PART 1/5
Riveting, cutting edge, forward thinking are the words Latestsale.com would use to describe the incredibly sophisticated Thursday 26th September 2024 annual Startup Grind Summit entitled AI & Fundraising. It was wonderful to join Derek Andersen Founder & CEO of Startup Grind as he led brilliantly the half day virtual event from San Francisco, full of insights and strategies to help start ups navigate fundraising and accelerate traction.
How can we all get educated and help each other? “Give more than you can take,” so says Anderson. From the first chapter hosting small events fifteen years ago, Andersen was pleased to reveal that Startup Grind is now hosted in over 100 countries. He asserts, Start Up Grind is one of the key avenues to discover more about the best companies to back, VC funds and angel investors.
AI FUNDRAISING
The summit kicked off with a FinTech burst of enthusiasm for supporting early stage ventures. Drew Glover Founding Partner and General Partner of Fiat Ventures, took attendees through his insight into “Reshaping the Dynamics of Founder- VC Relationships.”
Fiat Ventures is a specialist VC fund, a strategic capital investor that acts as a Co-Founder VC, specializing in go to market strategy and scaling growth for Fintech start-ups.
Glover contended that relationships evolve with market conditions and the search for the right investor is always a challenging endeavour. He suggests Founders should seek investors who share the same passion you as a Founder hold dear and to put as much effort into this selection process as product market fit. He introduced the audience to the concept of the Investor co-founder. Investors should not be mere capital investors he proclaimed.
Glover also attests that Founders should look for investors who are hyper focused on core and relevant industries. The question is, how will or can large VC funds adapt to this challenge? Can a VC partner become a Co-Founder of sorts, a CMO even, as opposed to a capital partner and nothing else? Glover pushes this insight to new levels and highlights how strategic capital partnerships would also facilitate an operational thought leadership partner with capacity for market distribution. He referenced the massive platform team of Andreessen Horowitz that adds value to their portfolio companies and indicated the need for expertise driven VCs.
This Co-Founder approach to investment strategies is a unique one that can either be a hindrance or be pivotal to the start up depending on the needs of the Founder and the founding team. A key advantage to the Co-Founder decision making process is speed to market that is always an important consideration for latestsale.com. A changing landscape has also seen a higher prevalence of investment newcomers putting forward their personal interest and support for start ups; from large corporations to family offices that would not normally be an obvious first choice for a Founder, traditionally seeking to fundraise from a VC or angel investor.
How does Glover see the next stage of development for venture capital progressing?
FACTOR 1- ACCELERATED GROWTH: the fast track to product or service development
FACTOR 2- STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS: VCs evolve from financiers to scaling partners
Latestsale.com would add a caveat to this however. A strategic partner choice is again dependent on market conditions and speed to market dynamics. Corporations are now placing big bets on start ups and in an age of competitive landscapes for VC fundraising and lack of clarity over specialism requirements, the Latestsale.com team, much like all ambitious start ups, is exploring all options and opportunities presented on the table. For this reason, only one pitch deck has left the Latestsale.com HQ at the time of writing. This pitch deck was not a VC pitch deck and it has been very well received.
From our perspective, the distribution of a strategic partnership pitch deck does not discount the importance of a VC pitch deck, only that with an extremely large team infrastructure, a pioneering Founder on board and complex, groundbreaking tech projects in development, VCs, angel investors, family offices, strategic partners, it is all hands on deck! Also important to note, timing is everything and each Founder will need to decide the distribution timeline of the pitch deck and to whom.
Glover predicts a new generation of VCs and claims the future outlook will take the industry by surprise with the most successful VCs, led by the consultancy approach. It is just too easy nowadays he asserts to set up a digital company or marketplace. If technology can optimize a business, so can everyone. Differentiation and focusing on more structured go to market strategy principles are paramount.
The rigorous investor selection process will generate an adaptive relationship between the Founder and investor that will no doubt change over time. Glover further asserts that Founders should be selecting from a wide range of VCs including those who are not in the top 100.