BC IDEAS
Saved by @AnmolNarula11

The cold hard truth:

Why do companies like Quibi raise billions, while companies like Peloton get nothing?

Because fundraising is a GAME

And the insiders keep the rules to themselves.

Here are 100 tips the insiders don’t want you to see but will help you win the game:

 1. You can’t play the game without nailing the basics.

There are 5 core ingredients to a startup pitch.

Most have 2.
Good ones have 4.
The best have all 5.

https://t.co/fqGl1yC7F2
2. Now that you have a grasp of the basics, it’s time to level up.

Good news - most founders make the same mistakes as each other.

Bad news - these mistakes are really easy to make.

Here's what not to do:

https://t.co/bd6hyZngeJ
3. Ok so you told me what not to do.

So what should I do?

Read below.

https://t.co/YmJpDZSuN6
4. We’re in a really unique fundraising environment right now.

It’s important to contextualize all these tips in the “here and now” of what’s going on in the landscape.

https://t.co/R1L2ysYKU8
5. Once of the coolest things that has come out of fundraising in 2021 is equity crowdfunding.

There's been major regulatory change and this is going to be a gamechanger for startups.

https://t.co/enx8oOgYXl
6. For the life of me I don't understand why VCs make Founders pay the bill for fundraising paperwork.

Some VCs have changed this behavior, but most haven't.

In case you have to pay, don't get swindled.

Here's how to reduce your legal bill by 80%+:

https://t.co/3dHknrFJoE
7. Aside from your own fundraise, if you're interested in angel investing, it breaks down into 3 distinct steps.

Internalize all 3 of these and then have a strategy for each:

https://t.co/HyAkGyEtuf
8. I've invested a few million over the past year.

It's humbling, exciting and anxiety inducing all in one.

If you're interested in angel investing (or a Founder that wants to see how an Angel "thinks"), here are some hard earned lessons:

https://t.co/foQoFviRw1
9. Finally (and selfishly), here's what I'm personally most excited about in 2021.

If you're building in any of these areas, I'd love to chat:

https://t.co/VqQRdOmf9d
10. If you enjoyed this thread, give me a follow

➡️@romeensheth⬅️

And if you have any questions on any of the topics above, DM me.

I’ll answer the first 50 questions I get over the next few hours.

More from Romeen Sheth

Romeen Sheth
Romeen Sheth
@RomeenSheth
This week I interviewed someone who:

- Built a $1.5B company as COO
- Sold a $1B company to Microsoft
- Invested in 25 🦄🦄🦄🦄

Here’s 10 timeless lessons from one of the greatest tech entrepreneurs of our generation:

is a legend and man of many titles:

Founder, Executive, Investor, Coach, Filmmaker.

He’s also a down to earth guy that’s incredibly generous with his time.

This convo was a follow on from a dialogue we started earlier this year.

Alright...onto the lessons:

Lesson #1: Startups should NOT “do things that don’t scale”

The whole point of technology is to find an elegant, scalable approach.

The sooner you do that, the better off you are.

When you glorify doing things that don’t scale, you end up with a startup that doesn’t scale.

Lesson #2: You can’t do it alone, no matter how great you are.

To win big, surround yourself with:

A. Other greats
B. Role players
C. A system that brings out the best in everyone.

All three of these are equally important and allow organizations to thrive.

Lesson #3: Silicon Valley is no longer a place. It’s a way of doing business

20 years ago SV was the home for innovation.

Today it's now spread to many other places.

Risk Capital + Knowledge + Support = a more inclusionary and global ecosystem.

That's a great thing.
ALL
Romeen Sheth
Romeen Sheth
@RomeenSheth
The ultimate hack to 10x your career:

Enter the Side Door.

Let's break it down 👇👇👇

Let’s set the stage. Imagine you’re in college and it’s Friday night.

It’s been a long week and it’s the party of the year at the local bar.

Awesome - you’re all set to go.

You get there and run into a huge problem.

There’s a massive line outside.

You do what most people do.

You stand in line in the freezing cold for an hour.

You’re tense and starting to worry.

You frantically call a friend of yours who managed to get in.

- Is there room inside?
- Any way you can talk to the bouncer for me?
- Is my (questionable...at best) ID going to get me in?

You leave your destiny up to the fate of the universe.

This is what most people do with their careers.

They take the front door AKA they do what everyone else is doing.

And what happens?

Well they get the same results as most people.

It’s hard to stand out and get the job you want.
ALL
Advertisement
Romeen Sheth
Romeen Sheth
@RomeenSheth
There’s a lot of bad advice out there on how to pitch your startup.

Last year, I invested $1M+ and heard 200 companies pitch.

Every great pitch I've heard nails 5 ingredients.

In this thread, we'll go through each to help maximize your chances when fundraising

Let's dig in👇


1/ Every pitch should have 5 ingredients:

- Problem: Is this an issue
- Solution: Do you have the fix
- Market: Is this a big enough issue
- Business: Can you make money
- Team: Are you the people to do it

The best pitches nail all 5. Good ones hit 4. Subpar hit 3 or less.

