Zack Urlocker’s Post

The biggest shock to first-time founders is experiencing the total lack of external validation for the first time. In school, and at jobs, there's always someone telling you what you need to do to get an "A," to get a good performance review, to get a promotion. And if you're doing those things, a constant stream of "good jobs" and "attaboys." When you start a company, it's just you struggling to get the attention of the market, sometimes for years. IME the biggest cause of early-stage startups failing is founders deciding they don't want to grind through this. Every once in a while, a founder calls me asking what to do about this. The answer is: The only thing you can do. Keep going: https://lnkd.in/gnRsPtU3

Excitement around my startup idea is great, but it’s not validation. Future fundraising concerns push us to ask tough questions before pitching to investors. 1️⃣ Will investors back thorough research without validation? 💡Napkin pitch stories are legendary, but I need to be pragmatic. As underrepresented founders, we must consider ourselves the rule, not the exception. 2️⃣ Can we raise a Seed round without a "product?" 🤖The tech space is saturated. Our goal: use tech to enhance, not define us. We’re disrupting a stale retail vertical, which gives us a unique angle. 3️⃣ How do we build early validation or PMF? ✅Validation is a signal; PMF is a fact. We need to show our concept’s appeal and market fit. 4️⃣ How much capital do we need? 💰We have initial guesses, but we'll need financial projections to be certain. Our target ballpark makes us a seed stage, but pre-revenue startups often start with smaller pre-seed rounds. 5️⃣ How will investors perceive our opportunity size (TAM, SAM, SOM)? 📈Understanding market size is essential. We're taking aim at an established industry so data to showcase our disruptive potential will be easy.

I’ve seen 1,000+ founders in my time at Innosphere Ventures. Here are the 3 most common mistakes I observe: #1. Not doing proper customer discovery When companies don’t do this, the failure rate is astronomically high and lack of market is the second most cited reason a startup failed. The good news is that there is a proper methodology that works… it just takes time and the time commitment. #2 Not preparing the business for capital This takes on many forms: - Not having a complete management team and a “fundable” CEO - Not thinking through the go-to-market strategy and greatly undershooting the cost of GTM - Not differentiating between early funding, growth capital, and traditional credit Each of these will prohibit you from raising capital. Investors do not give you this input. Not having sufficient capital is the single biggest risk factor cited by startups. #3 Not having expertise in building the team This is especially true of technical founders. Most founders tend to hire people like themselves. For technical founders, this usually means hiring others with technical backgrounds. Often, they don’t yet understand and value what a complete team looks like and how this translates to being fundable Those are the three broad areas of problems I tend to see. What makes your list?

One of the greatest lessons I've learned over the past month is that a startup's unit of time is hours. Why? Because survival is the perpetual state of a startup. Imagine if a doctor in the emergency room laid out their objectives for the week – that wouldn't cut it, would it? You'd demand updates and progress in hours, maybe even minutes, because time is of the essence. Well, the same urgency should be true when starting a new business. The most critical 'big company' habit to avoid is that time doesn't matter. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ePbUcV-x

Recently I read 100X.VC presentation by Vatsal Kanakiya. It nicely conveys Red flags one can see in Startup founders when they pitch to a VC. Some key points from it 👇 1. Founders pitch their technology product and not their business. No visible plan to make money. 2. Founders have little or no understanding of finance or cash flows and prudent use of funds. 3. Superman founders who do not trust anyone. and who does not delegate. They become bottlenecks for growth. 4. Startup founders hired people for their track record, and not their potential. For early-stage startup companies, every hire can make or break their future. 5. Founders Building products that no one wants. Many founders have a hypothesis that they are solving a big problem and put their full effort into their idea based on their subjective experience rather than systematic data or facts. Find the link to the full presentation in the comment section. #venturecapital #startupfounder

