Ben Taft
@benmtaft
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founder @mirareality (acq. Apple) // now building something new & investing @_geniusventures
LA x SF
Joined November 2012
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Such is the circle of life
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When I was a first time founder, I couldn't wait for the TechCrunch article to hit
Now I know to ignore these vanity metrics at all costs
TechCrunch articles, conferences, and even headcount are all examples of external validation that don't reflect your core business
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As a first time founder, I learned the hard way that headcount as a metric is a double-edged sword. Just because we were hiring more people didn't mean we were making progress.
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@businessbarista
Fab fit fun. Their business model is amazing (negative COGS business)
Brands pay to be placed in the box, consumers pay for the box
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So you've started your startup and now it's time to fundraise (or so you think)
Here's what to do (and not to do) next (🧵):
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Coincidentally just 6 weeks prior to October 7th, I finished producing a short film about my Russian Jewish parents' intense immigration story.
The entire sentiment of the film was contrasting how unthinkably terrible it was growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union versus how safe
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Levels of wealth:
-Beer Money
-House Money
-Jet Money
-Brex, Ramp & Mercury Sales Reps during SVB Meltdown Money
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When I was a young founder, my founder buddies and I thought that culture fit meant finding someone you could take an awkward elevator ride with (or more naively, go to a nightclub with)
It actually means finding someone who aligns with your values & decision-making frameworks.
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So you've started your startup, but now you need to distribute equity between your cofounders.
Here's how (🧵):
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File an 83b election within 30 days of incorporating to avoid being taxed on paper gains as if they were real, liquid gains. Missing the deadline can lead to painful consequences for founders, as we learned the hard way.
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To any founder that thinks they need $$$$ to validate their company...
At Mira, to build our first headset prototype, we did the math to figure out the proper curvature necessary to enable optics to do what we needed them to do (reflect light from the phone screen into the
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Charlie is a beast:
-Son of immigrants
-Grew up on an Apple Orchard
-Dropped out of Cornell to build tech for farmers
Now a Thiel Fellow and backed by some awesome people (
@generalcatalyst
@jbrowder1
etc)
We are stoked to support you
@ccharliewu
CC:
@_geniusventures
Excited to finally announce our $3.8M raise for Orchard Robotics 🍎, through a seed round led by General Catalyst and a pre-seed led by Contrary.
Read more in our press release below, and our exclusive in TechCrunch!
Honored to be working with
@bonatsos
@max_rimpel
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We’ve talked to ~10 YC companies now ahead of demo day, here’s my state of the union:
***Disclaimer: I’m 100% pro-YC and respect 100% of all the startups in it who are grinding on the hardest possible battle (building a company)***
1) All companies have very simple decks,
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I usually say cold emails to VCs don’t work, but this one worked. Kudos
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Thinking about starting a startup? Here's how to design the perfect founding team
🧵:
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A company all hands is the most expensive hour of the week.
Here’s how to run one effectively (🧵):
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@AmandaMGoetz
Jumped into this thread expecting most answers to say no
Warms my heart to see so many yes’s
Outsized input produces outsized output
Easier to do pre mortgage, kids, etc
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Absolutely fired up to back
@matanSF
and the
@factoryAI_
team. 10/10 team & vision 🤝
Factory is bringing autonomy to software engineering.
Excited to announce our $5M fundraise, led by
@sequoia
(
@shaunmmaguire
) and
@Lux_Capital
(
@breeves08
)
Read more here:
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Bad taste to tweet poorly about a founder after you meet with them.
These founders are grinding harder than imaginable, stacking dozens of pitches back to back to back
Cut them some slack
Founder joins the call 5 minutes late and kicks off with “hey natalie”. Gotta love YC. Bottoms up.
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TLDR:
-I built
@mirareality
, an AR headset company that was acquired by Apple
-I run
@_geniusventures
with
@gefkovicz
-I’m building
@daisymusicco
Holler if you are a founder working on a really hard problem or are in the top 1% of Spotify listeners globally.
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Founders: before raising a seed round, ask yourself 'how can we validate this business as fast as possible with as few resources as possible?' Aim to raise a pre-seed round from savvy angels and pre-seed funds to save dilution & spend each dollar efficiently.
