I, like many active angel investors, receive several meeting requests a day from companies looking for angel funding. As Iwas going through my inbox today, I started thinking about what separates the best meeting requests from the rest of the pack.
When deciding to answer an email from an entrepreneur, I ask myself these questions:
Here’s a warm intro that recently got me a meeting for MergeLane:
Hi Bill,
I hope you are well. Are you open to an intro to Elizabeth Kraus? I recently invested in her accelerator and thought you might be interested in speaking with her. She asked me to send along this note to you. Just let me know if you’d like to be connected.
Thanks and looking forward to seeing you next week – Bob
———
Hi Bill.
My name is Elizabeth Kraus and I am an active angel investor and the co-founder of MergeLane, an accelerator for high-growth women-led startups. MergeLane is out to prove that investing in women is not just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Our inaugural class started in February and we’ve been more than pleased with the companies we’ve accepted and the overwhelming support we’ve seen from our startup community. Some of our investors and mentors include people like Kat Cole, the former President of Cinnabon, Jane Miller, a former President at Heinz, and all of the Foundry Group venture capital firm partners.
We are looking for a few additional high-value investors to add to our network and I came across your profile on AngelList. It looks like you have an interest in women-led companies, and we currently have three consumer internet-related companies in our cohort (Sugarwish, Havenly, TomboyX).
Would you be open to a quick phone call? I am available between noon and 3pm PST every day this week. Just let me know if you’d like to connect and which number I should reach you on.
Looking forward to connecting,
Elizabeth Kraus
We are big proponents of using the 15 Commitments in the work we do in Conscious Leadership. However, as an Enneagram Type 1 who is most happy at maximum productivity, I’ve always had a hard time buying into Commitment #9, the commitment to play and rest. Until yesterday….
I am extremely disciplined and focused. However, this can also be a detriment. Anything I perceive as a distraction from my to-do list feels stressful, and I have to constantly tell myself that off-the-to-do-list opportunities are often the best opportunities. I was recently reminded of that.
For the final episode of Fund81's first season, I interviewed Jaclyn Freeman Hester from Foundry Group. As someone relatively new to the industry, she has a fresh perspective on what's compelling to institutional investors and an incredible pulse on the landscape for emerging VC managers. Enjoy!
Could I be more effective if I simply surrendered to a schedule that felt natural to me? After some serious self-reflection and experimentation, I can unequivocally say YES.
I’m trying to focus my time on opportunities to operate in my zone of genius and a few select priority areas in line with my passions and in which I feel I can make the most impact, aka my true north. To help all of us stay the course, I thought it might be helpful to share those priorities.
I gave first without question for almost five years. It came back to me in spades. I don’t regret it, and I think it was exactly the right thing for me to do at the time. But then….it just got to be too much.
Dave Balter, the CEO of one of our MergeLane portfolio companies, Flipside Crypto, shares his perspective on investing in the cryptocurrency space. Dave is obsessed with and extremely knowledgeable about cryptocurrency, and has an interesting perspective from both sides of the table.
Most venture capital funds target a minimum ownership percentage when making investments. In this Fund81 episode, Amish Jani, a founder and Managing Director of FirstMark Capital, shares his take on why ownership matters and how funds of different sizes and strategies determine ownership targets.
Venture capital funds are typically structured to have a 10-year lifespan, but venture-backed companies often take more than 10 years to achieve an exit and return capital to their investors. In this Fund81 podcast episode, we discuss solutions to this problem with our our guest, Roland Reynolds.
This year, I decided to do an experiment. To build our MergeLane investor and mentor network, I dedicated four months to exclusively focus on meetings that involved skiing.