1. Where you base your business is really important 2. Really think about your brand - persona, name, logo, fonts, tone etc. (this really made me chuckle and think of the Southpark episode with Harry and Meghan) 3. You will Pivot! 4. Data should drive your decisions, always! That doesn't mean you'll always have it measured (a lot of 'gut feel' is made up of a lot of data points you have gathered previously). 5. The prospective customer is not always right. We definitely built some features for prospects that were never going to buy anyway!

What are some of the important considerations when thinking about the location for your business? Some thoughts to consider: 💫 What's in that location? Talent? Access to capital? Good infrastructure? A microcosm of customers? 👥 There's also a conundrum on the size of the ecosystem: 🌍 For me this breaks down to Access to resources vs. Navigability 🗺 The smaller (I mean younger) you are, the more navigability matters - get to (possibly) what you need sooner (n.b. if you already have a network in a big ecosystem, it's more navigable than if you're just starting out). 📚 💸 The larger (older) you are, the more likely you need to access the resources of larger locations (doesn't mean moving, but you may want to set up 'nodes') Keen to hear your thoughts on other factors to bear in mind for location! #startups#fundraising#founders#venturecapital#investors#vc#vcfunding#technology#startup

✍ Why a Founder Agreement is needed... 📜 We started with a Founder Agreement. Would we have written it in the same way now? 😂 No way. But having one has been extremely helpful, and here's why: 🏫 It creates governance. 🔭 This is useful for investors to see. 🖋 It also means you have held the pen. Most future discussions on equity/vesting should take into account the precedent you have set, especially if an initial agreement is sensible and not outrageous. 🥧If you've earned out a portion under an existing agreement that your current investor base is happy with, it makes it more difficult for a future investor to get rid of it wholesale. I'm not saying this can't happen, or won't. Some investors insist on a boilerplate clause. 🛹 But even if you end up tearing up an existing one, the fact you had the nouse to set up governance showed an aptitude for de-risking one of the most significant issues for early-stage businesses - that of the original personnel leaving the business with all of the equity. #startups#fundraising#founders#venturecapital#investors#vc#vcfunding#technology#startup

🍸 I’ve been at a number of industry events in recent weeks. One topic keeps being complained about by investors. That’s generic outreach from startups. So, what is generic outreach? 🎲 It’s a speculative message that is not tailored to the recipient. Why does it happen? 💲Money! 📩 Same as with those pesky emails clogging your inbox. 🤔If you have it, others want to help you get rid of it. Some are better than others at doing this. ⏳A lack of time - there seems not to be enough of it. I’ve also been guilty of generic outreach before (in the startup I worked at before shipshape.vc) Sidenote: Spray and pray is a mental trap... Not spending time researching and just messaging is actually a much less efficient way to spend time.

Glad to represent shipshape.vc on Friday at Emergence Global. Our panel discussion covered Investment Trends. We see a lot on the demand side of the market. I.e. what startups are looking for... how? because they tell us. so, what have we observed? well, demands are far more niche than you might imagine. we have 10k+ different searches, all looking for different expertise from investors. Starts at 53:12 Thanks for having us Hugo Dupont, Steve Torso and Wholesale Investor, and Neil Walcuch (LiquiVend) for the photo! Our panel was moderated by Dominika Soriano (Cambridge Future Tech), my co-panelists were Constanza Dias (Octopus) and Saalim Chowdhury (Techstars). #investment#startups#venturecapital#vc#fundraising#founders

💹 UK VC funding has grown over 20x in the last 13 years. That's right. In 2010, UK VC funding totalled less than £1bn (~£900m). In 2022, it was £22.7bn. 🧮 The number of founders and investors has grown by more than 20x too. But methods of navigating the ecosystem have not improved at the same pace. An Airtable is not 20x better than an Excel. A database query builder that takes hours to master... is not 20x better than a database query builder that takes hours to master.

