Insights

At the beginning of your seed fundraising process, you may have to wait several weeks for the first “yeses” from any investor. During this time, if you’re not getting any commitments your round can appear stagnant. Reservations from Angel investors can help solve this problem; as your round’s availability decreases it will put pressure on other investors to say yes.

Toni Schneider - Founding Venture Partner, True Ventures A Swiss native who studied computer science at Santa Barbara City College and Stanford University, Toni Schneider started his career as a software engineer working on NASA virtual reality simulators. He went on to become a startup founder and CEO, and an executive at Yahoo!, before joining the True team as a founding Venture Partner. Toni is well known for his role as CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. He helped WordPress become a globally known brand that powers over 30% of all sites on the internet. For his work, Toni was recognized at the Crunchies as CEO of the year. When he is not running one company or advising another, you can find Toni in his VW van crossing the US with his family, coaching San Francisco Little League baseball, or tinkering with old cars. How did you get into the world of venture capital? I got into it first as an entrepreneur and founder, raising money from VCs. I did that for three startups. Then I switched to VC while also still being CEO of a startup. True Ventures is the only VC firm I’ve ever been with. One of True’s co-founders, Phil Black, was a close friend of mine. He was thinking about starting a new VC firm and asked me if I would be interested in being part of it. So when he started True together with Jon Callaghan, I said yes and dove in to learn from them how to raise money from limited partners and make venture investments as we pulled together True’s first fund in 2006. That’s so interesting to be on both sides. You began on the entrepreneurial side pitching to VCs and now you are a VC. How do you think that transition helped prepare you? Does it help you identify what you are looking for in a company that you want to fund? What a red flag would be, that sort of thing? It’s probably both good and bad. The good part is that I was able to bring a founder’s perspective to how we structured True. Our goal was to be very founder friendly. I could share honestly what it was like to sit on the other side of the table from a VC. That helped in creating a firm where we really think of founders and entrepreneurs as our customers and where we do everything we can to provide a good service to them. Another advantage is that when I look at startup teams, I have a good hands on feeling for their abilities because I’ve run several startups and hired and managed many startup teams. The disadvantage is that it comes with biases. I had a certain experience as an entrepreneur and certain things that worked for me and certain things that failed. That very much shaped my thinking around startups. While it gives me a good point of view, I also have a harder time going outside of my own experience and being open to different approaches to starting businesses. What for you personally makes a startup look like a good idea? What is something compelling to you as a startup you would fund? For me it always starts with the team. I look for strong founder qualities, which in my mind are the ability to be very charismatic, and to have a really exciting, big, long term vision combined with flexibility when it comes to everyday execution that’s going to be very zig-zaggy for a startup. There will be new challenges every day. So you look for somebody who’s comfortable asking for help and being adaptable near term, but has an audacious long term vision that they don’t waver from. The charisma and communication skills will help attract a lot of people to their startup. Finally, someone who has a lot of depth in their area of expertise. This is something I always look for. As I dig into an idea, do I feel, “Wow, this person is three steps ahead of me and has really thought it through and knows everything about the space they’re about to get into”? Any good idea is going to have more than one team chasing after it, and I want to bet on the team that has a lot of depth. There’s a lot of emphasis for future founders on idea generation, but it honestly sounds like the idea comes second to more of the team, from what I just heard you say… First step is to be in the right place at the right time for your skillset. There are other factors that play into it, but without the right people, none of it is going to work. The second step is the product and the idea. The product needs to be unique and truly compelling and have a story that can be articulated in a simple way. What does the product do? Who is it for? What makes it unique? It’s surprising how often founders can’t answer those three basic questions in a straightforward manner. I want to invest in a product that gets me personally excited, that I believe will have a positive impact on the world, and that will make customers say, “Wow, I want that, that’s different. That’s a totally new approach.” For the third step, like everybody else in the VC business, I look at the market. Is this something that if it works out — there can be a ton of risk associated with, frankly we want a ton of risk — but if it works out, could it be a very big business? Is it a big market that seems ready for a massive change? That has to be in place as well, otherwise you can have an amazing team with an amazing product, but without big growth and revenue