My second appearance on The 20 Minute VC is out today, with host Herry Stebbings. Harry does such an amazing job and it’s a real honor to be on his show. I hope you enjoy listening!
Here are the show notes from Harry as a preview:
1.) How David made his way from, his words “geeky hacker” to the founder of one of the world’s largest accelerators, Techstars and investor in multiple unicorns?
2.) What does David mean when he says that when assessing founders he studies “the moment of integrity”? What does he want to see from founders in those moments? What are some potential red flags? If a negative response, what are the subsequent actions an investor must take in this situation?
3.) How does David think about the right time to establish a board? What are the benefits of establishing your board with the seed round? What does David believe is the key to highly efficient boards? How has David changed as a board member over the years? Why does David believe, when building a company, “you always have to have a pessimist in the room”?
4.) When negotiating deals, what does David mean when he says “the terms must match the story”? How does David determine between a bridge and a bridge to nowhere? What can investors do to protect themselves if the targets of the business are not met and they have an uncapped note in place? How should they communicate this?
5.) Techstars today invests in over 500 companies per year, how does David think about reserve allocation across the portfolio? How does David feel about stack ranking portfolio co’s quarterly and concentrating capital accordingly? Why is this not effective? Why should seed and angel investing be an entirely different asset class to VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life
David’s Most Recent Investment: Ordermark
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and/or me (David Cohen) on Twitter here!
And of course if you just can’t get enough, here’s the first time I was on the show, back in 2016.
A huge thank you to Harry for all he does for the community and our industry.
