The Investor Update Template

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Ty Danco

I always look forward to letters from my TechStars portfolio companies. They are short, informative, and to this eye, look like a combination of two strong Catholic traditions: 1) Confession (“Help me Father, for I have sinned”) and 2)the promise of greater glory to come. Here’s a sample. Copy at will, and all you portfolio companies, don’t forget to write! For more detail, check out the longer article Dharmesh Shah and I put up on OnStartups.

To:        Newco Investors and Advisors

From:  Jill Jones, (617) 555-1212

Date:    xx/xx/2013

Mostly on track here since our xx/xx/xx update. Here’s the latest:

The Good:

*We met our goals for x and y, and exceeded our goal in z by 15%.

*Build on v0.4 is complete, feedback so far is good. Plan on releasing next week. Contact Joe (joe@company, (617) 555-1212) if you’d like to get a demo or a copy of the software

*Got press coverage here, here, and here. Please tweet!

The Bad and the Ugly:

*having trouble getting xyz new client to process the paperwork through legal. Suggestions on how to get around this slowdown?

*missed our target on xyz for last month, and still slow this month to date. On the agenda to discuss next board meeting on 6/3 at 10am. Let us know if you can’t be there but want to call in.

*still having trouble with hiring a good designer. For now, we are outsourcing to XYZ, but it’s expensive, so we are cutting back on travel so as to keep on our burn rate schedule.

General Corporate stuff:

*Update1

*Update2

Marketing Pipeline:

*Meetings scheduled with abc, def, and ghi in the next two weeks.

*Of last 10 meetings, 4 seem worthy of followup, with jkl and mno most promising.

 Big Strategic Questions:

*Have had some interest from the xyz customer segment. Building a prototype for them would probably slow everything else down 6 weeks.Worth pursuing?

*Have received inbound from abc potential acquirer/competitor. How much do we open up to them?

Asks:

*Looking for an introduction to def, ghi, and xyz

That’s it for now, any questions, give me a call at 617 (555-1213).  

 

What do you think? For me, it works, keeping me informed hopefully engaged. And readable in less than 2 minutes. It’s that simple.

Filed under: Angel, TechStars, Uncategorized | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Congratulations Crocodoc

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Ty Danco

crocodoc

 

One of my very first angel investments exited today. I learned yesterday that Box has acquired Crocodoc (formerly WebNotes.)

The story on this one is simple: I was touring around the various New England angel groups, and on my first stop at a Walnut Ventures angel meeting, this was one of the groups showing. They were short, but they were great. Thanks to Ben Littauer who sourced the company (like many of the Walnut Ventures angels, these were MIT grads), Michael Mark for inviting me in, and most especially for Ryan D’amico, who did some courageous things early on, including personnel changes, moves, and pivots.

A great product doesn’t always make for a great exit–I don’t even know the details yet of what the payout will be–but this was a nice experience with hard working kids who deserve their good fortune.

Meanwhile, I need to remind myself not to confuse a bull market with brains. Angels, remember, when you have exits, under recent changes in tax codes if you reinvest in another angel deal, there’s no tax. Like rolling proceeds from a house sale into a new house…you just continue the basis.

Happy angeling, all. Keep that economy pumping.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Plated–(My Favorite Due Diligence Ever)

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Ty Danco

plated1For those of you who love to eat, like to cook, and dislike or don’t have time to shop in the market, fasten your seatbelts. Or perhaps loosen your waistbelts. And angels, get ready to loosen the checkbook. Got a new favorite.

I’m fond of TechStars companies (it is such a great filter, with acceptance rates hovering around 1%), and even fonder of repeat, successful entrepreneurs. So when I heard of Plated, a TechStars NYC company where two HBS grads with startup success who were walking away from high paying job offers on the Street (just like Brent Grinna at Evertrue–one of my favorite angel investments), I wanted to learn more. I tweeted to @Plated to see if they were free–I was in NYC on other business with 2 hours before I had to leave for the airport–and got a response within minutes.

I cabbed it over to Plated’s office within TechStars to talk with Josh Hix, one of the co-founders. The basic idea is that you go to the site, “shop” once a week, pick out a few meals (minimum 4 plates) from their changing menu, and they select and send you all the ingredients, pre-measured, recipes attached. From my vantage point as a consumer, they do the work, I enjoy the fun and the meal.

I had a million questions: Is this scalable? (well, yes, actually). How are the margins? What are the logistics? How will you acquire customers…and in every case, they had a solid strategy and a well-considered response. As was evident in this coverage in the WSJ, in Thrillist, and in all these articles shown on AngelList. But as they say, the proof’s in the  pudding. Josh emailed me a coupon for a sample box (this was Friday), I checked it out, and decided to surprise the wife with a Tilapia Cobb Salad on Tuesday night.