potential it won’t be a VC scale opportunity. That’s not what we’re in business for. What was the number one red flag that would caution you away from investing in a team or a startup? On the people side, it’s teams that don’t seem to have the right chemistry or the right understanding of what their roles are going to be, or teams that don’t have a track record together. That for me is maybe not a red flag, but definitely a yellow flag. The biggest red flag usually comes up during initial due diligence. It happens quite a bit that I’ll think “Wow, this is a really good idea, I’m going to dig in,” and when I do, I realize that there are already a bunch of teams doing the same thing and the idea quickly doesn’t seem so original. It feels like more of a rehash or tweak of another idea. That usually throws cold water on a project for me. That’s the biggest red flag, that an idea isn’t that unique. It’s only one percent of startups go on to become really big. You really do have to filter out ones that you don’t think are capable or have a clever idea. Yes, and even when everything fits, even when you check all the boxes that I just described, it’s still hard. Because nothing ever plays out exactly the way we plan and hope. Another filter we use at True is that we focus on one type of deal. We do two to three million dollar seed rounds. That’s it. If it’s something that is a really good idea with a good team, but two to three million dollars is not enough to get it off the ground or it’s already past the seed stage, we won’t do it even though it might be a great opportunity. We are really trying to stay focused on one stage of investing, do it well, and have a whole portfolio of companies that go through the same stage so they can all learn from and support each other. Seems like True has a specific focus on seed round innovative companies, what else do you look for? We’re not thesis investors. We don’t have certain sector or certain type of business that we look for. We’re not a “SaaS fund” or a “Crypto fund”. We invest behind great founders and then double down when things are working. For example, we were early investors in Fitbit, a couple of years before hardware startups and connected devices became a trend. We weren’t looking for that trend, we just liked that team and particular idea, and when we saw it working for them, we followed on with a bunch more hardware investments like Ring and Peloton. We follow wherever our founders take us. Recently, we’ve invested in robots, satellites, and biotech, which are all new areas for us. We try to be very open-minded about what the subject matter might be. You really do try to treat founders and startups that work with you very well. Is that how your fund differentiates from others? There are certainly quite a lot of VC funds around here. One thing that makes us different is that we invest earlier than the majority of VCs. We’re really close to an angel stage, but we’re a full service VC firm. We are there in the very beginning, often when it’s just two or three people with an idea, and we have our founders’ backs all the way through. Most VC firms want to see revenue traction and product-market fit before they even look at something. The second thing we do that differentiates us is we are focused on the personal needs of a founding team, not just the business needs. We know what you will need as a founder, as a leader, to get really good at your job, to get through the ups and downs of doing a startup. If something goes wrong, we want to be your first phone call. We don’t want to be the kind of investor where you feel like, “Oh God, something went wrong, how do I break this to my investors? I don’t want to talk to them.” We hope to have a trusted relationship so that even when things don’t go well, we’re going to be there and help you through it. Part of how we do that is to connect all the founders within our portfolio and they help each other improve. That’s our founder network and platform. We have events and tools that facilitate direct, open, and honest collaboration. It’s optional, but most of our founders take advantage of this amazing peer network. I think it’s super valuable and quite unique among VC firms. What made you to want to invest in Laura and her startup, Atipica? What made them stand out from the pack of other investments you were evaluating at the time? Laura and Atipica really hit a lot of the boxes I mentioned earlier. She’s a very charismatic founder with a big vision, a great communicator with deep knowledge in the area of diversity, inclusion and hiring. She had spent several years working on the idea and product, talking to a lot of companies about their needs, so she had depth of expertise. We started working together a little bit over two years ago. It was still early days in diversity and inclusion tools and she was well ahead of many of the people we talked to. She had a small team, pre-revenue but she already had some pilot customers. So it was the right stage for us and we felt like our seed investment could help her build out her team, get the product launched, and get to the next stage. The hiring and recruiting sector in particular was interesting to us at the time. We had just had a successful exit to LinkedIn with Connectifier, and I was and still am on the board of another investment we made in this space called Handshake. They’re in the college recruiting space and doing very well. So I was personally excited about hiring tools and got quickly interested in Laura’s vision to make the recruiting and hiring process become more fair and inclusive and