On venture and fundraising
I’ve been hesitating about whether in my new journal setup1, I would write about / share items around venture capital and fundraising.
It’s an area of expertise of mine, but the fediverse is hostile to the entire concept of investment.
I decided to filter out cross posting of items tagged with Future of Venture — so it won’t go to my TFT Social Mastodon account — but will go to my Twitter, LinkedIn, and Bluesky accounts.
Even posting this2 I wondered where to put it. My personal account? My company founder account? Just not a great feeling.
Articles like When Tailwinds Vanish are fundamental to my thinking about the evolving investment environment.
- I think more software businesses will be small business rather than venture fundable
- funding deep tech innovations is a hard problem
- Things like the Venture Studio have applicability to both deep tech and execution focused businesses
As I flesh out / port / refresh content in my notes, I’m reflecting that a bunch of stuff in Startup is stale — having been a focus of mine from ~2007 to ~2017. At best that’s 7 years ago from today in early 2024.
And of course, writing it like that indicates that it was a literal decade of my life! Of course it’s part of who I am and informs my perspective on many other things!
I still have infinite time for supporting founders. I do a little advising, a little investing3, and am lucky to have a peer network of folks who do the same for me. It energizes me to jam with people who are trying to build new things.
New entity4 creation broadly continues to be an interest of mine. Some of that is captured by the word Startup, but I’m diving into co-op structures and looking at different options for Cohousing.
One of the things I hope to put time into this year is Founder Peer Investing, which is really just a fancy term for saying “What if we helped educate founders and build the next generation of investors by investing small amounts into each others companies?”. In Canada, we have the friends & family exemption, which means we can legally do this without needing to be an accredited investor.
Ok, well I just spent several hours this morning fleshing out notes here and putting down a bunch of thoughts. It feels good to have my own space and have resources to share with people.
I’m in the midst of fundraising for my company Fission, and so this is also a form of self study for me. As always, I write for me, and share it in case it’s useful or interesting or can be helpful to others.
As always, you can subscribe to feeds here and get everything that I write directly.
P.S. Send me things you think fit into Future of Venture.
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I’m writing a lot of journal entries, most of which could be considered microblogs in length and style. But I can write long whenever I like and format it how I like, all on my own site. Fedica then reads the RSS feed and schedules cross posts across multiple different networks, which at this point don’t post until like a week after I post them here. ↩
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I posted to my TFT Social account, started writing a thread, and realizing I had more to say and that my blog was very much my own space, continued with this blog post. ↩
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VERY little of this, and mostly referring to the past. I’ve written small $5-10K angel cheques. I am mostly broke because I keep playing startup roulette rather than ever having a high paying real job. ↩
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Sorry I know it’s a weird word. There are many different types of legal entities - corporations, partnerships, funds, co-ops, and more. And nebulous terms like community and non-entities like governing a pool of money in Open Collective or body of work in an open source code repository. I know just enough about entity formation to be dangerous, and am interested in their applicability globally. What can you do in Canada vs the US vs entities that work well internationally? Also taxes, and real estate law, which I am dumb about. ↩