Remembering Om Malik, Kind and Curious Entrepreneur

Small investments can yield surprising returns when you marry purpose with strategy.... A mother's entrepreneurial journey proves that meaningful profit doesn't require massive capital. Starting with just £60, she's built something remarkable generating strong returns. while creating positive impact in her community. It's a powerful reminder that financial success and social good aren't mutually exclusive. they can be two sides of the same coin. What makes this story compelling is how it challenges conventional wisdom about what's needed to launch a sustainable venture. Limited resources often spark the most creative solutions. This venture shows that constraint breeds innovation, and passion fuels persistence. The real lesson here? Scale isn't everything. Focus, authenticity, and a clear purpose can transform a modest investment into meaningful income and measurable change. What would you attempt if you started with just £60 and a clear mission?

Several people have gone out of their way recently to tell me that they really enjoy my Linkedin posts. First, I sincerely appreciate the compliments! Second, it's a good reminder to me and hopefully to others that we don't have to post according to whatever the latest algorithm is suggesting. The "experts" tell me I should pick a lane and write like a man (If you didn't follow it, it was a thread that blew up about 6 mo ago which I'll link in comments). But I write about fintech, health, family tech, CPG, community, female founders, venture trends, angel investing, and more. People are multidimensional. I have many interests, and so do you. I may not appeal to everyone, but I've gotten to engage with SO MANY great people because of my posts. And I feel like that energy and connection is only compounding, enabling me to add even more value to the founders I support. In the spirit of spreading the love, a few other suggestions of great follows across a range of topics:  Peter Walker - all things startup/vc data- you're probably already following him 😀 Kait Feeney - witty + heartfelt musings on life as a founder/mom Ethan Austin - doing VC as an "outsider" and finding outsider founders Laura Cunningham - thoughtful, research-based essays on what it means to be a parent raising kids in the age of AI Olivia O'Sullivan - advice for early stage founders on every topic you can imagine Will share more of my favorite follows periodically if there’s interest!

I so enjoyed being on a panel with Jeff Chu and Zoe Watson about what it means to be fundraising and building operationally in today's environment when the goal posts are continually moving (or at least it feels that way!). We discussed: 📈 How do you create mini milestones, or achievements, to increase your valuation? 🔀 How do you know when to stick the path or pivot? ▶️ How do you align teams so they can do more with less? ⏰ If you need a quick fix, how do you make decisions on bad tech debt versus good tech debt? (thank you Jeff for these new terms!) Jeff opened up with a mind-blowing statistic that the bulk of institutional capital is going to the same top, large funds. Meaning there is a lot less going around for early-stage funds and early-stage start-ups. (I want to say it was something like 80% of the capital is going to 30 funds!) And the impact this has on early-stage start-ups fighting for traditionally later-stage capital. Zoe opened up and shared how her company decided to make a strategic pivot following the customers (and money) and stressed the importance of pulling together as a start-up community as everyone is going through this. There is a lot to learn as we all navigate this new era together💪 I shared how my favorite word is "pivot" and it's important when time is a precious resource to align every member of the team with focus. But also, not abandon ship at every "no". A ship can take holes, especially if they're above the waterline, and even some below the waterline, if they're patched and fixed. (^A nod to my early career time I spent at Gore that continues to persist ⛵ ) As always, MassChallenge put on another great event for start-ups and the ecosystem. From pitches, to fireside chats, and networking. I met many new connections and loved seeing all of the familiar faces! If you're building right now, how are you doing more with less as the goal posts evolve? 👇

Relationships compound. That’s the thesis behind the Founders Dinner series, the most important connections in VC aren’t built in ballrooms. They’re built at long tables, with the right people, and enough time to actually be honest with each other. Last week during New York Tech Week, I co-hosted an intimate dinner for consumer founders and investors alongside Bluestein Ventures, Vanterra Capital and RiverPark Ventures, generously sponsored by Awesome CX and J.P. Morgan. No panels. No pitch decks. Just real conversation. Grateful for every person who showed up fully — and for partners who believe in community-first relationship building. More dinners to come. 🥂 #NewYorkTechWeek #FoundersDinner #VentureCapital #ConsumerFounders #AwesomeCX #BluesteinVentures #VanterraCapital #RiverParkVentures #JPMorgan

The best conversations around growth rarely happen on stage. They happen around tables like this, where founders and investors can speak candidly about the realities of scaling: hiring, customer expectations, operational growing pains, and everything in between. We were proud to help bring together such an incredible group during New York Tech Week. Thank you to everyone who joined us. #AwesomeCX #CustomerExperience #FounderCommunity #ScalingBrands #NextGenCX