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Sequoia & Founder's Fund invested in our seed round. But it's not always best to have multi-stage funds in your seed. Stage specific funds can often bring the best resources, signal & incentives at every specific stage.
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@businessbarista
Women’s lifestyle products. They started a decade or so ago while the model was still novel so defeating the chicken/egg between brands and distribution was likely more solvable with little to no money
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@nealkhosla
Couldn’t agree with this more, and the people who disagree are the same as those who would refuse the meeting
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It’s evidently a hard time for emerging managers to raise, yet I’m seeing a lot of them do it (successfully) anyway 💪
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You just started your startup – but did you file your 83b elections? Are you SURE?
Here's what they are and why you should triple check 🧵:
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One of the biggest mistakes a first time founder makes early on is validating their progress via Vanity Metrics.
Here’s what they are and how to avoid them (🧵):
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@chriszeoli
I went to Menlo so there’s a data point. Have a lot of founder friends from Harker too (not to mention Tony Xu was a Harker Grad)
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@TheStalwart
I know this is serious but I laughed so hard at the term ‘10 million hens under management’
HUM
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Founder circles: 4-6 founders meet monthly without cofounders or investors in the room. Safe space to express worries, stresses, challenges. We formed our own after the original ended. Still meet monthly 2 years later. Build a cohort early to help each other rise.
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@Jason
It’s kind of like when streaming first came out:
Wow! Instead of paying for different channels, it’s $10/mo for everything!
Now it’s regressed back to the mean: for this show you need Hulu, for this one you need HBO, etc etc
Same trend + regression happened with on prem & SaaS
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Founders: NDA’s are essentially unenforceable - unless it is some super deep proprietary tech, asking somebody to sign one is pure naïveté. Just execute, it’s all that matters.
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Which investors are good for which stage of your company?
The bottomline up front is that it’s best to have stage specific funds invest in each corresponding funding round. That looks something like this:
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My sleep last night was as bad as I know tonight’s sleep will be good
If that makes sense (yes we are all exhausted, thank God for todays outcome)
Anyone else breathing a sigh of relief and looking forward to a good night's sleep tonight?
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Reminder that every cofounding team needs swim lanes (ie clear division of roles) – or you will run into some major trouble later on
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I'm CCing some friends and thought leaders in the tech community who have been using their platform to fight anti-semitism. I've been quietly appreciating you from afar – this is both a thank you and a request to share this video further.
@shaunmmaguire
@SethGRosenberg
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This whole thing went from cracking jokes to very serious real quick (myself included)
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Spotify’s UI is literally 10x better than Apple Music it’s not even up for debate
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If you raise at too generous of a valuation, you’ll incur progress debt.
Your business will have to grow into the valuation you raised at, THEN you will ALSO have to hit the next big milestone to unlock your next funding round
Raise for one milestone at a time.
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Too often, founders incorrectly assume that culture means ping pong tables, WFH policy, and seeing if a new hire is someone they could take a non-awkward elevator ride with.
So what is culture and how do you actually design it? 🧵👇
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Hiring is a hugely important yet very time-consuming aspect of scaling your company - so how involved should founders be in it at any given point?
Read below👇🧵:
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As a first time founder, I gave out way too generous of titles for hires 1-10.
Now I know that the hierarchy is C > VP > Dir > Mgr > IC
Your first hires should likely be ICs. But put ‘founding’ in their title to acknowledge them joining early (e.g. founding engineer)
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I had my first serious relationship while I was building my first company and realized that the tools I used for cofounder relationships were essentially the same as the ones I used for my personal one. Strong communication, active listening, etc. Lots of parallels
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So always be sure to triple check this early on. And be a good friend – send this thread to a fellow early stage founder!
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Hence the importance of in person founding teams
I firmly believe that teams of 5 or smaller should have no formal meetings and instead, casually discuss what you’re working on while getting your laptops out and at lunch. If that leads to a roadmap-changing insight, then it should naturally extend into a longer conversation.
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“The factory is the product”
-Elon
Tesla's next-generation vehicle (coming in 2025) will use a groundbreaking manufacturing process that the company calls the "Unboxed Process."
