Operations and Customer Success at Visible.vc. Accredited Startup Yuppie. Marquette Alum. Grew up in Wisconsin, Explored Tech Down Under + 'The Valley,' and got pulled back toward home.
Drip Campaigns for Investor Relations One of the most difficult parts of fundraising is getting your foot in the door with an investor. Grasping their attention is key and receiving an invite for a meeting has an extremely low success rate. Anyone who has ever raised capital knows that it is not something you complete as a weekly sprint, and that it can take months from start, to term sheet, to finally spending that money on some well deserved office beers. At Visible, our initial success has been with stakeholder and investor reporting; all the details and data after you received funding. As we continued to grow and build new features and tools, we built Visible to be used throughout the entire process of investor backed companies; from sending out initial pitches, full on pitch decks, and…
*Constant replies to messages and questions. Making sure the team is working toward the same goal. Reporting to investors and advisors. Reviewing that your product is awesome before having it shipped. Keeping everyone happy. Checking revenue & expenses. Trying to have a shred of a work-life balance.* These are just a few things that startups and young companies deal with every single minute of their day. People who run companies simply want to grow the business, create success, and enjoy the benefits of their work; rarely do they want to manage the actual [internal] business. We all wish that companies and teams were put together like a swiss watch; carefully placed, working in perfectly unison, without issue, or need for maintenance. This is why the emergence of platforms to serve…
VC financing markets have, recently, felt like a monopoly game where your best friend is the banker and you let them pick their token first. It has never been easier to raise capital and at the entrepreneurs terms. What many founders and entrepreneurs forget is the responsibility they hold after they have a term sheet signed and fresh cash in the bank. Venture Capital and Investment Firms have a duty to provide returns to their Limited Partners (aka their investors); they are not just a bunch of rich people and organizations who give their ‘fun money’ to chance. I had a chat with close friend and Analyst at Real Ventures, Alex Shee about ‘why do VCs need data on their portfolio companies?’ and what they do with that information. My hope to is…
Before joining Visible here in Chicago, both Brett – who heads up Growth – and I had the opportunity to work with and hire at a number of different startups – from Sydney to San Francisco to Bangalore and back again. Nate hard at work during our team offsite in Copenhagen Recently, I returned to his alma mater, Marquette University, to participate in a panel discussion at the Kohler Center for Entrepreneurship where he discussed his path in the startup world and shared some insight with students looking to get involved. Years ago, inspired by this post from Christine Tsai of 500 Startups, Brett jotted down some tips for people early in their careers looking to find a job at an early stage company. We put our heads together on this…
From working with hundreds of customers and users, we get a lot of questions around ‘what kind of information should I be including updates to my investors?’ We break this down to 4 different sections. Financial Key Growth Metric Industry/Market Standards Investor/Advisor/Board suggested 1. Financial – Money money money. Finances are the lifeblood of a company, you can tell how well a company is growing, how smart they are spending, how healthy they are, or how many more months they have left before they disappear. -Look at any standard Cash Balance Sheet and Income Statement, you should have the major line items of this for your investors. -Depending on what kind of product you sell, there could be some important ones to highlight like gross margin or wages or marketing expenses.…
Having breakage points of trust and culture are some of the biggest risk points in early stage companies since so much relies on human capital. The startup ecosystem was designed to collaborate, open source, provide others with the mistakes we had so they could succeed quicker in their endeavors. There has been a lot of news recently about companies and firms having a disconnect with company culture and fair treatment of employees; we thought this would be a great time to provide some basic, yet crucial pieces of knowledge. Visible is still a small, distributed team, we have bi-monthly 1-on-1 chats with every teammate (regardless of role), outside of conference calls and slack communication to make sure everyone is building Visible together and that everyone is happy. Building a HR team early…
Using Software for Customer Success After a year with Visible, we’ve changed up a few pieces to work best with our team and to help scale. It’s interesting to see, over time, how the platforms change Checkout my updates below each section in Red. Something that makes me throw money at people/products/services, is the experience I have with them. Over the past several years, I have noticed the little things companies do for their customers, and own employees, to increase satisfaction via experience. What most people don’t see/understand/have patience for, are the platforms used to provide the service and experience. A great example of this is the ‘legacy’ US banking technology (which I could rant your ear off about as much as architectural facts of buildings along the Chicago river) that manages…
