Things We Believe Are Red Flags

Exploding rounds
An exploding round comes with a caveat like “Seed round in ground-breaking tech startup closing in 1 week!” We need some time to do our own homework.

Lack of control over core technologies
We try to avoid situations in which the startup has a product that has been launched to the public, but the startup’s team has no primary responsibility for actually building the core product. If there’s IP we’ll spend some time trying to understand who owns the IP.

Founders who are mainly focused on invention
Some founders are born inventors. That is not a bad thing. However, as early stage venture capital investors we have made a choice to invest in founders who intentionally want to build potentially big businesses: This includes inventing a product; Recruiting and developing a team; Discovering a scaleable, repeatable and profitable business model; Performing customer development; Searching for product-market-fit; Formulating go-to-market strategies, and; Growing the startup to achieve venture scale outcomes.