We drove from our house in VT to our apartment in Boston Tuesday mid-day, which is the day when deliveries are made. The doorman called my cellphone at 10:17am to tell me a perishable package had arrived, and I was worried that it would be a few more hours before I would arrive in Boston, but I thought even if the food was ruined–it was in the 70s–I could check out the quality of the packaging.

Not to worry. When I arrived at the apartment at 1:30pm, I found this insulated box, delivered by refrigerated carrier, with “Hi Ty!” written on top. photo (6)

Inside, we found an insulated bag, with cold packs keeping everything fresh.

photo (5)

photo (10)

The packaging was perfect, the convenience couldn’t be beat (I don’t know about you, but I just don’t want to go to the store just to score a 1/2 cup of buttermilk,) the recipe was quick and yummy (although I freelanced it a little on the dressing,) and most importantly, I scored points with my wife, who had been skeptical–especially about me cooking,  and ended a convert.

So what’s not to love? The market is huge, a quality, differentiated product is reasonably priced, the service superb, the vision can scale, and most importantly, they are sweating the small points, the entire customer experience, and delivering. Literally.

photo (11)

OK–so my execution as junior chef wasn’t world class. But theirs is. Nice job, Plated! Tastiest due diligence ever. Hey, sign up with code 8a8f36 when you get to the cash register, and you’ll get a few dinners comped when you sign up. Just like Pandora let’s you discover new music easily, this makes expanding your cooking repertoire dead simple. And check them out on AngelList, if you can’t make it to NYC Demo Day.

Filed under: Angel, AngelList, startup, TechStars | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

OK–I’ve been negligent

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Ty Danco

I have been busy on my own startup, and have been ignoring my angel investments, much less my angel blog. But great things happened this year:

Exits from Crashlytics (to Twitter), Localmind (to AirBnB), UpNext (Amazon), Incentive Marketing (Google), Pluromed (Sanofi), a merger for Draker Labs, as well as some successful B rounds for a few other companies. It’s hot out there in AngelLand, no doubt helped by a surging Dow Jones average.

I expect to continue to invest in companies I see through Techstars, but otherwise I’m only investing in entrepreneurs I already know or who come to me from fellow investors who are already investing–just too jammed to spend much time in due diligence, although that was never my strong point anyway.

So entrepreneurs, if I don’t know you already, thanks for thinking of me, but I’m mostly working on getting BuysideFX to be a killer startup.

Will try to get another post out sometime on an airplane flight, but otherwise, happy investing and happy startups!

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

My Favorite Angel Investor I Don’t Know

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Ty Danco

Apologies for having fallen off the blogging wagon in the last year. I’ve also slowed down the angel investing pace–a little bit because of valuations, but mostly because I’m running another startup, BuysideFX which takes up all my attention. (I’ll tell the story about how I decided to fund that later when we have something big to announce early next year.) Blogging, mentoring, investing, adding value has all dropped off the cliff, but offset by hopefully getting on another rocket ride as an entrepreneur.

But I’m back with a quickie post because I heard the best half hour of interviewing of an early-stage investor I’ve heard in a long-time: Jason Calacanis’s This Week In Startups interview with Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital. There are actually two parts of the interview, which lasts a few interesting hours, but the money part comes at the end of Part II, when Chris talks about angels creating value first, not hype. This is the same theme he covered on his Foundation Interview with Kevin Rose before, which I also commented on in a blogpost a year ago. But it’s still a powerful theme of angels walking the walk, not just talking.

But now I have a story to tell. I invested in a startup that I found via AngelList, UpNext. Before I talked to the founder, Danny Moon, I had downloaded the great app, which I use every time I’m getting around in a major city, and immediately saw how useful and powerful his 3D mapping was. For due diligence, in addition to talking with Danny, I saw an interview on Untether.tv, and that sealed it for me.  There were a number of fine investors onboard–David Cohen and David Tisch from TechStars, Paul Sethi, Will Herman, etc. But Danny’s go-to guy in advising him how to negotiate his sale to Amazon was Chris Sacca.  I’ve never spoken to Chris, but I’ve got the distinct feeling that I owe him for helping Danny getting all of the shareholders such an excellent outcome.

There was almost no news on this transaction, and zero humble brags going around. Because it was a small round to start up, the absolute dollars weren’t something that was going to get Chris, who know manages metric tons of dollars, a meaningful difference in his life. But he dug in, helped, without fanfare. Pure value-add, giving back to an entrepreneur who hadn’t been in that position, from an experienced investor who has been in a lot of transactions.

Bill Walsh, former coach of the 49ers, said that if you sweat the details and work hard, “the score takes care of itself.” That’s why Chris Sacca is killing it with his investments, why smart entrepreneurs seek him out, and that’s what everyone of us in the startup community needs to do–just help out. Good karma results.

