Powered by OpenReelBuilding a relationship with an investor, someone who is drowning in pitches and requests for their time, can be difficult. How do you cut through the noise? In this video, I share three ideas for kicking off a relationship with an investor you don't know.

Long gone are the days when NYC was just a place to build a fintech company or an ad platform.In the first half of 2018, we saw Flatiron Health’s $1.9 Billion acquisition, Quentis Therapeutics picking up $48 million in financing, and Paige.ai raising $25 Million--all to fight cancer. Making cancer treatment easier to plan for clinicians was the go...

Time and time again, I hear how hard of a time startups are having recruiting, especially for software developers. While candidate quality is sometimes an issue, or culture fit, or some other quality, most of the time the issue is that the company just isn't getting enough people into the top of the funnel. When I was a startup founder, I had thi...

I was talking to another investor the other day about the stress that surrounds the ups and downs of the job--winning and losing deals, and having some companies succeed versus others going south on you. I shared with this VC my secret to keeping stress at bay: I concede the fact that the possibility exists that I'm not good at this.My fund perform...

A few years ago, venture capitalists and founders got together to make it easier for international founders to come here and start new businesses. Why? Because it has generally worked out amazingly for Americans. Half of the startups in the U.S. that currently enjoy valuations of over $1 billion were founded by immigrants. Those companies emplo...

A few weeks ago, I booked a customized tour of Iceland with Noken, and I did it in about five minutes. All I had to do was to tell Noken how long I planned to go, what level of hotel and car I wanted, and then I had the option to add on a few extras, and within minutes my entire trip was booked. I had a connection to my own personal trip concierg...

"I'm not raising right now."When said to a VC, this is one of the biggest BS lines out there. You're literally talking to an investor, and if they offered you a big check at a great deal, you'd take it, no? So, how could you say you aren't fundraising?On the other hand, some founders *literally* aren't fundraising. They won't share any info on w...

It's really hard to advise a company when you don't have all the information--and no one has more information than the CEO of the company. Sometimes, you might believe the CEO is ill-informed, and you're a check on the amount of homework they've done to seek out solutions to a problem, or which metrics or signals they're paying close enough attent...

Recently, Brooklyn City Councilman Rafael Espinal proposed a bill last Thursday that aims to make it illegal for private employees in New York City to be required to check and respond to their work emails or take part in work-related electronic communications during non-work hours. The idea is great--I'm sure everyone would love to live in a world...

Given that he doesn't have much to do these days, Barack Obama goes poking around Crunchbase one day and he stumbles upon your startup. He finds your company, and obviously being super impressed, he reaches out and asks you what he can do to help.What do you ask of him? (Or anyone else on that level...)This isn't an easy answer. The truth is, yo...

A few years ago, a friend of mine got hired by a company as a software developer. She was an early riser and liked to get into the office around 8AM. A diligent worker, she was super focused from the moment she sat down at her desk--and so by the time 6PM came around, she had gotten a lot of work done and ready to call it a day. Her young male c...

Powered by OpenReel

Today, I can finally announce Brooklyn Bridge Ventures' investment in The Financial Gym's $1.8mm seed round, which I led, alongside Alpine Meridian, Secocha Ventures and several high ranking execs from the finance world.What's the Financial Gym?It's a membership based space and service where you can work with a Certified Financial Trainer 1:1 to ge...

In the last couple of weeks, I've had two similar conversations with my portfolio companies. They were just starting to build out their marketing strategy and they were faced with the challenge of how to staff it. Do you hire someone senior who might feel like the execution of the work was beneath them--or who simply hadn't done it in a while? O...

Last week, on Martin Luther King Day, I decided that instead of saying something in my weekly newsletter, I would do the opposite--I would listen. I asked, "What is your experience of being be black in tech today and what can allies do to improve it?"The responses I got came at a time when I've been having a lot of conversations with female founde...

The amount of work that goes into a job at a growing startup is insane. As soon as you put one project to bed, three more pop up.However, the most difficult aspect of the work isn't necessarily the effort required, but the emotions, with fear perhaps being the greatest one of all.When you're part of a small team, you're indispensable. You are lit...

I've rewritten a lot of pitch decks over time and a lot of them are really bad--mostly because founders have been told what should go in them without a lot of consideration as to why. Somewhere along the line, someone came up with things that are supposed to go in a pitch without ever asking investors how they take in a story.Here what I want to s...

