Mike Anderson’s Post

Technology is rarely a deal breaker in a funding deal. The numbers, however, are. It may be controversial, but after helping VCs, investors and startups with due diligence and preparing for funding rounds, this is what we've learned. Our role is to investigate how much investment in the product and engineering organisation will be necessary after the capital round. I see ourselves as an advocate, not a judge. We explain to the potential investor why certain technical decisions are made and how the team could overcome our concerns. Doing technical due diligence by sending out a lengthy questionnaire to fill out and diving into the smallest code details makes no sense to me. Ultimately, the investor wants to know if the team, the product and the processes are ready for scale.

🇬🇧 One week to go until our webinar for #UKFounders - Maximise Your Equity: Smart Valuation Strategies for Startups Calling all early-stage founders! Get ready to navigate funding rounds, understand equity distribution, master startup valuation, and gain key legal insights. 📊 Learn how to balance growth with equity dilution. 💰 Dive into valuation frameworks and investor negotiations. ⚖️ Gain essential legal knowledge for startup deals. 🎁 Walk away with a practical cap table model. Date: 26 March Time: 12pm GMT Don't miss out! Register now for actionable guidance to elevate your startup journey. 👉 https://hubs.li/Q02p3v5m0 #StartupSuccess #EquityValuation #FounderTips

You've aced the investor pitch, but now it's time for due diligence. Check out our latest blog post to discover why a well-prepared startup data room is a game-changer: https://lnkd.in/gHUYH9rF #VirtualDataRoom #VDR #DueDiligence

🇬🇧 🌟 Join us for a webinar aimed at #UKFounders on 26 March... Maximise Your Equity: Smart Valuation Strategies for Startups Get ready to navigate funding rounds, understand equity distribution, master startup valuation, and gain key legal insights. 📊 Learn how to balance growth with equity dilution. 💰 Dive into valuation frameworks and investor negotiations. ⚖️ Gain essential legal knowledge for startup deals. 🎁 Walk away with a practical cap table model. Date: 26 March Time: 12pm GMT Don't miss out! Register now for actionable guidance to elevate your startup journey. 👉 https://hubs.li/Q02p3wfd0 #StartupSuccess #EquityValuation #FounderTips

🇬🇧 🌟 Join us tomorrow lunchtime for a webinar aimed at empowering early-stage UK founders for financial success! Get ready to navigate funding rounds, understand equity distribution, master startup valuation, and gain key legal insights. 📊 Learn how to balance growth with equity dilution. 💰 Dive into valuation frameworks and investor negotiations. ⚖️ Gain essential legal knowledge for startup deals. 🎁 Walk away with a practical cap table model example. Date: Tomorrow, 26 March Time: 12pm GMT Don't miss out! Register now for actionable guidance to elevate your startup journey. 👉 https://hubs.li/Q02p3v-K0 #StartupSuccess #EquityValuation #FounderTips

Don’t make a financial model for investors — make it for yourself Alyona Mysko, CEO & Founder of Fuelfinance, shares why early-stage startups don’t need complex financial models to secure seed funding. Your financial model should serve as a tool to gain insights into your business, not just to impress potential investors. Start small, adjust as you grow, and keep it realistic. Read the full article on Tribume: https://lnkd.in/etY6hKkm

🤑 Investor Directory v1.1 Update – Now investors can add themselves, copy data into your own spreadsheets and updated data. More details below. 🧑🏻💼 Investor Sign Up If you're an investor, you can now sign-up to add yourself to the directory. To keep the list high quality for the founders, we verify all new submissions and will only add investors who work at a venture firm or have invested in at least one startup personally. 🧰 Copy Data From Investor Directory In the previous version, you couldn't copy data from the investor directory into your own spreadsheets. That made it less useful so we changed it. Now you can copy whatever data you want. I know lots of people were using it to start their investor target list (that's what it's for!), this should help. 🛠️ Updated Data It's still not perfect but we made some improvements to the data quality. It's surprising how often people move in and out of investing and between the different venture funds. We're working on longer term, better solutions on how to keep this up to date but it's definitely better than it was. That's what's in this update. What's coming up next? I'm looking to hire someone full-time to work on this and a few other products that we think will help the community. It'd be awesome if investors could update their own information, if founders could request introductions and maybe investor reviews (😯). Find out more and get access below. As always, it's free. https://lnkd.in/eT_bwwS8 PS: What else could we do to make this more useful to make fundraising easier? Drop it in the comments and upvote for other people's suggestions. I'll take them down and we'll work on them.

A simple question that some investors may ask that may feel like a trap, but it's a real qualifying question... What could you be doing better and how will this new capital fuel that? Investors want to see that their money will be used efficiently and effectively which typically means that they want to see where a startup could be improving so that it adds value to the company as well as the potential valuation increase. Investors want to put money behind great people with plans, not great people with no plans.

Novel closes $15m round. Novel announces a $15M oversubscribed Pre-Series A round, co-led by IGNIA Partners and Ulu Ventures, to propel the FinTech’s expansion of their groundbreaking Capital Intelligence™ platform. The round also includes participation from MatterScale, Gaingels, as well as previous investors. This injection of capital catapults Novel’s total funding to over $130M, fueling its mission to transform how tech founders fund and grow their business. By harnessing AI, real-time data, and their innovative capital-as-a-service model, the Novel platform equips founders with non-dilutive capital and essential tools for optimizing their capital stack. By making more strategic fundraising decisions, Founders are enabled to scale faster and exit better. The recent downturn in VC activity and the demise of SVB have caused an acute need amongst growth-oriented tech companies to re-evaluate their capital stack decisions. Novel meets the needs of entrepreneurs with data and insights to support their capital strategy decisions, paired with alternative financing options that give them quick and transparent access to capital. Source: https://lnkd.in/eeavy-rp Sign up for more news updates like this in our daily newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eskQx7Ym #donedeal #funding #seriesa #fintech #financialservices #financialtechnology #financialsolutions #fintechnews 

This week on the startup to scaleup journey: - How experienced founders build investor alignment