AngelList’s Post

Corporate innovators: Have you ever built and launched a new product or service only to realize it's not what your users/customers want? It's not easy to admit, but it happens. A lot. We get it. Building things is fun. But too often corporate innovators and business strategists end up building things people don’t need or want. There are lots of reasons why this happens. Sometimes it's because you haven't done sufficient, "boots on the ground" customer research. Luckily, we can help you with that! On July 24th, we're hosting a virtual workshop led by Senior Director, Elizabeth van Monsjou, PhD. She'll show you how to conduct scrappy user research to gather key insights, with the goal of finding problems worth solving and building better ventures, minimizing the chance that you spend lots of time and money on things that don't matter. Sign up below today: https://lnkd.in/ecC6fVE3

Social Discovery Insights is constantly on the lookout for new players, disruptive business models, and innovative technologies, in the social discovery market. In this week's roundup: The Breakfast, 222 & Wayve LLC. https://lnkd.in/eVidry_u

💥 Exciting news! We are thrilled to share that we just closed our seed round, securing $3.4 million in total funding! This injection of support will fuel our mission to empower developers in crafting high-performance Zero-Knowledge (ZK) applications effortlessly and in a flexible way. 🚄 At Hylé, we envision a future where Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are the norm, enabling truthfulness without the high costs. Our platform offers a triad of advantages: affordability, speed, and seamless finality. Developers retain the flexibility to choose execution environments, data solutions, and proof systems, all within a permissionless framework. 🙏 Huge thank you to our incredible investors who believe in our vision to redefine the landscape of ZK design. This funding round is led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Cherry Ventures, and Fabric Ventures, Frst, Heartcore Capital . Other esteemed investors include StarkWare, Uma Roy, Robin Davids, Bernard Chan, Richard Yuen, @0xkrane, Nicolas Bacca, Batuhan Dasgin. 👉 Don't forget to follow our visionary co-founders, Sylve Chevet (CEO) and Lancelot de Ferrière le Vayer (CTO), as they lead this exhilarating journey. 🔗 Want to know more? Links in the comment. cc: Cécile TREBOIT, Maximilien Grattepanche, Rajiv Patel-O'Connor, Vance Spencer, Luc de Leyritz, Patrick Mayr, Brett Sun, Max Mersch, Pierre Entremont, Yacine Ghalim

Founders Loren + Alicia share the story of how the beautiful joint venture came to be, the vision behind it, and the future of what it will be. Listen Here: https://lnkd.in/eAzn33-N

I pitched to institutional investors for my pre-seed start-up about two quarters ago. It was a phenomenal learning experience of which I derived plenty of key insights that I could incorporate to capture future realizable growth. I was quite insecure to publicize this deliverable at first, but where's the lesson learned if I don't embrace my shortcomings & make adjustments accordingly. If there's any critiques that you may have please feel free to drop them in the comments below; I'm fond of relativity, open to all acumen and interpretation. In retrospect, there's a breadth of pivots that I should've made and will make, noted below, as I continue to curate, scale, and discover product-market-fit. 1. Highlight the "shiny" product suite first; samples and beta assets will help investors visualize and expedite the consumer experience especially when in the ideation and product-development phase. 2. Proof-of-revenue and prior traction from product roll-outs will give plausible metrics to your start-up's financing needs, valuation, and financial projections. 3. Although comprehensive in essence, the pitch deck is not consumable nor suitable for contextual digestion in the time-span of the pitch. Delivery should be seamless, intuitive, and quick to appeal.

Building a brand in beauty & personal care? Prepare to get rich. Seriously. Kiva Dickinson and Madeline Kaplan’s (Selva Ventures) playbook here is simple. Identify companies that are: - solving real consumer needs, - fostering loyalty, and - attracting strategic investors in preparation for a massive liquidity event. With 2/3rds of their recent investments in this space, it's clear they are driven by high conviction. Watch the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/dHMF_Rhc

An underutilized but so! critical step that too many founders completely forego. That discovery totally blew my mind when I started digging deep in the venture space. (It also meant that my research process of (in)validation was giving our founders and the studio such a competitive advantage 💪🏽.) one day I’ll have a whole preso on this but for now… Check out the workshop 👇 and use research to your advantage.

Exciting News Ahead! Over the last few months, we took a deep dive. We have tried to solve a few problems coming up in the world. Ken Cato and I have been working hard on this project. We can't wait to share it with you. Our new venture will change how you approach life and business. This venture aims to make a big difference. It will address some of the challenges we face today. I believe it can bring positive change to many people. Stay tuned for more updates. I will share more details soon. Exciting times ahead! Bullet form summary ↳ Deep dive over the last few months ↳ Excited to share the new venture

Friends, #ICYMI Bethnal Green Ventures' impact report is out. It's possibly our most unusual but hugely impressive #ImpactReport to date (fair to say I'm biased), as my colleague Yumi T., who penned the report, packed all of our collective learnings about impact measurement and management and how we run and operate at BGV into one fantastic report. The foreword from BGV's Managing Partners Paul Miller OBE and Melanie Hayes detailing BGV's own quest to raise a bigger fund to invest in the best 100 tech for good startups over the next four years puts BGV's journey to date into very compelling words -"Fundraising teaches you many things – like what it is you truly stand for." Anyone you speak to going through the motions of raising for their business, be it founders, VCs or LPs themselves, might resonate with the sentiment that it also gives you such clarity as to what matters most. Last year, we didn't make any programme-stage investment, whilst we were raising our funds, but doubled down on deploying capital into existing portfolio companies, supporting founders with research into the angel investing landscape and various events, and focused on ensuring that founders from all walks of life can find pathways to access VC capital (even if it might not be from us). I'm incredibly proud of what our team, small but mighty, achieved in the last year, and I hope you'll enjoy reading up on our portfolio companies' positive impact on people and the planet as well. *TL;DR - Key highlights from our investments in 2023* - 2 exits - £70M further investment raised by our portfolio companies - 18M lives positively impacted by our portfolio companies - 64p of every £1 invested by BGV went into all-women teams, with 22p going to mixed-gendered teams and 14p into all-men teams - 33% of portfolio companies believe they wouldn't exist without BGV. For more stats and insights (especially the impact deep dives of our portfolio companies Head Set Immersive, Aparito and LettUs Grow), check our report linked below 👇🏾

Sometimes it's easy to forget as an early-stage founder that VCs aren't investing in you to build a business. At the earliest stages, they're really investing in you to build a *market testing machine*, one that can work its way through unmet demand, fragmented supply, and to find the right combination of model, technology and acquisition approach to suddenly untap a huge amount of value. It's only *then* that you build out the business, as quickly as possible, to deliver that value at scale. Half of the fun (and difficulty!) is knowing which stage you're in, especially as it can all come together so quickly!