from Menlo Ventures shared two recommended books worth reading about the topic.

Thank you all for the collaboration!

And how can we miss some Trump moments, I really used this as a way to illustrate the big mistake some founders do, when they go and build a solution to a problem that really doesn't exist, but they are sure they are on to something.

The solution, validate your problem statement first! I wrote down 5 ways to validate your problem including surveys, and customer interviews as well as using vetted analysis from the top consulting firms.

New Workshop at Gescheit & Partners : Working with Startups:

During my career, I have worked with both sides of the equation: Corporations and Startups. There is a big benefit of both entities work together to accelerate scale and deployment and build strategic partnerships.

Therefore, I have designed a new workshop for Corporate Leaders and Executive to understand how startups work and find a common language and work with some best practices based on the good and bad things I have seen both as founder working with corporate and strategic investors and as a strategic investor myself.

Here are a few details about the workshop:

-> Who is this workshop for?

1?? Corporate Executive and Corporate Boards.

2?? CVCs and Corporate Innovation Organizations.

3?? Corporate Innovators.

-> What will you experience during this workshop?

1?? The anatomy of a startup.

2?? Overview of today’s ventures market.

3?? Overview of the mechanisms of Corporate Venturing, and the CVC space.

4?? Best practices for engaging and partnering with startups.

5?? Corporate-Startup Simulations and Use cases.

6?? Panel discussions.

If interested please contact either with a DM or through my website: www.illaigescheit.com

If the topic of Corporate Venture Capital is interesting for you in general and you wish to learn more here are a few people I recommend you to follow: Ilya Strebulaev , Gary Dushnitsky , James Mawson , Alberto Onetti , ?????? Nicolas Sauvage , Linda Yates and Jeppe H?ier .

Finally, I'm experimenting more and more with AI tools, and last week I coded a web app in 3 minutes with Claude AI, this week I just asked ChatGPT which jobs it is going to replace, and see its answer (I'm starting to play more and more with Cursur AI, and it's going to be lots of fun.

That's all for now.

If you appreciate my thought leadership work and content please follow Illai Gescheit and engage with my post, share with your network and most importantly use my failures, successes and experiments to build great stuff!

See you all on LinkedIn !

Illai.

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