Imagine you are doing a timed 5-minute pitch in front of a 50-person room, and your pitch deck went through a MAJOR malfunction. Well... that was me. Attached is the funny moment. What I can tell you from that experience was that I was able to recover, and luckily, Techstars allowed me to do that 5-minute pitch again. My team, Artemis, did lose, but a couple of judges came up to me and commended me on doing an amazing pitch... EVEN with a malfunction. But, in real life, a founder should NEVER depend on their slides to pitch their dream. I went through that major realization within this past week. Yes, pitch decks are important. However, you are selling yourself as a founder to make a promise that you are the right person to lead this specific sector. To be clear, I want to be the leader in my dream, and I know there are many amazing future leaders that have their own as well. This weekend, I attended the University of Southern California x Techstars startup weekend, and I did learn a lot. Originally, I was under the impression that I would introduce my startup, get investors, the basic get-to-know-you strategy. However, I and my fellow attendees were hit with the curb-ball that this was a competition to collaborate with other founders to create a completely new startup in 52 hours and present it to awesome judges. I was part of this seven-person team, Artemis. Justin Cho made this amazing pitch about an AI travel startup, and I was compelled to join the team. I would show our amazing, funny team pictures, but unfortunately, LinkedIn only lets me post a video. Our whole team was filled with people of many different backgrounds. - I, 22, USC Senior, Business Finance, Real Estate Development background in VC - Justin, USC PhD in CS - Saurabh G., USC Ms, former passionate founder w/CS - Andrés Felipe Gómez Sarmiento, UCSD Alum, Sony Data Analyst - Kelly Su, USC Junior, Marketing & Cognitive Science - Andrea Houng, USC Sophomore, Economics - Pranav Anand Karthikeyan, USC Ms, Engineering Management We worked as a team to complete this project. I loved working with such bright and diverse minds. Here are a few things I have learned this week besides growing resilience from pressure: - Invite feedback - Every team is different - If your whole team sees the vision, it's go time - Present customer's WTP - Use Amazon Mechanical Turk and Discord as a source for survey results - The team slide doesn't matter unless your experience is the 1% Sidenote: Everyone has awesome ideas. It's just about who can execute it first in the best way possible. Since this competition has ended, I was watching a YouTube video on travel and I found a Youtuber, LivingBobby getting sponsored by Plannin. Funny enough, Plannin was the same exact concept. Blew. My. Mind. Artemis just has a different UI that is a bit more youthful, I am bias of course. [Don't worry Plannin, or not 😈 ]

6 startup founders gaze into a future-of-work crystal ball: As the world returns to “normal,” what does the future of work look like from where we are today? To find out, we spoke with 6 founders in relevant sectors. http://dev.dlvr.it/2dX0Z0

TechCrunch’s How to Pitch Me series is a great way for startups to get ready to pitch to investors, and I’m so glad I got to be a part of it. Some key pieces of my advice for founders: 1️⃣ At Neotribe, we’re looking for breakthrough technologies 2️⃣ If you’re sending a cold email, you need to grab the reader’s attention, and fast 3️⃣ Focus on product market fit with the investor, not just with the customer. Make sure to ask what the investor is looking for 4️⃣ I’ve never decided to invest in a company during an initial presentation. We take our time and do our due diligence. We’re investing in something that is so important in the founders’ lives, and we take that very seriously. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/g__aYCmm

Landing page exploration for Unthink! Context: Unthink is an abstract brand powering a community of founders, and startup owners in AI-related fields. What could be better? What do you like best? I might double down on this and make it into another case study!

I've been quiet the past few months on LinkedIn and here is why: We've not had the progress on our product(s) we were hoping for that you may see on the outside from other startups. When product is the thing you are responsible for, take pride on as your "specialty", work so hard on, and it seems to just keep hitting a brick wall.. What credibility do you have, to have an opinion on building anything? Even more so, presenting to others on this very topic lol.. (pictured below) Building state-of-the-art product(s) is difficult. Creating technology that hasn't been built before is difficult. Running an early-stage, deep tech startup is difficult. But, one of the most recent (of many) pieces of inspiration I got from Enzo Avigo is to be more transparent in this rollercoaster of ride they call being a founder. So embracing transparency... We've probably had 4-5 major pivots in the past year. Due to certain circumstances, we've had to go back to the technical drawing board at least twice. We've not had any true public releases. Don't worry, this isn't a "waiving the white flag" post. Our incredibly talented team is still working extremely hard on some awesome things that I'm really excited about to share about in the future. The problem worth solving hasn't changed, just finding the best "how" doesn't happen without a bunch of failure first. This post is just more accountability on my part to put my ego aside and accept failure better, publicly. As a friendly reminder, check-in on your founder friend and ask how they are actually doing, especially when they give you their "go-to" answer they give everyone. "The most basic advice to founders is "just don't die," but the energy to keep a company going in lieu of unburdening success isn't free; it is siphoned from the founders themselves." - Paul Graham #startuplife #product #founderjourney #aiandml