Finn Murphy
@FinnMurphy12
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Founder/GP @ Nebular ✨ - I like things that do stuff - particularly fond of things that I dont understand
New York, USA
Joined February 2016
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Pinned Tweet
To be fair, most VCs invest in things they barely understand too.
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Career newz - I've joined the Partnership at Frontline 🥳- I hate to do a thread but it's twitter and i'm a vc so I don't have much choice
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Very special day announcing what I've been up to for the past 12 months (founding an early stage venture fund called Nebular) on my friends podcast
tl:dr - solo-GP - writing a small number of lead and co-lead cheques at pre-seed and seed in software co's - based in nyc
woo
A
#20Angel
Special 👀
@FinnMurphy12
, Europe's NEWEST minted Solo-GP, joined me in the
#20Angel
hot seat 🔥
👉 Announcing his NEW Fund 💰
👉 Winners is the only thing that matters 📈
👉 VC data driven approach is WRONG 📊
🍿 Time!
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I've been thinking about this post for some time - there is so much happening in Ireland right now and not enough coverage highlighting the progress in just the past 18 months - Get read for the new generation of Irish startups
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born to late to explore the earth, born too soon to explore the stars, born just in time to create tremendous shareholder value building enterprise software ✨
Ramp, Rippling, and Retool have the highest entrepreneurial talent density of any startup — and it’s not even close.
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winning the images seo battle but destined to lose the metadata seo war
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new fund - same love of interesting people working on interesting ideas - hmu if you or a friend are building things and in need of 🧀
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I wrote a thing! Employee ownership is such a powerful force in tech that has created enormous amounts of shared wealth in the US. In Europe it's not quite playing out the same way - founders & boards need to foster a culture around stock based comp now
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The way most european companies comp their employees with stock is a complete joke - I literally know a European employee (relatively junior) number 100 at a US SaaS co that is a millionaire at a $5B+ valuation - at $45B the first 500+ would be millionaires 🤦♂️
Just got sent this article from someone in the European ecosystem saying "wow, 75 millionaires from Klarna!" 😳 A company valued at $45.6B should produce a hell of a lot more than 75 millionaires.
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‘What’s on the agenda for the MBA today?’
@Annalise_Murphy
- ‘They’re taking us to the shops for a ‘dress for success’ class’ - me heading off to my big day of VCing
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I wrote a thing! Everyone looks like a genius in early stage VC right now & with that the expectations on what great looks like is changing rapidly - 3x funds used to be hot - now its 5x or bust - all this change leads to new behaviours some good/some bad
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After a stellar 2021 the number of conference presentations delivered in Birkenstocks has collapsed.
A worrying harbinger of things to come.
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Jeb Newz: I just moved into a new principal role
@Frontlinevc
& extremely grateful for all the opportunities the team have given me to try get a little closer to figuring out the answer to the question 'How to be good at VC'? Obligatory blog post on LN
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The thumbnail here is Marissa Mayer but it’s actually a piece I wrote reflecting on how hard we push ourselves & the pressure to be successful in the startup world - that desire for ‘more’ drives a lot of us but it’s a double edged sword to be conscious of
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For most founders fundraising is a massive pain in the ass
Its often a black box process driven by FOMO, VC egos and hype
But like all processes it can can gamed to your advantage and theres never been a better time to play this game than now -so what are some of the rules? 1/
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At SaaStock last week & decided to shake up the typical dinner and drinks event so with my pals at
@northzoneVC
brought a bunch of founders and investors on a sunrise paddle down the Liffey.
Yes, it was cold.
Also yes, it was a very special way to see Dublin.
📸 🇮🇪
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‘Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.’ Is for sure the worst startup advice peddled in the past decade.