PS: Chris, if by any chance you read this, I’m down for a well, no swearing necessary.  And in the same vein as charity:water, check out this 2010 MassChallenge winner, Osmopure, for similar social impact. Tell Barack that an incredible use for American foreign aid is dropping 10,000 of these drinking straws wherever there are floods and other disasters screwing up water supplies.

Filed under: Angel, AngelList, MassChallenge, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Help! Looking for Feedback on my Startup’s Website

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Ty Danco

As readers know, I’ve been slowing down my angel investing, not to mention angel blogging,  because I’m back in the game with another startup. We’ve changed the company name to BuysideFX (more descriptive than the old one, which also sounded too close to another firm in the FX space,) and we just launched our website this week. I’d welcome any input you sharp-eyed angels have. What on the site needs work, is distracting, or is missing? I’m not expecting anyone to actually know about our obscure fintech field in fintech that’s halfway between systems and trading, but I know you guys have opinions on things like the use of video, copy, social media, etc. The point is only to get a conversation started.

One of the things we want to do is to let people know that we totally understand the state-of-=the-art, but find it lacking, and we’re looking to build the next generation of system tools. To establish that authority, what should we be doing? Posting blogs? Short film clips? Long classes? Animated slideshows? Demos (well, can’t do that yet, but soon)?  So far, we’ve posted some Soundcloud podcasts with some combination of 2-4 of us informally chatting. We wholesale copied this idea from Spark Capital’s Bijan and Nabeel’s Hallway Chats
–except instead of being in the hallway, we’re doing it with pancakes and coffee.

#1 Algos Gone Wild:Speculating About the Knightmare

#2  Simplicity: Designing Buyside Systems for FX

#3 Integration Headaches

#4 Best Execution–What the heck is that?

#5 What Do You Track–A Currency or a Pair?

Note that SoundCloud is really meant to be something you listen to casually on the go off of your smartphone, rather than at a computer.  Does this work? Or do we need to make it a more formal, filmed version? The way I’m figuring it, these are good enough for now, and as we create additional, perhaps more polished content, we can start getting choosier. But if we waited for perfection, we’d never ship.

We chose podcasting over video because we wanted to bang these out quickly and easily, rather than spend a lot of time polishing words, or worse yet, editing video. My guess is that when we find a rich vein of content sitting around the breakfast table, we can rework it into a traditional written  blogpost.  My guess is that this is an easier way we can do lightweight interviews with industry movers and shakers, but it could be that we’d be better off with some other media.

To date three of us have started blogging about next big thing in the fintech market for FX on our Tumblr blog, which seems to work well enough. Here, for example, is my piece on “iTunes for FX”, which lays out our inspiration and ideal for an FX system. Any retweets welcome, and feel free to follow our new Twitter account.

But overall, have we tried to cram too much in? If the media is the message and we want a simple, clear statement that reflects our priorities, I’d just as soon have a minimal website with two pages: one of who we are and how to contact us, and the other a demo of our product. But face it–the product will be in development over the next few months as we finish up our coding. When we get there, we’ll poll you again.

Thanks in advance for all thoughts–we are financial market people, not website designers. (Recommendations for all designers welcome, but especially this UX Interaction expert, who we are searching for right now.)

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Everything You Wanted to Know About Boards:Touring the Blogoverse

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Ty Danco

I’m taking part in a StartupVT conference and will be on a panel speaking about Boards. Here are some of my favorite knowledge bombs dropped by an all-star cast of entrepreneurs and investors. Just last week came this explanation of Advisory Boards vs. Fiduciary Boards from Christopher Mirabile. With that in mind, let’s take a tour of VentureHacks and AskTheVC. ADVISORS From VentureHacks:

And from AskTheVC:
http://www.askthevc.com/wp/archives/category/advisors
BOARDS From VentureHacks:

From AskTheC
  •  These posts  focus more on the legal corporate Board of Directors, while this compilation goes to making board meetings more efficient and effective.
The Rest of the Blogoverse
You can search for Board of Directors on Quora (a little more scattered, with a variety of crowdsourced opinions) or on any other the good angel blogposts (like Will Herman’s “2-speed” ) to get more than you’ll ever want to know. I especially like Will’s advice…and he’s been on both sides of a lot of boards. Or just search away.

As for my best personal board stories, here is a link to my speech at Silicon Valley Bank on how I recruited an Advisory Board for my first company, eSecLending.  My new company, FX Aligned, has a 3 person corporate board (me, the lead VC, and an independent board member chosen by me), but I’ve got a stacked Advisory Board, filled with great people chosen to help me with specific competencies. But unfortunately, we have yet all to get together for a dinner. I’ve got to get working on that. Happy reading.

Filed under: Entrepreneur, Vermont | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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