We spend a lot of time thinking about our own firm building at focal.

In this monthly newsletter, we share insightful reads and resources as well as our own thinking about venture firm building with you, our fellow early-stage peers, to learn alongside each-other and maintain an ongoing dialogue that makes us all better at building standout firms for our founders and LPs.

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🏗️ Firm Building

Useful nuggets published on firm building.

1. Slides and decks that close LPs

Insights on LP fundraising and slide examples / decks that hit their mark from funds we all know, shared by Ryan Hoover / Vedika Jain from The Weekend Fund in their new newsletter Signature Block.

Shout out to Wiz and Spacecadet for the most creative deck we’ve seen to date.

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2. Six Lessons From Being a VC During a Market Decline

Alan Feld from Vintage Investment Partners states that

“The venture industry is the most “manic-depressive” industry in existence. Either the sky is the limit, or the sky is falling. However, the reality is that it is never as good as people claim nor as bad as people feel.”

and then goes on to provide actionable advice on navigating a market downturn (that is more nuanced than most of the VC Twitter commentary). Worth a …

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3. Add your firm for cold outreach

Yohei from Untapped VC had collected lists of places to look for VC funding for pre-seed startups - add your firm to them if you want additional cold outreach.

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🤝 For Your Founders

Reads we’ve shared with our founders recently.

1. SaaS Funding Napkin

Point9’s “Funding Napkin” with a (literal) back-of-a-napkin answer to the question of what it takes to raise capital in SaaS from Pre-Seed to Series B, based on feedback from more than 60 SaaS VCs.

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2. How to Measure Cohort Retention

A deep dive into the formulas, visualizations, and SQL you need to accurately measure and report on cohort retention by Lenny and Olga Berezovsky who writes the newsletter Data Analysis Journal.

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🤨 Something Fun

Fun and (more or less) useful things we’ve read this month.

1. AI generated pitch decks

Deck.Rocks lets you generate pitch decks using GPT-3. Describe your idea in 1-2 sentences to get a tailor-made deck - won ProductHunt #1 product of the day.

Hope to never get one of these in my inbox …

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2. Mac Productivity Hacks

I have yet to come across someone in venture who’s not a productivity geek. Here are 20 Mac Productivity Hacks from the Overlord’s of productivity themselves, Superhuman (we’re all huge fans here at DV).

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🤔 What We’re Thinking Through

Venture firm building topics that are currently top of mind for us at DV.

1. Transitioning fund admin to Carta

We recently decided to transition our fund admin to Carta after speaking to many of you who’ve done so as well recently. Our decision was mainly driven by them offering a modern looking (always up to date) LP portal vs. us sending PDFs of excel spreadsheets to our LPs as well as some of their newer products like a streamlined LP closing process and Crypto Fund Admin.

This isn’t an ad for Carta - the transition was definitely a process and the Carta platform offers only limited customization. But it’s definitely been an upgrade for us - especially for anything LP facing. If you decide to switch to them as well, make sure to negotiate on the pricing 😉.

Thinking about transitioning to Carta? Happy to share our experience!

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2. Sub $50M M&A exits

We have a couple of founders in our portfolio that are thinking through finding a new home via an acquisition in the sub $50M range.

If you / people in your network have any expertise in this, we’d love to chat.

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Until next time 🧱,

Sydney & Pascal

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👋 Investing at the pre-seed?

We lead / co-lead pre-seed rounds in software / platform / infrastructure builders reinventing how industries operate and business is done.

We invest with collaborative ownership targets of 5% - 10% and would love to take a look too 😁.