Powered by OpenReelI have to be honest, I'm a little suspect when one of the first questions a founder asks me is about valuation. So many things about startups are difficult and so few startups raise *at all* versus the number who try, that this seems like not the most important question.That being said, you want to feel like you got a good deal-...

With each passing year, we get another set of lists:Startups to WatchFounders Who Crushed ItBald VCs in NYC You Should PitchWhen you're on the list, you're tweeting the heck out of it, very modestly of course, and getting all your investors in friends to do the same. When you're not on it, you tell yourself the list was bullshit for whatever reaso...

Board meetings at @amplehills are dangerous. A post shared by Charlie O'Donnell (@ceonyc) on Dec 20, 2017 at 8:06am PST When you're Ample Hills Creamery, the #1 rated ice cream shop in the country you can pretty much throw everything you've been told about fundraising out the window. Nothing seems to apply--you're not a tech company, you boot...

There's a thread going on Twitter about doing a BarCamp in NYC again. I started with a tweet from Jeff Namnum about how he joined the tech community...Forever grateful to @tonybgoode @noneck @whitneyhess @ceonyc and others for making a Long Island guy feel welcome a hundred years ago at barcampNYC. Absolutely changed my trajectory.— Jeff Nam...

As I sat in the movie theater watching Justice League, I thought a lot about the idea of a hero in the context of 2017. Generally, we've thought of heroes as possessing some kind of special power--or larger than life. We've confused the powerful and influential for people we should look up to. Yet, as we've seen in the retelling of a lot of the ...

CEOs, founders and managers are more worried than ever about issues in their organization that they might not be aware of. We've seen a ton of stories come out recently around bad workplace environments, and business leaders know that for every really bad story, there are a thousand festering smaller issues that need to be gotten out in front of b...

Two years ago, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures became the largest seed investor in The Wing--a network of co-working and community spaces for women founded by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan. They recently opened their second location in Soho after raising an $8mm Series A from NEA earlier this year, and their 3rd and 4th will open in the next few months...

Influencers. Kingmakers. Sharks. Power brokers. Visionaries.There are a lot of ways the startup world describes venture capitalists that portrays a certain power dynamic, real or perceived, that I believe is at the heart of so many of the industry's problems. The industry treats VCs as if they hold all the cards, and the worst behaviors of inv...

Last week, I heard the word "difficult" describing investors twice. Once was about me and once wasn't. The founder and investor relationship is, in fact, a difficult one to get right. Both sides walk in with a lot of cognitive biases and style differences unique to every pair. Meanwhile, the work of trust building is hard and takes a long time....

"Hi Charlie,I've requested a meeting with you during the first week of March. Here are ten reasons why you should take the meeting..."This is an e-mail I got from Amanda Weeks in February 2014, and the beginning of a two and a half year journey that culminated with Brooklyn Bridge Ventures leading a pre-seed round for Industrial Organic that kicked...

I'm a lead investor.That means I'm usually the first person to put down a price on what your company is worth--a dollar value on months, if not years, worth of your work, blood, sweat, tears, stress, etc. "Here's a piece of paper that says how much I think your dreams are worth."The reality is, any price that I put down at the stage that I invest ...

Posted this in what used to be my tech newsletter, and what has lately been about more...Yesterday wasn't just any given Sunday, was it?I would imagine most of the NYC-based readers of this newsletter don't take the position that "these athletes should just stick to sports" nor do they feel that way about Jimmy Kimmel and his recent conversations a...

If economists tried to measure the cost of the malaise that the election of 2016 left, we'd undoubtedly see billions, if not more, lost in worker productivity. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen more political engagement in my lifetime--and not just political engagement, but all sorts of action around causes they care about.These two re...

One of the biggest fears about the future of data is that everyone will turn into a number--that algorithms will turn everyone's personal experience into a single score that will decide whether or not you get what you want, a job, a house, a car, financing for a new business etc. or whether you get shut out.Actually, you don't have to wait for that...

I don't think there's ever a time when I feel more like I'm raining on parades as when founders tell me how interested other VC firms are in investing. I've seen it time and time again where founders, understandably apprehensive about fundraising, read too much into their engagement with investors--especially non-partners at firms.The founders wil...

On no sides is genocide an ok thing to promote with your free speech or to organize a group around.On no sides is the Confederacy, the sole purpose of which was to defend the institution of slavery, a thing to be admired.On no sides is the eradication of Nazis and the KKK a slippery slope to the end of free speech in our country. It is perfectly r...