Here's an explanation by
@larsmoravy
of what that means and why it's a big deal:
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If you ever feel sorry for yourself, *drag* yourself through a really hard workout and I promise you you won’t feel that way afterward.
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@jordwalke
I literally do not understand why this is even controversial - this has *always* been what it’s taken for startups to win
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So excited to back Keyan with
@generalcatalyst
@bonatsos
excited to announce we've raised a $1.4M+ pre-seed round for
@222place
led by
@bonatsos
(
@generalcatalyst
) with participation from
@ycombinator
@cory
@1517fund
@CrescentFund
@AfrajGill
@julianweisser
@benmtaft
& support from
@viterbigarage
we're hiring!
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You ever write an email that’s so good you reread it multiple times over after sending just to dap yourself up?
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Every person possesses an innate genius – the best leaders know how to unlock it in each member of their team and achieve employee-role fit for everyone.
Here’s how they do it (🧵):
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Robinhood’s green was so representative of their brand, I’m surprised (& disappointed) that they changed it
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So you've raised some money, but now you are starting to hire your first employees.
Here are some key DO's and DON'Ts (🧵):
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How to secure your first (B2B) customer(s)
Part 3 of 3: Scaling beyond the first PoC (🧵)
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@ChrisJBakke
I have a mentor who runs in pretty high up there circles, and he always told me that all of his UHNW friends would trade back 99% of their net worth in exchange for anonymity - something that he has preserved all these years
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After traveling abroad and hearing the same music / seeing the same retail stores / etc in literally every country, I am reminded that distribution is literally the only thing that matters
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one time for all my non technical founders!
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@NWischoff
Still seeing a lot of investors get heartburn after 10 post, only seeing really good/experienced founders command higher
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The first question you should really ask yourself is:
‘How can we validate this business as fast as possible with as few resources as possible?’
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One of the most useful tools & resources I've had during my journey as a founder are ‘founder circles’ that were originally set up by Sequoia. Read on:
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Twitter was losing ~$4M/day
Then they cut their headcount in half, that goes down to ~$2M/day or $60M/mo
They have ~250M MAUs: if just 3% of them pay the $8/mo, the company is ~cash flow breakeven
Was it really this simple to fix Twitter’s business the whole time?
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For SaaS and similar companies, there are sort of 3 stages of risk / valuation in my mind:
1/ Pre proof (no customers, just team formed with a hypothesis)
2/ little bit of proof (<5 retained customers, the model is working)
3/ Proven repeatability (low/mid 6 figures in ARR, 10+
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Once you solve for Z, you should aim to raise a pre-seed SAFE round. Raise it from savvy angels and pre-seed funds – it’s too early for the bigger multistage funds.
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Examples of Funds:
Pre-Seed:
@ycombinator
, myself,
@chapterone
,
@countdownVC
, etc
Seed:
@MaCVentureCap
,
@NFX
,
@firstround
,
@streamlinedVC
,
@PearVC
Series A: Sequoia, A16z, Index, Lightspeed, GC
Series B+: Tiger, Coatue, Insight, CRV
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Oh, and if you are ready to raise this type of pre-seed round, DM me 🙂
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Can we just acknowledge that now 2 of the 3 OpenAI board members were once the CTO of Facebook/Meta?
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First time founders: Don't fall into the trap of immediately raising a seed round. Instead, ask: "How can we validate this biz as fast as possible with few resources?" Calculate costs to achieve MVP w/50% buffer & raise pre-seed SAFE round from savvy angels & pre-seed funds.
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one of the portcos im most excited about 👀
We know we’ve been a bit hush hush about what exactly we’re building as we work towards our upcoming alpha — so let’s talk a bit more about the vision behind Sequence.
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@NWischoff
Was this as an LP consideration or was it them wanting to potentially invest in future rounds of your portcos?
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Agree wholeheartedly. As we say: ‘solve before scale’
Premature scaling is the kiss of death for startups, nail it then scale it.
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@brickywhat
FWIW I think junior VCs equally need to hear this for how they treat founders
Lots of junior VCs think they know more than the founder cause they can ‘pattern match’ and don’t show enough empathy for how hard it is in the trenches
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Culture is the set of guiding frameworks that drive decision-making across your company. Make sure to design your culture early on and screen for culture fit in new hires.
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