About 10% of startups fail in the first year. Between years two and five, about 70% of companies fail.
But those numbers don’t matter when you’re pitching: investors expect to see a business plan detailing how you plan to become profitable in 3-5 years.
“While it may feel unfamiliar, as a founder there are a few key things to keep in mind to ensure your financial model is both a powerful tool for you and ready for investors,” writes legal/business advisor Anthony Millin.
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In this detailed introduction, he shares a framework for building a 60-month bottom-up financial plan that accounts for early fixed expenses such as R&D and marketing that drive high burn rates during the first 12-18 months of operation.
“Remember, the goal here is to demonstrate a thorough understanding of your market and how your business scales, which is then reflected by the various assumptions you use to build the model,” Millin writes.
Thank you very much for reading,
Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, ukbusinessupdates.com+
@your protagonist
If you have raised venture capital, you must pay for it yourself
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What is an appropriate salary for a starting startup founder? Should they get paid at all?
Haje Jan Kamps says some investors are urging entrepreneurs to forego paychecks, but “not being able to pay your mortgage, rent [or] car payment” will have a significant impact on a company’s chances of success.
“As an investor in these startups, it is your duty to help the startup reach that point in the shortest possible time,” he writes.
“Telling founders not to take a salary is wonderfully counterproductive on so many levels.”
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In the new normal for VC, builders will win
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Large VC firms secure deal entry using a complex mix of strategy, research and relationship building, but “looking deeply at each founder’s vision and initiative is the only way forward,” says Will Robbins, a general partner at Contrary Capital.
With so much capital readily available, “we will never go back to the days when venture capital firms could win by being the only term sheet on the table,” Robbins writes, sharing his view on collecting deal flow and building a technical stack, and production “for LPs thinking about the next decade.”
With crypto startup valuations bouncing back, major investors are on a bargain hunt
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Several major crypto funds launched in the past two years are still actively deploying capital and chasing additional opportunities, Jacquelyn Melinek reports.
To get a sense of what they’re looking for and what trends to expect in 2023, she spoke to:
- Lydia Chiu, VP of business development, Ava Labs
- Tushar Jain, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital
- Peter Knez, Venom Foundation Chairman
- Arianna Simpson, Managing Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
RevOps unleashed: 4 tips to help teams filter out the noise and focus on the big picture
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No person could manage a B2B SaaS sales operation today, which is probably why Head of Revenue Operations is #1 on LinkedIn’s 2023 Jobs on the Rise list.
To save time from mundane tasks so RevOps teams can tackle “bigger, meatier projects,” Rattle COO Apoorva Verma shares recommended tactics for training salespeople, finding places to automate, and ideas for codifying “al your business-critical processes”. .”
When your startup fails
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If a fighter has no reasonable chance of winning the match, throwing in the towel is the smart move.
The same goes for startups that fail to thrive: After a certain point, an entrepreneur may be doing himself more harm than good by stubbornly pursuing his goal.
To learn more about what happens when a founder shuts down her own business, Ron Miller interviewed Lillian Cartwright, co-founder of ShelfLife, a B2B marketplace for wholesale ingredients.
Cartwright raised a $3 million seed round in 2021, but after approaching 90 VCs in the summer of 2022, “we couldn’t raise anything,” she said.
“So in the first week of February, I notified investors in my normal regular update that I was winding down the company and returning capital.”