🪙 There's a double-sided nature of poor outreach. Yes, founders are ultimately responsible for how they reach out. But... investors are responsible too. 🔖 Poor Investor information 🟰 📤 Poor founder outreach 🟰 😭 Poor VC inbox ℹ Buyer (investor) information is laid out poorly. 🤔This means it's difficult to know (for a founder) how to approach a sale (of equity). 🛒 Leading to fewer sellers (startups) making a good effort. 👍Many VCs take well-researched founders as the sign of a good seller. 🔬 I'd agree. A founder that does their research is generally more backable... ⏳ BUT... It's not exactly easy for all to do this in timescales that make sense vs. other business priorities. 🚫 I'd bet that based on their own website, 99% of VCs would avoid investing in themselves. 👟 I'd also bet they'd spot a distribution model that is ripe for disruption. Why? 💸 Because VC websites don't help market their capital effectively and mainly rely on one distribution channel only.... 🤝 their network and the networks of others close to them.

Something I wish I had known sooner as a founder when seeking investment: 🤔 You have difficult decisions to make 🚒 Survival can be your no.1 priority and that can lead to tough decisions that jeopardise your long-term future. ⚠ Some will play on this. 🗣 E.g. A prospective investor may want to tie their investment to advisory work. Unfortunately, this happens a lot. 🚸 It seems to happen more in less mature tech ecosystems markets. Wales has more than its fair share of these types! It's not impossible that it works out. BUT Tying the two (advisory remuneration & investment) together is dangerous. 😶‍🌫️ The investment can obfuscate whether or not that's the best use of capital for shareholders. ❓ It's also potentially questionable behaviour from that investor too because they should know that they are creating a dilemma. 📚 My learning from this is: 1. You need to want to hire that person as an advisor anyway 💼 2. The prospective investor should want to invest regardless of any prospective work ✍ If your answer to number 1 is 'no' then steer clear, it's almost certainly not the best use of shareholder capital. If their answer to number 2 is that investment is dependent on the advisory work... I think the answer should be the same.

Apps can't run your business for you You are accountable for choosing them, understanding them. Including your General Ledger (GL). GL is the app you'll get with the lowest "talked about/ importance" ratio. But get it wrong and you are [censored] We went on a journey as we started Ship Shape to choose a GL. TLDR: went with Xero. But the video shows why, and some pros/cons. Transcript of the video above: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. And what am I grumpy about this week? I'm grumpy about startups not making good fundamental decisions about how they're going to choose applications to run their business. Why is that important? Well, you're a director, you're liable for your business, you don't want to be seeing this person, your accounts that go up at the end of the year to Companies House, the representation you put forward to your investors count. If you get them wrong, and duck things up, you end up here. It's not where you want to be. It's your choice. It's on you. I got grumpy about this. Because years ago, I was starting up as the head of operations for a startup. And I was really concerned about how I was going to run good business operations by which I mean finance, HR, payroll, cosec. And I went to a conference where there were some really respected operators. And I deferentially said, oh how do you run business operations with so few staff? And the answer I got was, "oh, there are apps that do that for you". There are no apps that do it for you. You're accountable. Now, of course, there are apps that apps do run your business, you don't sit there with an abacus doing things, but you're still responsible for working out how they work, why they work, and you or the person up in court. You can't sit there even in March 2023 years record this going. Ai told me to do this, I'm sorry. There are sexy apps out there. But there's also quite fundamental apps. And actually, you need to do need to build from the base up as with most things in life, do the boring stuff first. The sexy stuff gets easier. The humble general ledger is something that many startup founders may not know about. You may have never needed to interact with this in your life before, you might have used finance apps in a company you worked at before, but been hidden from the actual GL. There is an obvious trio of these things to look out for you tilde, we went for zero. But there's sage and QuickBooks. They're very well supported. They're very well known in small businesses. There are many, many others. And if I actually just come here to a place called Software Advice, I just googled it and I come up in here. There's lots of other ones you can go for, initially arrived, sponsored, don't beat them up for that they got to make money somehow. But there's things that you have to look out for it. So you go to highest rated, and you get lots of other options for your general ledger. At the time when I had to make this recommendation to our business. I didn't have a general manager in place I now do I went to her evening, even she has never heard of half of these things. But you have to make a recommendation. And I started up at shipshape and I wrote this little piece. This is just an excerpt of the paper I wrote about why we should go with zero and the people I've spoken to and why it isn't perfect. At the time of writing it treats you're posting periods for your invoices you're receiving the invoice date is the same. Why is that? Why does that sound really boring and doesn't matter? It does. Because if you get a late invoice, you have to put it on your books, it actually goes on to a previous accounting period that might affect your year end, not by much. But you have actually already posted your end, you've posted up the company's house, it's now wrong. That actually is very important, doesn't sound it but is important. Zero has no concept of group. Whereas it needs to because when you open a US subsidiary, you will have two separate general Ledger's not working in tandem, they don't come together, you'll have to consolidate them on Excel or there are actually things on the Xero marketplace to do that. But they're not part of the existing part of Xero. At the moment, it does handle foreign currency transactions. But at the time of recording this, you have to pay extra for that there are these little quirks that go through for all that we've loved Xero, my general manager that works here who'd never use Xero, before quickly loves it also has a payroll option, which is not part of your same finance solution. But it works well for us and we use it. Sage and QuickBooks are out there as well, but actually just a lot more variety with them. The other advantage for Xero as a startup is it's one package and it just works. When do you actually need to do this? You do need to do it before you start seriously on product development. Before you've started seriously hardcore bootstrapping or even worse, you've got your first grant or you've got your first investment in. You don't want to be sitting there working out how am I going to do my end of year end of month book, bookkeeping and how am I going to produce my p&l balance sheets and cash statements? For myself? Nevermind or certainly my investors. You certainly don't want to be going What is a p&l balance sheet or a cash statement and realising that balance sheets they balance you need to know that before you start into the series product development, you need to select an option. Acknowledge there might be a risk of pivot you do something different later. But select one and set up for success before you start doing hardcore into your business. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair the grumpy CIO. I'm the grumpy CIO for shipshape VC. We are the venture capital search engine. If you are looking for investment for a startup, please come to our site www.shipshape.vc It's free and you'll find the investor who gets the business that you are talking about thank you

