Let Go and Haul: Bay Area learnings edition + an ask!
Week 16, 2018 – San Francisco / Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
I just got back from SF. Fundraising is happening and this train is leaving the station! I’m really excited about the VCs we’ve got commits from :)
If you’re reading this and have expertise in this area, or know someone who does and may want to help, I’d love to talk to you / share our investor funnel. I’m realizing that even though I have a great set of mentors around me, I’m still lacking perspectives from entrepreneurs who know how to go from pre-seed to A in today’s investing climate for consumer product with top tier VCs, particularly in the Bay Area.
My ask: please help me meet more entrepreneurs who have recently raised pre-seed for consumer products!
You might be like, don’t you already know these people? Maybe I do and I just don’t realize so remind me! My brain is so stuffed right now full of so many things, and even though I’m pretty good at networking, I did only move to the US a bit over three years ago (and those three years were bonkers), so my network still isn’t as deep in this country as I wish it was, plus there’s that data on why strategic networking is more difficult for women, so I’m being explicit about this ask to see what happens!
Journal: what I learned
The other week I wrote about people giving high-potential women counterintuitive advice to do things that are less of a high-stakes gamble so they’re less likely to fail.
This week I realized that there’s potentially another factor that’s been holding me back in one way: the east coast. I kind of sort of knew this, but this week I truly learned this lesson as I collected feedback from multiple investors in the Bay Area. Basically, if I’m going to be extremely simplistic about it, this is what I have learned from pitching in three different cities:
Huge caveat: obviously, not all investors in these cities are like this, and the investors we have in NYC are definitely not only like this (which is why we love them and we found each other!) but this extremely generalized learning helped me wrap my head around pitching in these three different cities and what material to emphasize depending on where I’m pitching.
New York: how quickly can you start making money?
Los Angeles: how emotional and touching is the story?
San Francisco Bay Area: how fucking big is the vision?
All of these things are important! And, these cities clearly excel at these three things. There’s a reason New York is the financial capital it is, why LA is where beautiful stories come from and SF is the breeding ground for unicorn start-ups. However, what I’m learning is depending on what phase you’re at and what kind of company you’re pitching, these places are going to be different degrees of helpful. Right now, making money is not the focus for us. Dreaming big and finding product market fit is the focus, which is why SF is an important part of the puzzle.
As one investor in SF joking-not-joking said to me “this is the only place that money has no value”. Or, to paraphrase others: east coast (Wall Street) investors can be so focused on short term gains and the milestones to get there, they won’t let you dream big enough to be interesting to the Bay Area VCs in subsequent rounds. Woah! I’m still figuring this all out, but my biggest lesson this week was to pitch the big crazy vision that many investors in NYC told me was too crazy. Shout out to Matt Mireles for giving me a crash course on this my first night in town. I’m realizing now that early on in this journey (before working with the amazing Betaworks crew), I kissed a lot of frogs who gave me unhelpful advice I took to heart not knowing any better. Or, I was simply talking to people in the wrong category and it the advice was mismatched for what I needed. Or, they’d never met a woman with bonkers huge idea like this before, and didn’t know what to make of me so didn’t talk to me about the potentials for success, or had any faith or belief in me that I might be able to do it [insert entire life here on that last one]. Long story short, I think I was being told to stay small in not one but two ways, and while our pitch is really good and the story is strong, there was one significant area of weakness that came to light in SF, and that is: how fucking big is the vision? Because it needs to be really, really big for you to be interesting to them out there. This week was about a lot of rework and learning to pitch differently.
This experience reminds me a lot of the many times I figured out how to get through a tough passage of a concerto on my cello on my own, only to have my late teacher Tanya Prochazka tell me in my lesson that while that method was sort of working for me, it was never going to sound as brilliant or be as strong as if I did it this different way that she was now showing me. Of course, this would mean unlearning the old habits and finger positions to retrain my muscles to learn a different set of mechanics. The longer those old habits have been in place, the harder it is to get the muscles firing to do things the right way.
Jams: what I’m into
Last night I caught a show at Nowadays, which is definitely my new favorite venue in NYC (and is yet another reason the border of Bushwick and Ridgewood is where it’s at these days). The sound system is incredible, and it reminded me of many nights at Plastic People when I lived in London listening to the spacious, thoughtful wubs of British dubstep, which was fitting for last night.
This area chart of popular film genres the team was nerding out about this week.
This really beautiful video inspired by how driverless cars see space via Anton
This J.G. Ballard quotation from 1972 via Arkadiy that is eerily similar to the vision for TRASH.
This new and April-appropriate Bishop Nehru song with Lion Babe