help companies understand why they’re having such a hard time building diverse workforces. Is there any piece of advice that you would give founders who are up and coming next generation founders that you don’t think get shared enough currently? Something that people are failing to focus on when they’re thinking, “I want to become a founder”? Is there some aspect you see time and time again they forget and you would caution them to focus on? Try and get as much perspective as possible. When I was an entrepreneur raising money, I felt that I knew and loved my team and my business, and I could pitch them all day long. But when I went into VC meetings, I was new at it and had never heard any other pitches. On the flip side, those investors had heard tons of them, yet I had no idea how I stacked up. I’ve definitely seen founders come through True who think they nailed it but they didn’t. And I’ve seen founders completely hit it out of the park with us and were like, “Was that OK? I have no idea!” My advice is to connect with other founders and see other pitches, or at least get some information on how high the bar is. I think that’s how you get better. Don’t try just work on your own idea, on your own pitch within your own bubble, but really try and see what else is going on out there, who’s doing really well and connecting. How are they doing it? What’s the subject matter? A lot of what you’re describing was actually the impetus behind why Alchemist got started. The founder, Ravi, felt the same thing, a lot of startups didn’t really know how to compare and weren’t really swapping notes and sharing. Alchemist has become like a community where you can share ideas, help each other out and that everyone is trying to get the best out of everyone else. Exactly. The most worthwhile part of being a part of a program like that is learning from each other and getting perspective. Then the last thing I’m really curious about is seeing how you get to see all the upcomings startups, tech products and services. What areas do you personally think are going to be the most exciting and you are most excited about in the upcoming near future? I get that question a lot and actually I don’t know. Literally someone will walk through the door tomorrow with an incredibly exciting idea that we couldn’t anticipate. All the super interesting things we have gotten really excited about are little bit out of left field. We’re trying to be truly open to new people and ideas because our next great investment can come from anywhere. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.

Laura Gomez - CEO, Atipica Her family immigrated to America when she was eight years old and settled in the Silicon Valley area. Shortly afterwards, she got an internship with Hewlett Packard. No one at her internship looked like her, and she hated it; it made her want to stray away from tech. However, her parents — who’d come to the U.S. to make a better life for her children — saw that tech would be an incredible opportunity and pushed her daughter to continue. Determined not to let the industry make her into a victim, she decided she’d work in tech, “whether the industry embraced her or not.” She believes she made the right choice going forward with tech; now, years later, diversity is dominating the conversation in the industry. Since then, she’s worked at huge companies like Twitter and YouTube, helping them translate and localize their applications for a global audience. Her latest endeavor, Atipica, helps tech companies find and hire diverse candidates; says she’d rather fail trying to solve the problem of diversity in tech than to never tackle it. Laura has raised $2M in seed funding led by True Ventures. In order to get a more in depth look into Atipica and the mind that created it, we conducted an exclusive one-on-one interview with the company’s founder Laura Gomez. We pushed for answers to questions that people often want to ask Silicon Valley’s next-gen entrepreneurs, but seldom have the chance. By the end of this snapshot, we hope you have a sense of this amazing founder’s story and a few lessons to take away for yourself. What exactly is your startup bringing to the marketplace? What we bring to clients, investors and or our own team members is thinking of AI in HR in a more thoughtful and inclusive lens, powered by data and machine learning in the workforce. While there are many tools out there for HR, we are the only ones thinking of it as a holistic, inclusive solution and building it with a diverse team. What was the impetus behind creating your startup? The conference I just came from was actually MC’d by a former human resources business partner at Twitter. While technically I do not have any direct HR experience, I have worked very closely with HR throughout my career. Regarding the starting idea, it began with me thinking of a thoughtful and inclusive way that we can better understand diversity at the top of the funnel so that we can apply what happens to diverse employees and what doesn’t, and try to move away from anecdotal approaches to diversity and inclusion. What is the most challenging matter you as a startup are currently facing? I think the biggest hurdle is people not only picturing Atipica as a solution for social impact and diversity, but seeing it as a business intelligence tool that is adaptive to the dynamics of the workforce, which includes different genders, races, ages, and other kinds of diversity. The challenge is understanding the market outside and how to position ourselves, and getting people to not just thinking it’s a social impact and