Startup founders: a VC just shared the best ways to get a meeting: 1. Intro from a portfolio founder 2. Intro from a portfolio employee 3. A VC already in your round 4. A VC's LP 5. Operators in the VC's network 6. Cold outreach 7. Intro from a VC who passed Five of the seven are "find the person you already share a connection with". The catch is you can't see those connections. You don't know which ex-coworker now works at an a16z portfolio company, or which old colleague angel-invests alongside the fund you're chasing. This is why we built a custom Claude Skill connected to our Crustdata MCP. How to use it: 1) Export your LinkedIn connections (Settings → Data Privacy → Get a copy of your data), or just point it at your own profile 2) Give it the fund you're raising from 3) It pulls everyone working across that fund's portfolio companies 4) Matches them against you on shared employer, school, and city 5) Ranks the paths by how close the tie is, then drafts the intro message Want access? Happy to run a few warm-intro searches live on a call! Link below #Fundraising #VentureCapital #StartupFounders

Do You Need a Warm Intro to Investors? Recently, I got into an argument here with a VC who claimed that cold outreach never works. Without a warm intro founders were wasting their time. I butted in, telling him he was wrong. Snide comments aside, this is a critical question for founders — how can you reach investors? The answer depends on what type of investor you’re trying to reach. There are 3 types of investor. Each requires a different way to reach them: - VCs - individual angels - angel groups As the VC posited, cold outreach to any decent-sized fund is a waste of time. Some funds don't even bother to list contact info on their website. Even if they do, don't bother trying to contact them. Anything other than a warm intro from a trusted source goes straight into the trash. Think you have the perfect pitch for a16z or Khosla? So do ten thousand other founders. Your only hope is a warm intro. But it needs to be truly warm — an investor in your startup who knows someone at the VC personally, not some random person I met years ago and connected with on LI. But the truth is VCs won't invest in your pre-seed deal anyway. At that stage, it’s angels and angel groups. And here’s where the VC was dead wrong. Cold outreach can be effective to reach angels. Warm intros, of course, are better, but many angel investors like me will respond to a personalized, well-written cold intro for a startup in their area of interest. The key though is “personalized”, “well-written”, and “in their area of interest,” Because 99.7% of the outreach I receive is not. Before reaching out, understand what we’re interested in. Then craft a short, personalized message about why we should be interested in your startup. For angel groups, warm intros get you nothing. I am VP of Chemical Angel Network and on the executive committee of TCA Los Angeles. In both roles, I’m frequently asked to take warm intros with founders. I’ll look over a pitch deck and perhaps have a short zoom call. If I think it’s relevant for the group, I’ll tell the founders to apply online. But whether I think it’s relevant or not doesn’t matter a whit. The application has to go to the pre-screening committee which will decide whether to bring it to a full screening where the members vote on whether they’re interested in learning more or not. I’m just one member out of a hundred. So don’t waste your time on outreach, warm or cold. Just go to the website and apply. More details on how to reach the 3 different types of investors in today's article in Entrepreneurship Handbook. https://lnkd.in/gMzkyMyE

Packages differ substantially between high-growth tech firms and established corporations, reflecting divergent acquisition risks, retention philosophies, and investor expectations. Tech companies typically structure packages with equity acceleration and stock-heavy components tied to pre-IPO or rapid-growth valuations, while established corporations favor cash severance multiples and pension protections reflecting lower-volatility business models 📦 🗳️ 🧉 🎁

Let's clear this up. During our Mother Eagle’s LinkedIn Live, one question stood out: "What exactly is Founders Forge?" It was a reminder that we've welcomed so many new people into this community over the past few weeks, and we've never properly introduced what Founders Forge is all about. So, let's fix that. Most founders don't need more information, they need someone to help them see things differently. ➖Every day, founders make decisions that quietly hold their businesses back, ➖They chase trends instead of building strategy, ➖ Confuse being busy with making progress, and ➖Keep changing direction because they mistake confusion for growth. Not because they lack ambition. But because they lack clarity. That's why Founders Forge exists. ❌ Not to give founders another course. ❌ Not to flood them with more information. But to help them; ✅ think better, ✅ decide better, and ✅ build better. Because one clear decision can move a business forward. One wrong decision can delay it for months. Over the next few days, we'll take you inside Founders Forge. You'll see what we believe. How we think. Who we serve. And why we've built this room for founders in the first place. Because great businesses aren't built by accident. They're forged 💜💜

A founder recently told me about a social experiment I haven't been able to stop thinking about. He hosted a party where everyone was randomly assigned a social class—from powerful to powerless—and wore it on a name tag. The only rule was that everyone had to interact with each other according to the status they had been assigned. He said what fascinated him wasn't how people treated one another. It was how quickly people started behaving like the status they had been given. The people assigned more power spoke with more confidence. Those assigned less became quieter, more hesitant, more deferential. A few days later, I found myself in a small version of that experiment. I was at a VC and founder mixer, talking with a founder who kept asking me questions I'd almost never been asked before. - What do you look for in founders? - Do you think it's okay to be a solo founder? - Do I need an office in NYC to raise? - When should I start fundraising for my next round? I kept answering with, "I'm no expert, but here's what I've heard..." Until I realized he thought I was a VC. For a few minutes, I got to experience what it feels like when someone assumes your perspective carries authority before you've even said a word. It made me wonder how many conversations, opportunities, and ideas are shaped, not by what we know, but by who people assume we are before we ever open our mouths.