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Take 2019 by the horns by subjecting your goals to a premortem.It’s the time of year when the founders in my orbit are discussing their company’s goals for 2019. Every one of them is excited to take the new year by the horns. Their goals are specific, impactful, and carefully modeled in spreadsheets. Their teams and investors will surely be thrilled with their achievement… but 90% of companies don’t hit their goals due to inadequate implementation and resource planning. It’s a pain I know all too well as a repeat VC-backed founder myself. 
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Why a Vision Statement is the most important line of code a startup will ever write.Traditional Vision Statements are Exciting for the CompanyA traditional vision statement is aspirational for a company; it describes where the company is going if it’s successful. It can also be limiting when viewed through the lens of a venture capitalist.
In Q3, ICO markets finally developed a demand for traction.The ICO market has experienced a sudden cultural shift that has left concept-stage blockchain founders grappling with the same increased demand for evidence of traction that has long stymied founders trying to raise capital in traditional VC markets. The median ICO dollar size and overall volume of deals have dropped by half since a peak in Q1 of 2018.  Trends between ICO size and deal volume show that ICOs have become much fewer in number and raise smaller amounts of capital. [research: Foundational, source: Coindesk, ICOData.IO, ICODrops] Pressure for earlier validation has mounted from their blockchain peers as well. At cryptocurrency conferences, technologists from established initiatives have been exhibiting an ostensible lack of acceptance for concept-stage projects. Blockchain thought leaders openly share their consensus view that projects launching large public ICOs, without any proof-of-concept or market adoption, are drawing negative attention to the entire cryptocurrency movement.
Dramatically improve the odds of your venture’s success by rooting out and mitigating knowable risks with a premortem.In startup culture, optimism tends to flourish at the expense of honest pessimism. At Foundational, we embrace this by starting our strategy engagements collaborating with our clients to agree on how the world must be changing, what their teams are doing to bring about that change, and how we will measure the achievement of their inevitable success… we also use a novel process that quickly identifies the likely causes of failure well before they occur. It’s a simple and impactful technique that any team can do for themselves in under an hour.
What is Traction? Where does it come from? And, most importantly, how do you generate it? Startups are in an endless pursuit of product-market fit. If they are very young, they might still be defining their vision of what the world will look like should they find it. If they are more mature, they are justifying to their next round of investors and strategic hires that they are strengthening their understanding of the early fit they’ve already established. This road is so well-traveled that the industry has adopted a name for the story of this pursuit: traction.
How to eliminate the #1 killer of startupsI recently I wrote about the Product Management Gap: the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it.
The Product Management Gap is a pervasive and deadly problem in the VC-backed startup space that I feel accounts for over half of the ventures that succumb to the dreaded Series A Crunch. Although it’s easy to identify, and affects nearly every startup, the Gap is also stubbornly difficult to fix without access to the talent, and budget growth-stage companies have at their disposal to hire qualified Product Managers The #1 cause of death for startups is a self-inflicted woundThe Product Management Gap is the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it.
Early-stage funded startups commonly have employees focused on engineering, design, marketing and sales, but rarely do they have a team member dedicated to the one thing they need to get right to raise additional capital: product-market fit. …and how to get VCs to give them to you. These common traits define every startup successfully raising venture capital in today’s traction-centric market.What it Takes to Raise a First RoundVCs are ultimately judged by their own investors on their Internal Rate of Return (IRR). In order to optimize that metric they need to time their investments so they’re getting in at exactly the right point in history… or at least they need to feel that way. It’s up to startup founders to create the sense that this time is NOW.
An early-stage investor will back a company once they believe they will see a substantial return on their capital in a reasonably short time horizon. For a seed-stage fund that’s about 20x in a 5-7 year time-frame (or about 1x the entire fund’s size). In today’s market of rising seed valuations, GPs at funds are looking for real product traction and simply won’t be interested if they think a startup still has major go-to-market assumptions to figure out. If you are successful at defining metrics that tell a narrative of traction, measure progress towards increasing them, and regularly update your most interested potential investors on that progress, then the barriers to raising capital will begin to crumble quickly. The precondition for this is that founders need to have effective conversations with actual VCs in order to understand what investors perceive as the venture’s core assumptions. Here’s the trick for how to get started… |
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