Charles Hudson at Precursor told Monique Woodward of Cake Ventures, when she was first raising, “You’re not just raising for Fund I; you’re raising for the first three funds. And act accordingly.” In other words, build long-term relationships. As someone who lives and breathes in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, it’s about giving first. There are many things I have yet to do, but are on my life’s roadmap. And given my humble, but curious beginnings, two of the greatest gifts I can give right now at this point in my career, are:
- Time
- Valuable connections
… which led me to be a scout years ago. Or as the folks at Techstars say, give first. On a similar wavelength, one of my mentor figures told me when I first jumped into venture, “Think three careers in advance.” You’re laying the groundwork for your future success. Or, as I have sometimes heard it described, the tailwind of your 10-year overnight success.
I try to be helpful to everyone who takes time out of their day to talk to me – be it outbound or inbound. Of course, over time, it’s been much harder for me to meaningfully add value to every person who comes my way. Though my blog is one way to scale and share my knowledge capital, I’m always looking for new ways. So if anyone has any recommendations, I’m all ears. After all, I’m still in my first inning.
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Fast, Simple, Awesome
In the theme of scaling myself, I recently shared with the fellows in our VC fellowship about my workflow as a scout. And, I thought it’d be just as valuable to you my readers as well.
I find myself living in my inbox for at least 3-4 hours a day, with hundreds of email chains by the end of the week. What I needed most was operational efficiency. And, at the end of the day, efficiency is results divided by your efforts.
E = Result/Effort
First things first, tune your email settings, which I first picked up from Blake Robbins‘ blog:
- If you have more than one inbox, enable multiple inboxes.
- Enable compact view versus default view.
- Enable keyboard shortcuts.
- The only ones you really need are: E to archive, V to move an email
- Enable auto-advance. So that you move on to the next email automatically after performing an action on the previous.
Then, the best thing is you only need three folders: Action Needed, Read Later, and Pending Response.
For any email that takes longer than a minute or two to reply, it goes in the Action Needed folder, like long-form advice/feedback or being stalled by waiting on a reply for a double-opt in. When my day frees up a bit more, usually later in the day, I revisit this folder to address all the other action items.
Read Later includes the mountain of blogs, newsletters, news outlets I’ve subscribed to, but didn’t have time to start reading until later in the day. Occasionally, it includes a founder’s monthly investor update. For the latter, I usually just scroll straight to the asks and see if I can help or not. If not, I read and move on.
For the emails I send out but expect a response in return, Pending Response is the perfect folder for that. This next part is completely optional. But, under the Nudges category, enable Suggest emails to follow up on. Because of Google’s algorithm, it can occasionally end up adding to the clutter when it surfaces up an email that doesn’t need to be followed up on. But if that’s the case, it goes straight into the archive folder.
And yes, for everything else, that don’t go in the above three folders, goes into Archives.
I used to have a million and one folders for startups, jobs, VCs, events, saved articles/newsletters, and more. Which looks great when you’re organizing material and when the inbox search algorithm wasn’t as great as it is now, but it doesn’t speed up the workflow. In fact, it often slowed me down – as I tried to put items in the appropriate folder before responding to my next email. And sometimes, they fit in multiple folders.
For mobile, the only thing you need to change are the Mail swipe actions. Swipe right to archive. And swipe left to Move to [folder].
You can either do the above, or use Superhuman, which has all the above functions. The faster I can get back to people who need my help, the better. Whether it’s me, or someone smarter than me, I try to point founders in the right direction.
Tracking the data
Separately, on an excel sheet, though I don’t track every startup I talk to, I track deals I refer/intro, with the following columns:
- Startup
- Founder(s)
- Date
- Stage
- Industry
- Deck [link]
- Referral Source
- Who’d I refer to
- Secret Sauce – Differentiator/Reason for referral
- Result of referral (Pending, Talking, Rejected, Invested, Will revisit)
- Date of action [result of referral]
- Check size (if applicable)
- Round size (if applicable)
I also color-code so that’s it’s easier on the eyes. With the above, I can track:
- Most intros/investments/rejections, by:
- Industry
- Partner
- Stage
- Referral source
- Response Rate
- Average Time:
- Between intro and investment, per VC
- Between intro and conversation
- Average check size (per fiscal year)
- Average round rise (per fiscal year)
- % breakdown by types of compensation
- % referral sources from founders who successfully fundraised (via me)
- Founders who didn’t successfully fundraise (via me)
In closing
As one of my favorite VC quotes go: “There is no greater compliment, as a VC, than when a founder you passed on — still sends you deal-flow and introductions.” I’ve had the fortune of working with some amazing founders over the years – a number of them who I was never able to help with the limitations of my own knowledge, but through the people I sent them to. Luckily, I largely attribute to my ability to help founders quickly through the above workflow. Hopefully, it can be as useful to you as it has been for me.
Photo by George Brynzan on Unsplash
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