On Funding — Shots on Goal
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On Funding — Shots on Goal Being great as a startup technology investor of course requires a lot of things to come together: You need to have strong insights into where technology markets are heading and where value in the future will be created and sustained You need be perfect with your market timing. Being too early is the same as being wrong. Being too late and you back an “also ran” You also need to be right about
On Funding — The Denominator Effect I recently wrote a post about funding for investors to think about having a diversified portfolio, which I called “shots on goal.” The thesis is that before investing in an early-stage startup it is close to impossible to know which of the deals you did will break out to the upside. It’s therefore important to have enough deals in your program to allow for the 15–20% of amazing deals to emerge.
Photo by Vanna Phon on Unsplash Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of many startups from e-commerce to gaming to marketplace companies, among others. Most of these startups spend the lion’s share of their marketing budget in today’s social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Snap, TikTok and so on because — no surprise — that’s where the customers are. Digital advertising spend is projected to grow 25% this year to $191 billion, and Google (69%), Facebook (59%), Snapchat (116%) and Twitter
The Changing Venture Landscape
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The world around us is being disrupted by the acceleration of technology into more industries and more consumer applications. Society is reorienting to a new post-pandemic norm — even before the pandemic itself has been fully tamed. And the loosening of federal monetary policies, particularly in the US, has pushed more dollars into the venture ecosystems at every stage of financing. We have global opportunities from these trends but of course also big challenges. Technology solutions are
Nearly six years ago, I was thrilled to invest in Andrew Farah and the team at Density when they had a vision for building anonymous tracking of how people use office buildings, rentals and other public spaces. And today, as the company announces their latest funding round of $125M at a $1B+ valuation, I’m still thrilled to back Density as they are growing massively with customers like Uber, Shopify, Delta, and Cisco, among many others. Quite