Ty Danco and Dharmesh Shah recently published an excellent guide for entrepreneurs on communicating with investors. They have given me their permission to share it here.
The Why and How of Updating Your Angel Investors
There’s a massive amount available on the interwebs on how to improve the odds for success in new ventures. But almost nothing concrete is available on the care and feeding of your investors. You can do all of the Lean Startup experimentation you want, but we’re here to tell you that one of the the easiest and most underrated skills that a startup CEO needs is knowing how to keep your investors updated, excited and engaged.
The reason is: The CEO is the investor’s user interface into the business. It’s how investors see what’s going on, and in some minimal ways, interact with the business.
We polled several early stage investors (including ourselves) that have 30+ investments each under their belts, and asked them their advice for entrepreneurs on how best to communicate with them and update them on the business. Here are the results. [Read more…]
Launchpad portfolio companies have been busy this week. We just closed a $1.1M Series A round with JamHub, which they will use to accelerate the rollout of their very cool rock & roll products. They make a family of devices that allow bands to plug in and jam together with incredible and finely controlled sound quality for each player, but without the noise of a traditional amplified rehearsal. Silent and neighborhood-friendly rock & roll that sounds awesome to the musicians, but doesn’t wake the dead. Fantastic team – we are really pleased to be working with them. (Mass High Tech story here.)
And speaking of reinventing long-standing traditions, portfolio company Vizibility has done a radical rethink the humble business card. This week they launched their new line of NFC-enabled business cards to compliment their online identity management platform for professionals. For situations where you want to quickly pull up the contact info, LinkedIn info or Google results on someone you have just met, you no longer need to manually search or scan a QR code with your phone’s camera. One tap of the NFC enabled card will allow you to bring up the information directly. Very cool. TechCrunch wrote about it here, or you can check out the company at vizibilty.com.