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ask your VCs to send new hires a welcome note - it’s the lowest hanging fruit to be helpful and people appreciate having the contact / getting a word of encouragement from someone who put money on the line for the company when they’re putting their careers on the line for it
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current state of the emerging vc manager fundraising environment
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Linus Torvalds gave the software world 2 of its greatest gifts in the Linux kernel & git - but while those technologies originated in Europe, it was American companies like Github & RedHat that captured much of their value - why has Europe failed to build big dev focused cos?👇
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Thanks to
@adrianweckler
for republishing my post on leveraging hype during a fundraising process in today’s
@Independent_ie
! Stock image game here is strong - the pinstriped suit is making a big become in venture circles atm :)
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today was a really bad day for an awful lot of people in the startup community - you might have got your money out, you might not
Instead of talking about how 'it's a really interesting example of the prisoners dilemma' - do a good thing, check in on folks & make sure they're ok
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The first company I got to partner with at
@frontlinevc
was 2 Irishmen living in America running a biz who's customers are in Kenya. 6 months later they're killing it & it's a joy to see the company getting the coverage it deserves - global mindsets win 🌍
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Thanks everyone!! Although the congratulations from my mum of initial confusion -> tech support query -> mild realisation is the greatest gift of all
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Shane is a wizard 🧙♂️ & it’s a buzz being involved with him & his team
@evervault
They’re going to make shipping safer software faster & keep sensitive data away from hackers, lazy system admins and folks who’s password is password1 - great to get
@arihelgason
& index on board! 💰
Delighted to share the news of our partnership with
@IndexVentures
as well as existing partners
@sequoia
,
@kleinerperkins
and others
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cultural aversion to risk amongst the most capable people in the country the real ‘number one issue’ - there is plenty of capital available for great people swinging big in 🇮🇪
Access to finance now ‘number one issue for Irish tech firms’
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An old VC joke was that no one became a seed investor by choice
Seed is hard work & the real money was in fees for larger funds as so few funds actually returned meaningful carry
Today everyone wants in on the action
Why? More money, less perceived risk
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Verrrry excited to have the talented and much smarter than the rest of us
@_Zoe_Chambers
joining the Frontline team! 🥳🥳🥳
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I regularly call out my mates for sticking in corporate jobs when they could be doing startups - they then remind me I'm being a hypocrite VC from my cushy finance job dressed as a startup person - Jack made the jump & is actually in the arena & I'm proud to call him a friend
This day six months ago I left my happy, secure job at Linklaters.
Today, is the first milestone of that journey as we launch for investment at
#EFDemoDay
I'm wrecked but I'm invigorated by the support I've received by so many of you. Let's do this.
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Wooot - delighted to finally announce this investment from earlier in the year - one of the most interesting and refreshing experiences using the
@helloswyg
product during diligence and their company mission to change the way companies hire is one to get behind in a big way 🥳
Swyg raises $1.2M pre-seed to use peer-interviewers and AI to reduce bias in recruitment by
@sohear
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Huge amounts of wealth created in Dublin by US pre-IPO companies coming here & bringing the culture of employee ownership with them. Literally blows my mind when people argue they’re worthless - talk to an AE who joined Datadog just pre-IPO about how worthless their new house is
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Disgracefully late to the party here as my inner paywall ninja dies a slow death but absolutely had to pull the finger out and support the amazing work of
@TomLyonsBiz
@ipkehoe
& the team at
@thecurrency
- if they publish 1 piece a year like the Davy 16 - it’s worth every penny
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Yet another VC downturn think piece you say?
Things going sideways always results in a fair share of finger pointing
blaming founders who took secondaries and ramped burn prematurely is easy
VCs taking responsibility for our own actions? hard
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to the pals still yolo’ing into SaaS & Fintech Series Bs, Cs & Ds at 250x ARR on days like today I salute your courage
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Crypto - fraud / drama / crime ☠️
Ai - fraud / drama / crime ☠️
Fintech - fraud / drama / crime ☠️
Biotech- fraud / drama / crime ☠️
b2b SaaS - kingdom of heaven 💰
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Volume of investments is the wrong metric to be proud of here. If Enterprise Ireland put 4x the amount of capital into 40 companies we’d see much better results for the 🇮🇪 ecosystem.
Concentrate into the companies with the highest potential -> they produce talent -> numbers 📈
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Busy workin' but thinking - so first blog in a while
One of the ponderous decisions you face as a VC or founder is when to lean into hype & momentum & when to stick to your guns. Different times call for different modes.
