The best advice I've been given about startups...from my investors
Why a Whatsapp can make you a 'value add investor'
Whenever anyone asks me what I’m looking in an investor, my response is almost always:
Someone that is respectful of my time and let’s me get on with it
Someone that I can feel comfortable WhatsApping at 11.30pm at night to ask advice
The best investors I’ve got on The Lowdown’s cap table are ex-operators and founders. They just ‘get it’. And because of that, they’ve given me the best advice on my founder journey so far.
Sometimes when you’re in the depths of despair with your startup you can forget to pick up the phone to the people who can offer you a nugget of advice that unlocks something.
Here’s some of my highlights, and some weird AI generated images to illustrate:
‘There is not one path to success’ - Alice Bentinck, CEO at Entrepreneur First
Sounds so simple, but I remember this advice often. After only 5 years in startups, I’ve started to see the pattern of complete unpredictability: you think one company is going to IPO, the next year they’re shutting down. You think one pre seed startup is never going to raise, a few years later and they’re growing like gang busters. You really never know how things are going to pan out for anyone.
‘Success’ is also an interesting word to think about. Some of the most miserable people I know are running massive hyper growth scaling startups. Are they happy? Not one bit. It’s so important to think about what ‘success’ means to all of us.
Alice has been a great source of advice for me throughout my time on EF, and whilst planning how to become a mum. Through running EF, and managing a complicated talent business, she has well and truly seen it all.
‘Know when you’ve lost the crowd’ - David Robinson, CCO at Hearst UK
Technically I learned this when I was working for David at News Corp in my 20’s, but it has has been such a useful learning for pitching my startup. David (or ‘Robbo’ as I call him) was one of the best public speakers I’ve come across, and always managed to blend his wit with directness, that made people listen.
One of my bug bears is that when presenting, in general people over explain and ramble, especially when talking through slides. Keeping it shorter and saying less, has so much more impact.
Whenever I do public speaking or pitching I watch the audience. If they’re fidgeting or looking around the round, it’s time to wrap it up ASAP. Don’t stick to the script, react quickly and improvise.
‘Don’t let anyone else pitch your idea to their boss, always start from the beginning’ - Tracy Doree, NED and Founding Partner of Kindred VC
Another one related to pitching - Tracy gave me this advice about fundraising, but it holds true that ‘the recap’, is a great way to start any pitch or meeting.
I think I was talking to Tracy whilst preparing for a partner call and we were discussing if the associate would have explained the context properly. Taking the meeting into your own hands and making sure you get to pitch your startup yourself, in your own language, is a great way to start. It’s never as good hearing it second hand.
Tracy also gave me some critical advice in 2020; ‘Alice, who can you get to build your spreadsheets for you?’
‘One in two people you hire will probably be the wrong fit, but it’s ok’ - Robert Suenderhauf, Founder & CEO nu3
Robert’s advice made me feel more comfortable with my hiring mistakes and more aware of just how hard it is to hire people who are absolutely spot on for what you need for your startup, and what they want for their career right now.
I didn’t realise what founders meant when they said that hiring was the hardest thing, until I started to see how someone being 10-20% off for the role or team, can have such an impact on your startup’s morale and productivity.
‘Raise enough money for 24 months, not 18’ - Matt Robinson, Founder @ GoCardless & Nested
Matt used to live very close to me in Brixton, and one day in lockdown we went for a walk in the park to talk about the various things I was stressed about after raising our pre-seed.
Lots of founders stress about dilution in the early rounds, but Matt’s view was refreshing; raise more money than you think you’ll need, if you raise for 18 months, you’ll need to start raising in 12 months - which is not a lot of time. That’s why you should always raise for 24 months minimum.
I didn’t completely understand this until the clock started ticking. Some critical first hires can take 3-6 months to find, then a couple of months to onboard and make an impact. Before you know it you’re 3-4 quarters in, and you’ve got to prove enough traction to build a story for the next raise. You have no time at all, buy yourself more time or cut your burn.
‘Not being honest is actually less kind’ - Michael Ströck
I had a life changing call with Michael when I was struggling to make a big hiring decision in 2021. Michael’s straightforward, European way of communicating things was a bit of a shock to me at first. But over the years he’s given me an amazingly different perspective on things.
Over the course of about 2 hours, Michael explained a few very crucial things to me around the topic of making mistakes and learning to accepting them. The spark notes were:
We are all conditioned to make everything a quantitive decision, but we are all emotional decision makers.
So when you make a decision based on your gut and it goes badly - you’re fine with it. When you make a decision against it, it eats you up. To feel less pain, listen to your gut.
You are locked in by your fear of feeling emotions that you don’t want to feel. If you run your own business, you have no other way but feeling these emotions (‘I fucked up’) all the time. It’s hard to embrace feeling shitty, but just notice it and learn to accept it.
If you get 3% friction from every decision you’re going to make - it slows you down and fucks you up.
When giving feedback to people, save yourself the pain of going through less direct ways of doing it. They will learn less and therefore it’s less kind. Be kind and direct.
Great post Alice
Thank you for sharing this!