BRYCE DOT VC

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Questions Worth Asking

That number. I hadn’t seen that number pop up on my phone in years. 12 years to be exact. I’ve thought a lot about the conversation I had the last time that number popped up on my phone. I can still remember where I was standing, the time of day and the way the air felt on my skin as I sat on the stoop in front of my house as I answered that call. It was the fall of 2005 and we were in the final…

OATV and Indie.vc

Around this time last year, Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal did a profile on the experiment we were running with Indie.vc . Buried in the piece was a mention of a new fund we’d closed to continue iterating on the experiment. That’s the only mention of the new fund. In the proceeding months since his piece, it has become clear to me that there’s still some confusion…

Friend or Financier?

The biggest mistakes I make as a VC come when the emotions of friendship cloud the realities of being a financier. That’s an easy line to blur when your business is based on personal relationships with founders and instinctual investments. At the earliest stages, when there’s little, if any, meaningful data on which to anchor a decision, an affirmative answer to the question of “is this someone I…

What Are You For?

Today feels like the golden age of being Anti something. If my Twitter feed is any indication, there is literally no end to what people are being Anti of Anti Trump. Anti Hillary Anti Fox News. Anti CNN. Anti Bay Area. Anti New York Anti Wal Mart. Anti Juicero. Literally no end. Indie.vc has even been described as Anti-VC. We aren’t anti-VC, we’re for profitability and all the freedom that comes…

The Time Thief

Amy Krouse Rosenthal died yesterday . I don’t know her, but I cried when I read the dating profile she wrote for her soon to be widowed husband. Like, big ugly cried. I can count the number of times I’ve cried as an adult on one hand. Well maybe I’d need to borrow a few fingers, but the point is I rarely ever cry. Maybe its because my wife is out of town and I miss the mornings with her after the…

Living Above the Store

In another life I will come back as a chef with a small restaurant in a little village with less than 10 seats inside and a quaint patio outside. Word of my talents will spread far and wide and people will come from the furthest corners of the earth to sit and sample and soak in the special little space we’ll create. Until then, I’ll watch Chef’s Table on Netflix. There are so many wonderful…

My First Lyft Ride

Over the years I’ve used Uber 600+ times and spent 10s of thousands of dollars with them. I am neither an Uber apologist nor critic, but I did something today I’ve never done. I used Lyft. I have actively disliked Lyft since the get go. The fist bumps, the pink mustaches, the overly friendly drivers. Not my style. The choice today was not made lightly. But it was revealing. I remember back when…

If You Don't Know How Much You Need the Default is Always "More"

“What’s your end game?”, I asked This particular founder had just raised a mid eight figure round of funding. And, after hearing about struggles with their board, struggles with the new investors and watching their ownership drop from mid double digit percentages to high single digits I couldn’t help but wonder. What’s your end game? Seemingly surprised, the founder shot back that this round was a…

One (round) and Done

Just as we’re running out of derivatives for “seed” and letters in the alphabet there’s a new funding trend emerging. Call it Bootstrap+, Fundstrapping or Series 1 and done, there seems to be a move towards simplifying the various funding schemes and getting down to the business of building a real business. In their funding announcement last week, the Text IQ team was careful to note their…

Helluva Lifestyle Business You Got There

Unicorns and venture capital go hand in horn. Or so the story goes. Have a billion dollar idea, raise a little bit of money, show a little traction, raise a lot more money. Rinse and repeat. You can’t compete with out it! They say. You can’t scale without it! They say. Weaponized balance sheets have become the competitive strategy of this anabolic age. Anything less makes for a less ambitious…

Lessons Learned From a Million Miles and 5 Kids

It was super early and I was still waking up and maybe I was a little grumpy but seriously why was this flight attendant being so nice to me? They had way too much energy and knew way too much about me to be so in my face at 5am. “This is a big day for you today isn’t it Mr. Roberts?” Um. Sure? Silence fell over the cabin as the Captain saddled up to my arm rest. A firm handshake and a few awkward…

Funding Independent Alternatives

A few weeks back, I was sitting at the counter of a local coffee shop waiting for my meeting to show up. As I sat, I overheard a conversation between the owner and a prospective vendor. The meeting ended with the vendor going in for the close. And their tactic struck me. “We’re a small family owned business. We only work with a small number of customers so we can provide them the absolute highest…

A 12 Step Program for Breaking An Addiction to Venture Capital

Venture Capital is a hell of a drug . At Indie.vc we’ve developed a simple 12 step program for those of you looking to break the habit in 2017: Step 1- We admitted that we are powerless over VC’s partnership dynamics, tastes in trends, and their ever moving milestones—and that trying to time, or anticipate, them will make our lives, and the lives of our customers and employees unmanageable. Step…

Meaningful Exits for Founders

For an industry that doesn’t do it for the money, we sure talk about money an awful lot in the world of startups. A few posts were written this past week diving deeper into the numbers that drive VC returns which, in turn, drive behavior in startups who’ve raised money from VCs. One post , written by Samuel Gil , outlined what is considered a meaningful exit for VCs. According to Sam’s math, a…

When Your Customer is VCs, Your Product is the Stock

There’s an exchange in Season 2′s final episode of HBO’s SIlicon Valley that I haven’t been able to shake. After deciding to change the focus of the business, Richard confronts Action Jack, the CEO installed by the board, about the compromises that are being made to the product to fit their new focus on the enterprise market. The following exchange ensues: Jack Barker: Do you know what Pied…

Every Business is a Lifestyle Business

As we walked around the block, away from the team and the screens in the office, the founder started to open up: “In the last year I’ve gained 20lbs, I’ve stopped exercising, I’m basically living at the office, not seeing my family, I’ve never been so stressed in my life.” The t-shirt was definitely tighter and the bags under the eyes were definitely bigger than they were just a year earlier.…

You Don’t Need a Master Plan You Just Need to Start

Startups are overdosing on ambition these days. Everything has be a billion dollar idea that changes the world or it isn’t worth doing. These days, even a billion doesn’t seem to be enough : I’ve probably sat in on eight unicorn presentations [recently], and five of them use the world ‘trillion.’ Now I don’t think I had heard the word trillion in an investor presentation before…

Unicorns Are Eating Seed Investing

We recently celebrated our 10yr anniversary at OATV. Over a decade ago, seed investing was such a new idea that it took nearly 2yrs of pitching potential investors to get our first fund off the ground. We were one of the first 5 institutional seed funds (there actually wasn’t a clear name for what it was we were doing, but we always stuck with and promoted “seed” as our prefered name). Today,…

The Realities of Rocket Fuel

Details are still coming in on the specifics around yesterday’s explosion of the SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle. Here’s what we do know from the company’s own press release: At approximately 9:07am ET, during standard pre-launch static fire test for the AMOS-6 mission, there was an anomaly at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral space launch complex 40 resulting in the loss of the vehicle. The anomaly…