“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”
I love change.
From music to fashion, to technology to culture, I ‘ve always been drawn to what’s next. …
I have one more post about Indie in me and then I’ll take a break. Not a break from Indie itself but a break from writing about it. The truth of the matter is that there’s no break from Indie for me because Indie is a part of me now.
In many respects, it’s the truest part of me.
The part of me that I was trying to translate into my work and the work I have the privilege of being a part of. Make no mistake, funding founders trying to bring their ideas into the world through business truly…
Last week’s post was designed to be a simple and direct announcement that our initial Indie.vc experiment was ending and would no longer be accepting applications. I’d always intended to follow up with a few more posts to unpack our experiences and lessons learned for those looking to build on what we’ve started. Today is the day for that next installment.
But first…
Whenever I hit publish on a piece I have some personal predictions about how the post will be received. …
6 years ago, a mysterious Tumblr site appeared on the internet. It had no branding, or slick design, or any indication of who was behind it. The site simply spelled out a hypothesis that founders needed a new kind of startup funding option for building independent, venture-scale companies. The site went on to propose an experiment that included a new investment structure and a community of like-minded founders.
The reaction was immediate and the site spent the next few days nested at the top of Hacker News.
“Raising a seed round would have been a huge mistake for us”.
These words stopped me in my tracks. Here was a wildly successful founder at the helm of a business most can only dream to have built panning the path that most are marching.
They continued.
“If we’d have raised a seed round we would have been focused on the markets and milestones that investors needed to see and not on the needs of our customers.”
Despite going on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from top tier VCs and ultimately selling to SAP for $8B+, the years…
Over the last few months, we’ve been rolling out our new INTRO product. As part of those efforts, we launched a weekly newsletter called INTRO to Finance. The goal of INTRO to Finance is to break down complicated financial topics and financing questions into easily digestible and actionable answers.
We’re publishing this week’s issue on Medium. If you enjoy it, sign up.
Another Thursday, another newsletter. I’m Jason — welcome back to INTRO to Finance where we answer financing questions you’re too afraid to ask your VCs.
We have a meaty question to answer this week: “What is the difference…
Yesterday at the Sorenson Innovation Summit we had the opportunity to announce a collaboration with the Kauffman and Rockefeller Foundations designed to catalyze a new initiative within our current Scout Program pilot.
But first, a little context.
At the beginning of November, we announced plans for a Scout program as part of Indie.vc 2020. The response was immediate and somewhat overwhelming.
In December, we kicked off a pilot of the program with around 200 participants. That left a waiting list of nearly 3,000 people patiently awaiting our learnings from the pilot and anticipating our opening the program more broadly. …
Nearly 5 years ago we set up a sort of sandbox to begin iterating on different models and messages for a new kind of risk capital. One that stood in stark contrast to the growth at all costs blitzscale based model which had become the dominant path for startup founders to follow. Over those years we’ve tested and tried different structures for investment, different narratives for founders and different cadences for deploying capital. We’ve made a lot of mistakes but we’ve also stumbled into something that seems to be working in ways we could have only hoped when we started.
…
Over the weekend Eric Feng posted an insightful piece detailing leadings from Unboxed.tv’s explorations around unboxing videos and the commerce they drive. A major part of this exploration involved building products. A lot of products, including four different iOS apps, three websites, two content studios, and one YouTube channel. Unboxed has raised nearly $10M from top VCs and is in the process of pivoting to other areas of exploration.
Contrast that experience with the above tweet from a few weeks ago that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.
I got to know Austen while he was…
In a startup world awash with a steady stream eye-popping funding announcements, one last week caused the collective startup community to sit up and take notice. The amount, by comparison was modest, the valuation was significant, but the larger narrative the round captured felt important or significant or maybe even seminal.
There’s been a growing drumbeat of founders and investors questioning startup conventions of bundling ambition to fundraising and Notion embodies many of these new and emerging ideals.
From Erin Griffith’s NYT piece:
Notion’s ambitions are big — the company wants to replace Microsoft Office. But its executives don’t believe…
Bryce Roberts
VC, Dad