Looking Right vs. Being Right
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Like all good VCs I hold many contradictory viewpoints at the same time - this one is my particular favourite in that it's a great time to be a founder but a really hard time to build a business
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good vibes only
@Frontlinevc
and we're opening up the party for someone keen to dip their beak in the world of VC - no prior investing experience required and it's working with the growth team on some of the buzziest companies coming out of 🇺🇸 into 🇪🇺
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Hup the team behind
@umbamobile
of Tiarnan & Barry et Al - one of the hardest businesses in the world to build & rippping now - thanks for letting me make Umba my first ever vc investment 3 odd years ago I was/am clueless - best crew 🙌
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the best way to learn is to make stuff & building stuff with friends is all the better
buzzed to launch a new side project with
@ConorDeegan4
&
@NevFlynn
we're bringing identity to crypto & utility to the world of NFTs with
going live Apr 14th
@pfpidxyz
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not just games - feels like this is common across the board in VC right now - there’s a consensus view what a ‘good’ company/founder looks like - pattern matching for the surface details rather than digging in & seeing the weird details that can in the end drive the big outcomes
The laziest VC move in games is "pedigree chasing": only funding ex-Riot, Epic, or Blizzard employees (and not always leads). The founders of those massive companies (and countless other successful ones) had zero "big game company" experience. But now they're the Ivy League. 😂
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as long as European institutions refuse to offer the same market conditions as available to top founders in the US we’ll keep losing our best companies in that direction - problem is getting fixed in VC but looks like a long way to go for the public markets - great take
@drnovac
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Been mulling over how hyper-competitive fundraising/hiring/everything in the world of VC/startups has become in the past 12 months & trying to think about what to do when everyone has infinite bags of cash at their disposal - tl; dr - time to do mad shit 🤪
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tough to see comments like this after another rough day in the whatsapp trenches
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This is rampant in european vc right now - if you worked at a European unicorn for a couple of years regardless of what you did there are term sheets flying at you - I’m sure some of these teams are good but it’s just the laziest form of pattern recognition
It’s crazy how much respect people get for being at a rocketship startup irrespective of what they did there
I’d much rather invest in a founder who previously had a big impact on building a $100M company than someone who happened to spend a couple years at Stripe
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I just published - A framework for founders — how this VC thinks about pre-seed investments - It's a longish read on how I've come to try assess pre-seed companies here
@frontlinevc
- feedback v welcome
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The 👑 of UK Pre-Seed stebbing up to bring the heat to the world of Seed with
@HarryStebbings
- There is no kinder, humble and more generous man in UK VC today and I couldn't be happier to get to see him and Harry take over the world and back the next generation of 🔥 founders
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It’s initiatives like this pioneered by long term thinkers like
@stephenkinsella
& many of the industry leaders in Ireland that will make help Ireland stay at the forefront of the western world when it comes to progress - can’t wait to invest in the first grads from this course🔥
*Does a little dance*.
OK, it's out there.
@UL
has designed a new approach to software engineering. It's called Immersive Software Engineering, and you can learn about it here.
.
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Always a good time talking shop with friends like Kieran, Georgia and Julian.
We covered end of the UK Empire, why London is/was the Mecca for ambitious international founders in Europe & why unwillingness to light money on fire holds Europe back.
Hup!
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This should be required listening for anyone in the world of startups and VC. Literally
@eoghan
drops more wisdom here in 30 mins than I've heard in hundreds of blogs and podcast and
@HarryStebbings
is at his absolute most genuine
Top quote: 'I don't take notes, fuck all that'
🚨 20VC Coming Tomorrow 🚨
Immensely proud to be releasing this one tomorrow with
@eoghan
.
Some very deep & personal topics:
How to deal with:
Weight of expectation
The chip on your shoulder
Being your authentic self even with stakeholders who may not align.
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In what may well be the worst move of my venture career thus far - here comes the hot take absolutely no one asked for: Why valuations are going up and why that's actually a fair and good thing (provided trends in M&A and public markets continue 🤪)
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Big ups to the team
@kota_benefits
- particularly two of the most driven fellas in the game
@Luke_Mackey
@Patrick_OBoyle
on their €5m seed round from the crew of EQT, Northzone & Frontline - not easy in the current environment & a testament to the product they’ve built 🚀
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The
@localyze_team
once again delivering the goods raising their $35m Series B with
@generalcatalyst
& the racket king
@max_rimpel
👑goooo
@HannaAsmussen
@lisamariadahlke
@FranLoew
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Speaking on the vision stage at
@DubTechSummit
around 12:15 today on the current & future vc market and once again ripping an all emoji presentation if anyone is around - if you can decipher this one I will give you 1 million dollars*
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Our recent investment in
@Modulz
came about from a cold e-mail, so I wrote a piece about cold emailing VCs & how contrary to popular belief - it's not that going in cold is bad, it's that most cold e-mails are poorly put together in the first place: ❄️📩🤑
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Just published a wide ranging interview featuring gems like
'We were all smoking crack, and now we’re looking at the person who’s addicted and going, ‘what a moron.’