GPT-4 cannot write your code for you. Yesterday I was grumpy enough to post this. I promised to share thoughts. So need to follow-through! GPT-4 is amazing. But here's why it can't write your code. Watch the video below: Full transcript of the video is available here: Hi, I'm Alistair, the grumpy CIO. It's Thursday the 30th of March 2023. And I am grumpy about GPT-4, and the hype and blurb that's out there about how it's going to write all our code for us. It can write code. It can't write production level releasable code that's suitable for your organisation without significant adaptations. It just can't .My feeds are awash with hype about how it's going to change the world. And don't get me wrong, it is an astonishing tool. I'm not being a Luddite, something doing the rounds at the moment is how it just you just gave it some simple instructions and it produced a Tetris game, in a blink of an eye. It's absolutely astonishing. But that's not all the work to get something in for your organisation. And it can't do that for you. You still have to work out what a system should do. Its large language model, it doesn't have your idea for you, it can help help prototype things, but you still have to think about that yourself. And more importantly, needs to work out what it fits with. It can't know that for sure you can keep training and giving it more stuff. But fundamentally, that's your job. It does give you some ideas for how to generate some code. But that's not new, it's just powerful. And it's visible, because a business person can see it. But your developers already, they'll start cutting some code, working out the structure, working out their code, working out the complex code summary, how they're going to test it, if they're following TDD approach. But then they'll go, oh, how do I do that, and they'll go to Stack Overflow. There are code auto generators, they'll go to GPT for they'll google it. This isn't new. It's very good. And it's astounding and its power. But it isn't new. You still have to work out hwo to make it readable, testable, scalable, supportable. Boring! No, not boring. When I worked for a bank, who will remain nameless, in the naughties I spent X million dollars developing a solution for them as an IT project manager. We documented it completed, completely made sure it's completely testable, failover testing, performance testing, boring, boring, boring stuff. Then five years later, they'd lost all that documentation, they had to update the infrastructure, they spent 2x, twice as much money just trying to move the thing that I'd already built for them five years ago, because they hadn't maintained any of that information. It's not boring, it matters. When you're making stuff, you have an idea, then you kind of nail it down. And that is where GPT-4 is one of a number of tools - an amazing tool! - where you can actually go we're almost back to the 90s, where you have a business person developer sitting together going: Business person: "I've got an idea". Developer: "I've coded it, look at this". And it comes up with a prototype. And that's beautiful. But then you still actually do have to sit it with your with your system architecture. And then you have to code it properly to actually work out how it fits with everything else, which is where you spend a lot of your time, and see if it works. This is the amount of time typically it takes you to actually get something real to customers, working out what it is always takes longer than people think it does. Coding, what it actually does, this is where GPT-4 is one of a number of tools that that will save a lot of this time only takes this portion of the end to end time. The rest of it is working out to test it how to make it scale, how to make it performant? Or what does that what does that mean? How do I do it, then you got to fit with all the other stuff. And it's all the way from your coding style. All the way to your integration points. It's not just things like obvious API's within your organisation, it's also we're taking the CSV file from here and every organisation has this mess of like, beautifully coded stuff that an AI can really read and be trained on quite well. It's Bob's Excel file too. Then you have to integrate it and test it and do it again. That's work that doesn't disappear. It is work that can be get rid of. And as I said, I'm recording this at the end of the March 2023, there are things that can take away a lot of this work to start with generating reusable code, but look at the "And"s AND fitting it with all your code. AND working out all your integration points are not just the obvious ones. But all the other obvious ones, like random CSV uploads, somebody having to remember to do something in a calendar job at a certain point on Thursday afternoon, all of that can be produced into an AI AND the testing approach, how you're gonna do it, how you're gonna scale it AND documenting it as your organisation needs. So you as the future AI or the human can read it. And in a year, two years time, all of that can be done. And when that does happen, we'll have this astonishing thing where you work out what it is you still have to do it yourself. But then it just gets generated. And a senior just has to check it. Check it works. And then you release it. And that will be amazing. But we're not there yet. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. I'm Alistair the grumpy CIO. I am the grumpy CIO for www.shipshape.vc. We are the venture capital searching search engine, come to us to improve your investor outreach. If you're a startup or you're working with a startup that needs funding, we are the search engine for venture capital. I hope to see you on here. Thanks for listening.

