🧰 Venture Tools #004

Culture is king & Investor databases

💡Insight - Culture is king

As a founder it’s tempting when a hire doesn’t work out to blame the departing team member. Ultimately you come to realise that whatever the circumstances around the departure - it is always your fault as the founder.

Either your hiring process was not sufficient to select for the right candidate or your on-boarding process failed or you failed to keep that team member engaged.

A team-member churning can easily cost you $100k in replacement cost and lost productivity. Elevated churn can kill your company.

It is for this reason that the hiring process is the most important process in every company.

Before you start hiring, you need to invest time in writing down and establishing your company culture. Company culture isn’t ping pong tables and beer on Thursday evening. Company culture is a set of shared behaviours that the team optimise for in order to succeed.

The behaviours should be relatively controversial. Not hygiene factors like ‘integrity’ or ‘honesty’ - no company wants to hire dishonest team members.

You culture should be written down, discussed with your team and then tested against as part of your hiring process. When we did this at my first company employee churn dropped by 80% and the company’s progress accelerated.

Culture is the foundation that your company is built-on.

A classic example of a detailed (and controversial) culture is Netflix’s original 2009 culture deck. You can read it here.

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🛠️ Tools

1. Ideas for Angel Investors - Indexing - the power law is real. It makes statistical sense to invest in a lot of companies - great read from the Odin team

2. Blitz-scalers beware… the statistics are stacked against you

   Ethan Mollick @emollick

   👀 Fast scaling has massive downsides: startups that scale more quickly fail more, but are no more likely to succeed than those that scale slower. Why? Because scaling marks the end of experimenting. Startups that scale after lots of experiments succeed. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

   

   

3. Understanding Portfolio Construction - by Craig Thomas - great resource for emerging managers and angel investors alike

4. How to Angel Invest? - responsible angel investing mechanics and best practives by Shruti Gandhi

5. Pricing Your Product - a guide from Sequoia

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💰 Investor Databases

Last summer I posted a thread of investor databases on twitter. It was quite popular. So popular in fact that some of the databases listed got taken down due to the number of emails some investors received.

Alex Macdonald @alexfmac

💰Here are 13 investor databases for seed stage Founders looking to raise money. 100k+ investors. Not Techcunch. Not AngelList. These are the databases you haven't heard of. This is to all the Founders hustling on a Saturday 🍻 Happy hunting 🎯

So I have created an updated list below. All the databases are free to use. I’ve broadly ordered them in terms of utility (ie those with contact information, multiple filters at the top). In this list you’ll find investors for whatever stage you’re at and wherever you operate in the world.

Remember to research the investors before reaching out to them, ensure they’re relevant to your company and write personalised outreach if you don’t have a mutual connection (more on cold outreach here).

Happy hunting…

📝 OpenVC - a list of 4k+ VC firms with built-in introduction & pitching tool

🏦 2k+ VC Firms & Angels Investors - including email addresses from Madison Campbell

🌐 Signal - the investing network from NFX - 10,000+ investors categorised

🎢 Ramp VC & Angel Database - 1,200+ high quality VCs and Angels (mainly US focussed)

🧪 Deep Tech Investors Mapping - 1,700+ deep tech investors from Hello Tomorrow

🗽 NYC Founder Guide - Angels & VCs investing in NYC

🇺🇸👩 600 US Female Angels - with twitter handles and websites by Lolita Taub

🇪🇺👩 193 European Female Angels - from the team at Sifted

🇪🇺 European Tech VC Funds - 800+ investors in Europe broken down by stage and geography from EuroVC

💰 Active Investor List by Trace Cohen - 401 Active investors with LinkedIn profiles

🌎 Climate VC and Angel Database - from Matt Ward and the team at 4WARD.VC

😇 1,500 angel investors - with emails and LinkedIn profiles from Gritt

🇲🇽 VC Fund Database for Mexico Startups - 254 investors in Mexico

🚀 Investors who don’t hate travel - 307 investors who invest in the travel sector

🌱 The Ultimate List of 750+ Seed Funds from Matt Estes

😇 281 Angel Investors - from the Angel Capital Association

💼 752 funds <$200m - from Shai Goldman

🎬 161 Media Investors - from Monetizing Media

💊 HealthTech Venture Investor Database - 200+ Health Tech focussed investors

📈365 Investors from Docsend

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Thank you for reading. Feedback is always welcome. Have an awesome week 🤌