&
'A superpower is to be comfortable looking like a complete moron'
+ Father Ted iykyk
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only credible advice I can think for founders asking about the fundraising environment is that it’s highly unlikely to get any better than it is right now but there’s a whole lot of chances for it to get a lot worse
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Instead of the usual pints we decided to do a morning Stand Up Paddle Boarding session to gather people in town for
@DubTechSummit
- the weather is looking ☀️ and we’re had a few drop outs so if anyone wants to join a founder/investor morning jolly tomorrow hmu! (8am kick off)
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The dearth of ideas in Irish politics is incredibly disappointing - Eamon Ryan calling for an expansion of the State in yesterday’s Irish Times & the major initiatives touted are the expansion of the regulatory state.
Incentivise making things. Not burying us in bureaucracy.
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When GPs are digging for talent info they usually ask ‘who are the most talented young people in European Venture?’ - since I started 4 years ago the majority of people I always thought of were women (soz fellas) - great to see a lot of them on this list
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It's lunchtime on a Friday so I'm obviously writing about balance sheets and treasury management because what else would you be doing with your day - thoughts on the impact of all the $$$ being pumped into startups atm here - plz enjoy my attempt at lols
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The enterprise collaboration stack is growing more complex, many companies operating many different tools outside the 365 & G-Suites - There is a place missing at the intersection of these tools to bring their data together & be a 1 stop shop for employees
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rules of thumb - be more generous with the people actually building your company than with random investors - educate people on why options are valuable - give EVERY employee options so you can have a culture of ownership - make the exercise window 4+ years tax doesn’t screw them
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🚨🚨 NICHE CONTENT ALERT 🚨🚨
Breaking into VC is hard. Even finding a job listing can be a challenge. Getting to the last case study interview? Near impossible. But if you do, like several people we just interviewed, there isn't a lot online to help you prepare. le thread 1/🧵
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founders describing how their new generative voice, image and video businesses have grown 17x in the past 5 months
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Why Airpods Max will be a multi-billion dollar revenue line by Christmas
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also if a start up won’t tell you how much % of the biz is allocated to employees, strike price, current pref price per share, total # shares in circulation, # of share options in your grant, exercise window & acceleration conditions (get double trigger) - tell them to fuck off
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📢 Announcing The
#DebutSessions
📢
👉For 🇬🇧
#startups
formed in past 12 months
👉Inclusive & Accessible
👉Raised less than £100k to date (raising max 750k)
👉Building platforms/tools improving Health, Work & Life
👉Product Demo available
Apply Here -
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#NewProfilePic
- i finally found one stupid enough to engage with
@larvachads
- big thanks to
@Kieranleehill
for the considered advice on this fine art purchase
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VCs get a hard time for 'let me know how I can be helpful' & in todays market if you're not helping you're probably dying - I put together a few things I've done for portfolio companies that move the needle a little in between getting out of founders way
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Finally
@Annalise_Murphy
wins true glory - crowned the most Googled search term in Ireland 2016
Most-Googled terms and questions in Ireland over past 20 years shows our obsession with weather and sport
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More than 1/2 of this increase is the Collisons - self-made - entrepreneurs - building a company that helps other businesses - all this says is Ireland has very few extremely wealthy people & other than the Collisons they underperformed against the market
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Start ups sometimes take a really long time to get right - sometimes they can take most of a career to build up to the right moment - the Modulz team have been hard at it for 2 years to deliver what’s coming in December - patience & determination is going to pay off for them 🔥
I've been dreaming of this upcoming
@modulz
project for most of my career.
- Dozens of high-quality components.
- A color system with dark mode.
- 250+ crisp icons.
- An extensive design system.
- 100s of gorgeous templates.
All free and open-source. Just 2 more weeks!