2/ PROBLEM

The problem statement is an explanation of why a set of circumstances is painful for a set of users.

There’s one word in that sentence that is most important: painful.

If your problem is not painful enough, it's a vitamin.

The best startups are pain killers.


3/ SOLUTION

The solution statement is an explanation of how you address the pain felt by your users. If you don’t have the right solution, you won’t get customer traction.

Customers don’t buy your thesis on the pain point. They buy the actual thing that solves their pain point.


4/ MARKET

In tech, only businesses that have outsized potential get funded.

To have outsized potential, you have to either be in a:

(a) small, but rapidly growing market or
(b) large existing market that can be resegmented

If not, the business is not venture backable.
ALL
Romeen Sheth
Romeen Sheth
@RomeenSheth
Hot Take:

The metaverse is going to make everything more extreme.

Here’s how the world is about to go on tilt and what it means for you 👇👇👇

My friend @ShaanVP had an awesome thread on the metaverse a few weeks ago.

He set a clear, understandable definition of the metaverse:

The metaverse is a time, not a place.

It’s when our digital life is more important than our physical life.

If you believe in that definition (I do), then it pushes an interesting second order question.

What happens when that shift occurs?

I think everything gets a lot more extreme.

Why?

The world doesn’t get any bigger, but our surface area of exposure increases exponentially.

We have more insight and visibility into everything that’s going on.

This will put more pressure on the proverbial pressure cooker.

Here are 10 examples:

1. Opportunity

As more economic activity moves online, constraints and barriers go away.

You can be 10,000 miles away and considered as a candidate for a job.

Measurement pushes away from inputs (politics, facetime) to outputs (deliverables).
METAVERSE
Romeen Sheth
Romeen Sheth
@RomeenSheth
0/ If you’re an SMB operator and want to increase the value of your business, focus on 2 things above all else.

1. EBITDA: how much $ do you make
2. Risk: how reliable is the $ you make

Enough has been written about #1. Here are 5 things you can do to tackle #2:

[THREAD]

1/ All 5 of these tactics are a function of the same guiding principle:

Spend more time working ON the business, not IN the business.

Your job as CEO is to consistently:

- Identify opportunity
- Execute once
- Set process
- Delegate
- Fire yourself

With that said…

2/ Establish your focus

Most SMBs survive in the early days through 1-2 key customers.

If you do a good job, they'll give you more business.

That's the trap.

If it's not in your core focus, resist the urge.

If you don't you'll become a consulting firm for 1 customer.

3/ Eliminate Key Man Risk

SMBs are overly reliant on a small handful of individuals to run the operation.

Implication: Most knowledge about the business sits in the heads of a few people.

Take the time to develop strong Tier 2 management - this creates redundancy in the org

4/ Institute Operating Process

Strong Tier 2 management isn't good enough. You need knowledge to live in docs and systems, not just in brains.

Every dept should have a stand alone playbook.

An easy test: "how quickly can somebody that knows nothing about the dept. plug in?"
BUSINESS

More from Ideas

ishmohit
ishmohit
@ishmohit1
The secret to understand competitive dynamics in gold finance is to focus on the player which has approvals from Rbi to set up more than 2000 branches and not the ones which are facing difficulties in expanding. You know who the real challenger to Muthoot will be
IDEAS
Sneh Kagrana
Sneh Kagrana
@sneh_kagrana
The opportunity in US Equity Markets is huge and at the same time, it is getting easier for Indians to invest in the US markets.

Here is a summary of 10 companies I follow and what they do:

1/ Roblox:

$RBLX is a gaming platform where users can create games and monetize them by charging “Robux”. Kind of Youtube for Games. Users also spend money buying tickets to events, gaming avatars, etc.

DAUs: 42M
Average Bookings per DAU: $15.48
FCF (TTM): $518M
MCap: $50B

2/ Crowdstrike:

$CRWD, currently valued at $57B is a cybersecurity company. ‘Falcon’ is a cloud-native platform and uses AI to detect threats. Collects More Data - More Learning - Better Detection & Protection. It can protect your laptop as well as devices running on IoT


3/ Alibaba:

$BABA is a group of Chinese E-Com marketplaces and businesses. Its 2 primary marketplaces - TMall [like Amazon (B2C)] & Taobao [like eBay (C2C)], have 800M+ annual active users. Apart from this, it also has a Cloud business.

Mobile MAUs: 925M
Ecosystem GMV: $1.2T

4/ UiPath

$PATH aims at automating the mundane tasks at the workplace and thereby save on time and productivity. Say you have an invoice in PDF format, UiPath will read it and capture the date, amount, category etc and enter the data in your database.