diversity solution, but rather that it’s a business intelligence technology that’s helping businesses adapt to what the workforce looks like now and what the workforce will look like in 5 or 10 years. Can you tell us a little about your background before you started your startup? I’ve been in tech since I was seventeen. I had my first internship at Hewlett-Packard, and since then went and studied in college. I didn’t really focus on computer science because I felt a lot of the imposter syndrome. After college, I joined a lot of early stage tech companies all at various stages of growth. While working at them I saw a need for more diversity. What previous experience or situation do you feel best equipped you for your current role? Growing up I always had a hard time assessing myself and my skills, but I also loved languages and loved reading about and interacting with new technologies. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I realized that there was a natural intersection between the two, called localization. As I continued with my interests, I realized that technology could help me assess career paths and even help companies better understand the skillsets of people. That is something I want to incorporate into Atipica as well. How are people assessing themselves, how are they intersecting their skill sets with their own mindset and passion in the long run? If you could go back to the first day of your startup, what advice would you give yourself? Be patient with the fundraising process. Patience in understanding the complexity of what it takes to get funding is fundamental to becoming a founder. While people do usually want to be patient and not force it, the process requires a thorough understanding. It’s really not just the waiting that’s difficult, but you need to have patience in understanding the process. What made you apply to Alchemist? Why not others? A former coworker from Twitter is an Alchemist alum so I decided to consider it. I started researching, and I found Alchemist was considered the best accelerator. I then reached out to a friend who knew Ravi so that they could introduce me to him. The rest is history. Since joining Alchemist I actually made one of my closest friends by going through the program. She’s also an Alum. I saw the success of Alchemist, the prestige, the thoughtfulness of the program that Ravi had built and it made me think: “This is where I want to be.” What was the most valuable thing you took from being a part of Alchemist? Learning how to sell to enterprises. My whole career, I had only ever sold to consumers. I think the enterprise component allowed me to better understand all the components that make up enterprises in general. Obviously there’s an emphasis on revenue, but there’s also an emphasis on positioning and on the value to the client. Being better able to see through the lens of enterprises and how they look at startups was very helpful. Can you talk about a time in which you thought all hope was lost and how you made it through that? It happens to founders, if not every day, at least once a week or every month. This month alone it has happened to me twice. The main one had to do with someone that I thought was going to lead my round of funding, but it just got to a point where it just didn’t seem like it was going to work out. They had their own concerns about the business, and I had my own concerns about aligning myself with their values. I think it was one of those things that should have been addressed and discussed earlier on, but those are the types of things that happen, and I learned from it and have moved on. I personally am a big fan of acknowledging the things that I can’t control and then focusing on the things within my control, plus by doing that it helps me not go into a rabbit hole of “oh my gosh I can’t believe this happened” or “poor me” victimization. Since I’ve started focusing on that, people have noticed how much happier I am. I feel more in control of my life and my startup. Always make sure to be grateful for everything. Even for example if you meet with an investor and they decide not to invest, thank them and walk away with gratitude that they were willing to meet with you and that you were able to learn from that. Being grateful in life opens so many doors and will never hurt you. What entrepreneurial lesson or skill took you the longest to learn or are you still learning? All entrepreneurs, whether they know it or not, are going to face some sort of ethical dilemma. It might be who they take money from, what they’re building, who is it going to affect. I have had to learn how to handle those dilemmas and to stay true to who I am. This skill is especially important right now when we have big tech companies being held accountable for various intrusions of the democratic processes or how they’re building their product and their businesses. Practicing ethics and integrity is something that I continue to learn each and every day. Do you have any advice for female or minority founders? Yeah, definitely! I actually just met with a female venture capitalist this week to see if she had ever led a preemptive Series A round. I asked because I really wanted to know if it was true or if it was just my own bias, but I had never heard of a woman or a person of color that has been a part of a preemptive Series A round. That being said, I know many male founders that have recently closed preemptive rounds just by talking to an investor. I think we need to acknowledge the systematic discrimination — men can get a $10M term sheet from a coffee, but not female or