I send out a monthly mailer of deals that I'm investing in that I'm looking for co-investors for. Because I'm investing so early, a lot of times these companies are not only pre-revenue, but they might also be pre-product. I also invest in a really wide range of opportunities, so many of them don't look like you're typical venture deals.Tinkergar...

Fundraising sucks. No one likes it. Founders don't start companies so they can spend half their time asking people for money and VCs don't love the dance either. However, it's a necessary animal, so the least everyone can do is act professionally, and most of all value each other's time. That's what I'm most frustrated by--the lack of respect fo...

In reading the NYT piece about the negative experiences of female founders raising, one quote stuck out to me:"They put up with the comments, Ms. Renock said, because they “couldn’t imagine a world in which that $500,000 wasn’t on the table anymore.”If you've ever had to fundraise, you can understand this. It's an extremely vulnerable time where y...

This is the worst question a VC can ask.It presupposes that the only good deals are the ones they can't get into--which is an odd way to think about the world. I suppose the only club deal they would want to get into is the one that doesn't want them as a member.There are lots of examples of huge deals that could have been had by anyone early on--...

"In May 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the production of 185,000 aeroplanes, 120,000 tanks, 55,000 anti-aircraft guns and 18 million tons of merchant shipping in two years. Adolf Hitler was told by his advisors that this was American propaganda; in 1939, annual aircraft production for the US military was less than 3,000 planes. By the end o...

I didn't grow up in a neighborhood where gunshots were a thing--and I know I am incredibly lucky for that. That's why when I pulled up to the corner of Atlantic and Fourth by the Barclay's Center yesterday at a couple of minutes after 2pm, the sound of gunfire was pretty startling, and it's not something I can easily shake.Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop-po...

One aspect of venture capital that rarely gets talked about is competition to get into a deal. What happens when a founder has that rare wealth of riches when they're choosing who they're going to allow onto their cap table? The tables turn and the one being pitched to becomes the one pitching. The moment when you find out that you're not guaran...

For the last couple of months, I've been recording interviews with founders and recruiting professionals for the Startup Recruiting Podcast. Despite my best efforts to make it tactical--full of hacks, tips, tricks, etc., the common themes that keep coming up are much more about meaning, mission and values. At first, I'll admit it felt a little fl...

I don't know whether or not Donald Trump colluded with the Russians around the election--or whether any of his associates did either. I certainly don't think much of him--and it certainly doesn't seem beyond him, but obviously I don't have all the materials and information I need.But what I do know is that anyone who is sure of their innocence wou...

I can't tell you how many pitches I've taken where a founder told me they needed revenues, or a fully functioning product to raise capital--and they were told that by X number of investors, so they took it as gospel. Plenty of companies have raised money pre-revenue and pre-product, so why the discrepancy?What you're most likely hearing from an in...

It's hard to answer that question, because even if you look at fundraising data, you don't always know a) when the round was actually closed vs. just announced or filed and b) you don't know when fundraising actually started. Maybe it was wrapped up in a week or maybe it took six months.That being said, I was super curious what my own track record...

I know a guy.In fact, I know a lot of guys. That’s good because guys are all anyone is looking for these days—or even speaking to. "Software guys.""Hardware guys.""Tech guys" in general. Guys who might want to fund our round.How tired are women of being either excluded in the language of who people are looking for, or being lumped in with men and...

Just had a few conversations with startups around how early to hire for marketing. For most founders, it seems silly to hire for marketing when you don't have a product in market to sell.So, when are you supposed to start marketing? The day it launches? Seems a little late for that. You'd like to have developed an audience to be able to launch ...

VCs lie. Everyone knows that or at least suspects it.What you don't know is whether they're lying to you or to themselves. I can't tell you how many times I've heard an entrepreneur make a generalization about VCs based on a few meetings that was completely wrong--and they were usually basing their statement off what the VC told them. Often, it'...

There are a lot of relationships that would be a little weird if they hadn't become commonplace--the kind of thing where someone raised by wolves might not adjust to so easily. A waiter requests money from you at the end of a meal, a doctor looks into your open mouth, and demanding strangers get into your car if it's yellow and has a number on the...

I asked a founder the other day the following question:Can you describe a candidate that would be a fantastic hire somewhere else that would never thrive in your organization?If you can't answer that, it's going to be really difficult to find the people that *will* thrive in your company. Not every candidate is a great hire for every company. Obv...