🏋️It's not an easy time to raise. ↘️ This round has had a fair share of disappointments. 📃From investors not fulfilling obligations 😟 To the downturn in confidence many investors have had in the last few quarters BUT I'm delighted to say we've got a particularly special Angel joining our round. AND 🐶 That we've "eaten our own dog food". 😇 What's so special about this Angel? 👉 We found them using our own investor search engine (many VCs also write personal Angel cheques). Apologies for the shaky video! #startups#fundraising#founders#venturecapital#investors

🐣Delighted to present our latest release! 👐Showing off a snazzy new UI 🔍And the ability to shortlist pieces of evidence. 🗒️Helping founders build short lists of relevant investors to reach out to. 💤 Not long lists where you don't know who gives a damn! Thoughts welcome! What should we build next? #buildinpublic#founders#startups#fundraising#venturecapital#investors#searchengine Daniel Sawko 0:02 I would like to share with you the latest update and release search. So what's changed? Well, firstly a snazzy new sort of background design. We're really pleased actually, this feedback and just like the, the old gray sort of dark design is it's a little bit too much progress, right? We like the theme, but ultimately want to see a bit more interesting. So yeah, we've added in some funky new designs in the background. We have also released shortlist functionality. What's that mean? Well, getting search. And what you can stop doing is if you see things that are related to the search phrase that I find interesting. So let's take there's a tweet here that looks interesting. I might want to shortlist that. Likewise, amongst the portfolio companies that Id group of investors pick through and Bramble energy, shortlist them already. And I might work let's say ITM power interesting. shortlist them as well. And what that means is, we've actually got a little shortlist here on the left hand panel, and I can build a shortlist of investors that are relevant to me in my business, and also portfolio companies and investment entities. So that's really helpful because it means that I can see my progress and additional searches as new information comes to light that helps me with what I'm doing my fundraising to start with, you can't export to CSV. We are planning to release that in the coming months. But yeah, I just wanted to sort of let you know what we've been doing, and answering a few of the questions and requests that we've had from from a good number of our users over the past couple months. Thanks very much. Transcribed by https://otter.ai