underrepresented founders. How I stay balanced is knowing that I can only control my own company and my own strategy when it comes to fundraising and not any external factors like who’s getting funded and are they preemptive or not. However, if there is a trend where minority founders aren’t being treated fairly, you have to acknowledge it and hold the industry accountable. Has there been someone that has helped you along and that you don’t think you’d be here if it wasn’t for them? How did they do it? How did you find them? How did you build that relationship? Yes, it is a VC friend of mine named Freada. She was one of the first people I ever pitched to. When I pitched to her it was horrible. I wish I had recorded it because it was absolutely terrible. But all of the partners and associates actually gave me really great feedback. I met with her afterwards, and she told me to focus on what I really wanted to make and then to build that well and find people who are willing to buy it and then come back to them. I took her advice and seven months later met my lead investor through her. And her firm, Kapor Capital, became an investor as well. So I definitely wouldn’t be here without Freada. Did you already know her or how did you meet her? I didn’t know her. I actually just randomly reached out to one of the principals, who is now one of my closest friends, there at the VC firm that I kind of knew of. I reached out and I said “Hey do you have time for coffee?”, and she said yes, but asked me if I’d rather meet with her coworker Freada because she was really passionate about what I was trying to start. She eventually became my mentor and colleague and investor. As a founder, you need to be willing to just put yourself out there and ask to meet people. What constitutes success for your startup in the next 12 months? I want to build a company based on values, integrity, using AI and machine learning to coach people rather than trying to automate and replace people and their skill set. I want the world to know that not all tech companies are trying to replace people and that not all artificial intelligence is biased; and I really want them to know that there’s a company out there thinking of thoughtful and conducive ways to use this technology to help the current workforce. What constitutes success for you personally? Success for me is having a proud legacy to leave behind. No matter what happens, I have met amazing people who really believe in me and my mission. At the end of the day I’ve done great work and built something I really believe in and am proud of. I have two nieces and if they ever read about me and what I’ve done, I know they’ll be proud. Are there any insights you have learned that you want to share with the next generation of entrepreneurs? I would tell them to stay true to their convictions. Whatever you’re building, make sure to find a support system. Don’t think it’s a weakness or a sign of desperation to ask people for help. Make sure to ask people for support, ask for advice, ask for opportunities. I believe that most people out there are good people and are willing to help, and if they’re too busy and aren’t willing to help, then you shouldn’t take it personally. Don’t be afraid of rejections, but rather be thankful for each and every opportunity that you’ve been given, and that will make a big difference. About the Alchemist Accelerator Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.

A first board meeting is a big and life changing milestone. As founders, you survived weeks of due diligence, followed by a term sheet and then a wire of a few million dollars. Now it is time to be a CEO and experience and run your first board meeting with the investor or investors who sit on your board and blessed the deal.

Emotion factors into customer experience, and as a result, into purchasing decisions. A customer’s experience isn’t just about features, it also includes how the product or experience makes them feel. It’s the moments of delight a customer encounters, and also the overall feeling they take away after interacting with your product.

Directors like James Cameron, James L. Brooks, and Steven Spielberg are masters when it comes to understanding human emotion. In just a few short scenes, they can leave a whole audience in tears. They aren’t doing anything magical. They’re just appealing to the same human emotions we all have. As an Alchemist Accelerator Partner, I teach founders how to apply the same principles to fundraising. Get an investor emotionally excited and investment comes naturally. Try to beat them to death with numbers and figures, and you’ll just spin your wheels. Investors see thousands of pitches a year and fund a handful. If you want to win, you have to get them excited and snap them out of their default behavior of “no.”

Innovation has been difficult for traditionally successful companies. While leaders such as Intel, Oracle, and Microsoft spent time improving performance, entrepreneurial founders from Facebook, Google, and others moved in, creating new earnings engines by delivering faster and with less friction.

First-time entrepreneurs that are building an enterprise SaaS company and trying to raise money without having paying customers will typically find it difficult to raise capital. As an Alchemist Accelerator CEO mentor, I help founders understand this point as early as possible. If you want to survive, meaning close your Angel or Series A round to live another day, you must prove that customers will pay for a solution to the problem you are solving. That is table stakes in Silicon Valley.