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Phoenix park & Dublin turned into the perfect spot for a bitta snow kiting by the
#BeastFromTheEast
&
#StormEmma
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VC/founder friends - 5/10k left in wildly oversubscribed round - company is in the AI infrastructure - we want more diversity on the cap table - any female/non-binary/POC operators in who might not typically get to angel invest who we should intro the company to? 🙏
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Great success.
Instead of the usual pints we decided to do a morning Stand Up Paddle Boarding session to gather people in town for
@DubTechSummit
- the weather is looking ☀️ and we’re had a few drop outs so if anyone wants to join a founder/investor morning jolly tomorrow hmu! (8am kick off)
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Do this and your comp package is better than 99% of other employers in Europe and you can stop complaining about it being hard to hire A players - when employees get screwed it messes up the way ecosystem - when they win it’s a huge win for economies and start ups - LFG Europe
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Junior VCs around the world drawing up new career plans after hearing about early stage founder secondaries in wildly hyped company rounds
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the hardest things in business tend to be the most rewarding in the long run : )
I think $25M is one of the hardest fund sizes to raise for.
1. You are too small for most institutions.
2. You are too large for friends and individual checks to make a significant amount.
3. You are no longer collaborative or competitive but an awkward middle ground.
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If I was starting a new company today one of the first people I'd call would be
@calfonsorico
- all the heart and soul of a great investor and just generally a great human to have in your corner
Masterfully interviewed by the don himself 👑
You didn't think I was done with
#20Angel
show releases this week 😉
Episode 3 with the ONE & ONLY
@calfonsorico
from
@cocoadotvc
dropping tomorrow 👀
Carmen backs killers with a heart and this show is a must listen.
Nobody who knows Carmen doesn't love her 😍
Stay tuned...
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Giovanni & Karolis building one of the best teams in the HR tech space in Europe right now - Delighted to see many of the worlds most thoughtful company builders getting behind the business with this round 🥳
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Arguably the worst day in the past decade for a press release to come off embargo but delighted to see the
@overwatchapp
teams acquisition by
@benchling
get announced - 3 of the most deserving people & a huge result for Northern Ireland startups!
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#jobfairy
#vcjobfairy
- repost from Instagram (yes you can get jobs there now) -
@Frontlinevc
- hiring a new associate - details in the thread - review from previous (current) associate hire (me) - ‘11/10 would recommend to a friend occasionally I wonder how I’m paid to do this’
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@davidmcw
couldn’t have nailed career aspirational Ireland with this piece. It’s a sad state of affairs but all of my smartest & most ambitious friends from college-2011-16 have become lawyers, bankers and consultants and they’re in too deep to get out now
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People should go work at Tines
@FinnMurphy12
@Jack_O_Meara
FWIW, at
@tines_io
we have a five-year extended exercise window and there has been negligible overhead. Just upside from our point of view.
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Buzzzzzed to have
@kanglaur
join the frontline team this week - she’s going to bring a whole new perspective and set of interests to the FL team! also so great to have so many smart people join the team as I hit the 3 year mark and can now quietly ease my way into retirement
Please welcome Lauren Kang to the Frontline team. She joins as a Senior Associate focused on seed-stage B2B tech after a career spanning strategy, operations, and investing at Overton VC, Facebook, and Innosight. Welcome to the team and to the Frontline community, Lauren!
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Dropping new internet things - product&pfp - the pfpid public mint is now live! What started as an idea 3 months ago is now a real thing that you can put in your wallet and prove that you are who you claim to be! Perks if you mint early 🔥
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this. once you’re in VC you realise you get 90% of the upside with 10% of the pain involved in company building. Makes it pretty tough to make the jump again unless you’re comfortable with wildly irrational decisions. Makes the right people respect the founders even more tho
I think any honest VC might tell you that on average, their job is *at least* an order of magnitude less painful and more flexible than that of a founder in rapid growth mode
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one of the hottest deals in vc right now is an AI tool to help personal injury lawyers more aggressively pursue claims…
when the blowback to all this comes we’ll 100% deserve it smh
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Another week another
@Frontlinevc
backed co announces their Series A - congrats to Neil & team on their mission to make ML systems safer & fair of
@axios
to point out how far they (& we all have) got to go on diversity - they’re working on it, hard. 🚀
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