Giving entrepreneurs helpful, actionable knowledge, and tools to fundraise successfully.
The world is full of (read: choking with) content for founders and entrepreneurs: blogs, tweets and retweets, posts and reposts, never-ending comments and replies, with every single platform offering short-form, long-form, and any-other-form-you-wish publishing tools.
Then you have entire armies of bots, servers, and DIY homemade systems (hello Perl) that spew a never-ending stream of content – all of very little (read: no) care for quality or any relevance.
Oh, and I nearly forgot the new (ahem) “AI” copywriting automation and spamming platform. It’s now a thing to re-hash Twitter threaders, re-spam them as new, and use social amplifier tools to get it syndicated. You get the idea: quantity over quality, at a monstrous machine scale. (“6 ways to achieve X” and “how to eat like Elon Musk”, anyone?).
The BS has reached toxic levels, and it’s now asphyxiating entrepreneurs, confusing and bamboozling them at best. And founders are choking indeed. You must read them all to “know your market“, but also make time to do deep work, think creatively, build and manage your team, spend your time with customers and iterate the product, while not forgetting to keep investors informed with short informative but well-crafted updates while being on the hunt for a great hire (or ten). Don’t forget you also need to increase your sleep time, gym time, time away from it all and of course make time for slowly cooked food whilst growing your connection network. And do not even think about burning out, we invested in you! There, read this piece on how to cope with it.
Always the optimist, I believed (fool) that platforms would ensure poor quality content is ranked and pushed down into oblivion, that dark and scary place known as page 4 and deeper in search results. This, in turn, would naturally (well, programmatically) surface high-quality writers and articles, and over-index truly relevant pieces to each founder in a beautiful improvement and feedback loop. Surely, platforms have more than enough data to achieve that, right… they know my every move, read, likes, and dislikes.
Instead, the world decided to generate more. Just more.
More of everything, meaning the ratio of junk to meaningful content has remained as low as ever. Understandably, most platforms encourage it as traffic translates to time spent and time spent to attention, and since they’re all in the attention conversion business, junk or not, more is… well, better.
Result: 15 years+ on, I’m still swimming in a sea of content garbage, still searching, still struggling to find information that’s actually relevant, valuable, and actionable for entrepreneurs. (NB: there exist some truly outstanding sites and ecosystem contributors, they’re just very/too few. I’ll post my favourites in another post)
So like all classic entrepreneur pitch one-liners, “I couldn’t find what I needed, so I made it”.
After many years of conscious continence, avoiding adding to the garbage pile, I decided to try and do in text what I have been doing in person for entrepreneurs for over a decade now: help out when asked, be direct, BS-free, supportive, and share stuff that actually works – not “strategic insights” or best-practice papers.
The list is long, but I’ll keep it focused on what I do every day: help founders and entrepreneurs raise funds successfully – the right amount of capital, from relevant and value-add investors, not crappy ones because that’s the only offer left on the table by the end of the process.
I’m fully aware that my contribution is a tiny drop in the ocean, absolutely. I certainly have no claims to being any good at writing, so bear with me. What comes next is bound to be messy, too long (isn’t this already? I’m amazed you’re still with me, you must be a friend) and poorly worded. But it’ll do away with the self-aggrandising, the academic or intellectual snobs, the copy-pasted platitudes, the self-contradicting, and shallow posts etc.
In short: I’ll cut as much of the noise as I can and give you something that makes sense, is logical, valuable, and actionable.
Expect things like (in no particular order): What VCs don’t tell you, How they assess you, Internal VC process hell, Pro/cons/alternatives to VC, Risk profiles founder vs VC, How to assess investors and funds, How to build your priority list, Unfair BS about VC, How to set your funding timeline, etc…
I’ll mix the practical with some examples, direct links, applications, ideas, views and interviews, and ask lots of questions so that we can all engage and discuss like peers actually do.
I was a failed entrepreneur, too, I know about imposter syndrome, the “should know more, be better, faster, have all answers, everybody else does“. This is designed to bring practical and actionable stuff to make you realise everybody’s swimming upstream just like you. A dual, and connected, purpose: reduce noise, help out.
I know, it’s humble, no “elevating the entire ecosystem”, “giving back to the world” or “saving lives with my tweets” BS here, but I so wish I had received those snippets when I was in the middle of CEO execution hell.
So there we go.
Here’s to a less noisy, more actionable, and BS-free series of threads.
I hope you enjoy it, contribute if you can find the time, and find it valuable.
‘best
/F
