I am lucky enough to attend a forum of chairs and directors from deep tech startup companies. Each month we extract from our collective som new ideas to improve our practice. Here are some recent ideas on board pack refinement. #1 – Consider a written narrative instead of slides. Like Amazon’s now-famous six page memos,… Read more »
Main Sequence is ‘all in’ on SXSW Sydney, co-sponsoring the 2050 stream with our friends at CSIRO, Nourish and v2food. Here’s what we will be doing during the week. Get your SXSW Badge The Main Sequence/CSIRO Lounge Throughout the week, we’ll be hanging out in our lounge on the main conference floor – Room C3.1.… Read more »
I wanted a clear, crisp manifesto on research commercialisation. Here are 13 principles for bringing big ideas into the world. We, the scientists, the inventors, the creators and the entrepreneurs, acknowledge that we live on a planet in trouble. Yet, we believe these problems can be solved with technology and human creativity. We are optimistic… Read more »
What is a founder? Generally, we mean a person who starts something. But what does it take to start something? What do founders actually do? I believe it is the behaviour of a founder that makes it possible to deliver something that most people consider impossible. In this post, I will break down those characteristics… Read more »
Venture capital can be a solo, transactional game: meeting founders, building conviction, and making a case to an investment committee before allocating capital. Some firms learn how to exploit the aggregated super-power of their whole group to discover unique investments and unlock value. What we don’t talk about enough is how the firms themselves collaborate… Read more »
Venture Science is a practice for founding and building new companies with designed advantage at the start. We’ve done this a lot at Main Sequence to create companies like v2food, Samsara Eco, Eden Brew, Endua and Quasar Sat. I’ve been using Chat GPT-4 to help me imagine new companies. Here’s how you can too. #1… Read more »
The natural flow of time in venture is towards the ‘transactional’. Without a deliberate other process, days become 30-minute zoom window slices. These become a terrible blow to big thinking because they gobble up the available time but also because: The default is ‘out’ rather than ‘in’. ‘No’ is easier than ‘yes’. Assessing/judging someone else… Read more »
I’ve always struggled to write a year in review. Not at the end of the year, at least. The end of a year tends to involve a burned-out shell with no time or energy, too busy thinking about the future to focus on the past. But it is worth a quick look. What did I… Read more »
In this essay, we are imagining a pitch from an early stage deep tech company, probably still working inside a university. An investor red flag might not be obvious to a founder. Why would it? They build up over years as signals of weakness and they are best avoided. Knowing what they are makes it possible to… Read more »
Before you start pitching, roleplay the investor perspective Pitches need to be given from the perspective of the investor. These things are too often forgotten The investor’s job is to make a financial return for their investors. They get thousands of pitches per year. This means they are distracted and also that they’ve probably heard… Read more »
Tick tock – can others hear your clock? Recently I introduced a startup to a potential investor and they followed up in 4 minutes. How a startup works with time is a clear indicator of their culture and can be an indicator of their future success. Why time matters Time is everything in a startup. The… Read more »
Do we still need startup accelerators? Were they for a point in time that has now passed? I have been designing and running accelerator programs since 2010 and believe they have been a significant contribution to the innovation system we have today. Ten years ago, few people aspired to start a company, and there was… Read more »
The hardest conversation for an early stage investor happens when you choose not to follow on in a company you have invested in. This great tension is rarely discussed but lies at the core of the founder/investor relationship. We both know that these moments of decision will come and it matters how we handle it.… Read more »
OMG, the pressure of being the founding CEO of a startup. Most people come into the role with limited experience and start the daily process of building something from nothing. The job is to learn what to do faster than the wheels can fall off. Every startup CEO feels like this. A quiet voice tells… Read more »
Welcome to our new column by Main Sequence Ventures partner Phil Morle. Every fortnight Morle will share his wisdom and insights with Startup Daily readers and also discuss it on the Startup Daily show. His first column is part of the Venture Capital Primer for Scientists series, based on hundreds of workshops he’s given during… Read more »
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