I hate it when I can't copy+paste a bit of information and have to type it out. Just had to send a (personal) wire and the PDF would not allow me to copy the account # and my bank had paste disabled. Every time I use a normal bank it reminds why I started @BankMercury.
Procrastination as a founder work strategy: a) if its important enough then you will feel the urgency and do it. b) often things resolves themselves if you don't deal with it straight away. I would say it allows me to do more things and be less stressed.
It’s crazy how correlated startup valuations, public stock valuations and crypto are. One would think all 3 are a completely uncorrelated asset, but fed fulled asset bubble has made them linked at least in the short term.
1/ Have had a lot of discussions with CEOs about their post-covid offices. Based on a poll of @BankMercury employees: - 35% want to be remote - 44% want to be hybrid We have decided to support remote+hybrid and are getting office space in SF, Portland, Toronto, and New York pic.twitter.com/SwNsoxvBtK
This is what I call a "FOMO round": Founder talks to VC A, B, C, D, E for a fundraise VC A leads a round at valuation X VC B-E have a ton of FOMO and one of them says “What if we give you more money at 3 * X” Founder says "f*** yeah!" Lots of this happening right now.
If you are being interviewed for a job would you rather: - Interviews end early if you aren’t a good fit Or - always finish all the scheduled interviews for the day Ending early is better for both sides as it doesn’t waste time, but some people get offended by the sudden end.
There is now a strong selection bias in how companies go public: Direct listing - the best companies IPO - good companies SPAC - the rest Obviously exceptions in all 3 buckets but that’s the trend.
1/ A simple but effective tactic for negotiations that I learned from an advisor when selling my previous company is “instant rejection”. If someone offers you a deal where there is one deal breaker item, instead of negotiating the deal entirely, just instantly reject the deal.
Even though @BankMercury has 12 support reps I still receive 100% of the support emails and look through them often. Having everyone at the company stay in touch with issues affecting users is especially important as we scale the company. Any tools people use that make it easy?
Back when we had 10 people working at @BankMercury I could not imagine what 100 people would do here. Now that we are almost at 100 people, I can easily imagine what 1,000 people would do here. So much to be built!
We had to pivot my previous startup (Heyzap) 4 times before we were chasing the boulder down the hill. My general framework was to give each idea 2 years of hard work. In hindsight, our pivots should have been more extreme and should have given it 1 year instead of 2. twitter.com/ShaanVP/status…
Two mantras that help me handle the ups and downs of entrepreneurship: 1. Focus on the journey not the destination 2. Life is a game: don't take it too seriously but try to win :) Both have served me well.
We are hiring an US-educated engineer who didn’t get an H1b and instead is going to work for us in Canada. He is now going to build a life and pay taxes in Canada. In the remote world talent can be anywhere. Our bad immigration policy is directly leading to lower US GDP!
One of the best things about Zoom meetings is that I can make notes in parallel with the meeting. Completely game changing when it comes to interviewing someone or speaking to a founders as an investor.
Google Calendar has trained me to think that a Google Meet link on the invite is probably a mistake. That one decision has completely ruined the GMeet brand. Doing bad/dark UI patterns to pump up usage numbers might be good short term but an awful long term decision.
6/ Do: run a strong investor pipeline. The biggest thing in your power is to get connected with or reach out to as many investors as possible. For @BankMercury seed I talked to 150+ investors. For our series A, I talked to 25 VCs. Those were both relatively quick rounds.
1/ Fundraising is a bit of a chicken and egg process, where once you get momentum it's easy and before that it's almost impossible. Closing a funding round requires momentum, and there is an art to "creating" FOMO in a genuine way. Here are some do's and don'ts:
🐦 The 2 types of Startups twitter.com/immad/status/1…
2/ I spent 5 months at the start of 2017 just talking to people. My process was: A) Go in with a set of things I wanted to learn and questions B) Do a 60 minute call/meeting C) At the end ask them who else I should speak to
1/ My absolute favorite things about living in Silicon Valley is how willing people are to teach you their hard learnt lessons. I am often ask me how I started @BankMercury. 2.5 years ago I had the idea but really no clue how to execute it.
🐦 How to think about investors twitter.com/immad/status/1…
🧵 Keep investors updated through the hard times twitter.com/immad/status/1…
🐦 Perfect your product, not the look of your pitch deck twitter.com/immad/status/1…
3/ C: Partners at series A+ VC firms often make ~2 per year, so they can be quickly over stretched. Unfortunately as with B this doesn’t stop them taking the meeting with an entrepreneur even if it’s near impossible for an entrepreneur to get a yes from the VC
1/ A lot of the time when an investor passes on a deal it has nothing to do with how good your company is. Three common reasons: A) your company is off thesis B) investor doesn’t have funds C) investor has invested too much recently and is being extra picky
7/ E) always mentally prepare for “shit hitting the fan”. What if your biggest customer churns? What if you have unexpected taxes? What if your term sheet falls through? Ideally have worst case scenario contingency plans. I call these cockroach mode plans :)
6/ D) avoid non-lead checks from “series A brands” in your seed. This can really kill companies. Just talked to a company that did well but not “amazing” but their seed “series A brand” investor didn’t want to lead the series A. They really struggled raising from anyone.
4/ B) don’t raise too much and increase your burn beyond your “natural position”. If your burn is too high you will have to do layoffs and can easily loose momentum and never recover.
2/ this means what you are really fighting for in fundraising is making sure in the medium scenario you do okay. The medium scenario is where you do well but not quite enough to get profitable or attract a 3x+ valuation premium. This case is actually really common.