ARR - $653M
MCap - $35B
IDEAS
Advertisement
Intrinsic Compounding
Intrinsic Compounding
@soicfinance
Tomorrow at 11am on our Youtube channel. Have simplified it to an extent that even a 5th Grader understands the key terms 🙏

Link🎥
https://t.co/AKBBNV6N49
IDEAS
Sid \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Sid 🇮🇳...
@resilience1011
@_soniashenoy TPG is looking at a floor of 5x-6x returns 😌

@_soniashenoy Here’s what TPG’s investment brings in (1/2):
a. A much-needed longer runway
b. Strong governance and no-slack attitude
c. Push to get the EV strategy right - start transitioning from buy and assemble to a build in-house model
d. De-risking the existing business
IDEAS
Dinesh Sairam
Dinesh Sairam
@Dinesh_Sairam
This thread is for investors or those who are interested in CDSL as an investment. Often the central reason quoted for an investment here is the gush of FCF the business produces and some float money also to boot. But this argument ignores a central problem as well. (1/11)

I completely agree that CDSL is a business that produces ample amount of Free Cash. So, it begs the question: "What are they doing with all that cash?" Generally, firms can utilize the cash on their books in 4 ways: Dividends, Acquisitions, Capex/Investments and Buybacks. (2/11)

CDSL does have a Dividend Payout Ratio of ~35-40%. But Dividends are the least efficient way of utilizing cash, due to the Triple Taxation on Dividends. More

Handled well, Inorganic Growth is so lucrative that some companies build their business models around acquisitions (Say, MSSL or Cyient). However, CDSL literally CAN'T be one such company. Read 7 (c) of the below regulatory document to know more:

https://t.co/071lwnnwJ4

(4/11)


CDSL can also reinvest cash into their own business, like most companies do. But CDSL (And most Exchanges) have little need for Capex/Reinvestment. CDSL's IPO came in at Rs. 523.99 Crores. Two years in, the Cash and Investments on their books stands at Rs. 650 Crores. (5/11)
IDEAS

You May Also Like

Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
ADI SHANKAR AND SRI TOTAKACHARYA

Adi Shankaracharya chose his disciple Totakacharya to be the first head of the Math at Joshimath.
The Narsingh Mandir (Mandir of Sri Narasimha) in Joshimath is one of the 108 Divyadesams and also the home of Badrinath during the winter months.


Totakacharya was earlier a boy named ‘Giri’ and a devout disciple of Adi Shankaracharya. Unlike others, he was not known to be an expert in Shastras but his dedication to his Guru was complete and he used to listen to His discourses with utmost faith and devotion.
@SriRamya21


One morning as Adi Shankara and his disciples were getting ready for the discourse, Giri was delayed. The other disciples urged their Guru to commence the lesson on Bramhsutra Bhashya telling him that Giri would anyway not be able to comprehend its deep meaning.
@RajeAiyer


Adi Shankar responded “नायमात्मा प्रवचनेन लभ्यो न मेधया” – Atman cannot be attained through discourses or mere intellect.
He,then, awakened the supreme knowledge in Giri.
Giri spontaneously composed: श्री शङ्करदेशिकाष्टकम् extolling his Guru’s grace.


Adi Shankaracharya granted sanyasa to Giri and gave him the name Totakacharya.
The story of how Giri became Totakacharya is a great example of the importance of faith and devotion in your Guru and not the mere knowledge of the Shastras.
@DetheEsha
ALL
Aditya Todmal
Aditya Todmal
@AdityaTodmal
A Thread on the Boss himself @Mitesh_Engr

Mitesh Sir's Positional Option Selling 101:

• How to find direction
• Which options to sell
• How to deploy capital
• Exit criteria
• What ROI he targets weekly
• What % risk he takes

Done with the help of @niki_poojary


How @Mitesh_Engr Sir finds the direction?

• Daily charts S/R
• 75 min charts S/R
• Intraday trend
• Always play directional
• Never trades in strategies


Which options to sell in weekly expiry according to @Mitesh_Engr?

• Weekly candle High/Low
• Sell 1% away options from those
• Exit when levels breached


Position Sizing by @Mitesh_Engr Sir.

How to deploy your capital?

• First sell 20%
• Pyramid the next day
• When to exit
• What to do when view goes wrong
• What to do with idle capital


Some important tweets of @Mitesh_Engr Sir

• What Data to look at
• ROI for safe players per month
• Max risk per day
• Gather knowledge and play directional
• Never play strategies
OPTIONS LEARNING , ALL , MPLEARNINGS
Advertisement
Julien \U0001f332
Julien 🌲
@julien
1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did.

This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.

2/ I remember being 26 and writing about reading 52 books a year. I wrote blog posts about it. They got copied. It became "a thing." Now it's in Twitter bios. It looks impressive but it's insanely useless and I shouldn't have done it.

3/ what I should have known at that time is that only young idiots like myself, with no accomplishments, find list of tiny achievements impressive. Anyone who has actually done anything of substance doesn't gaf

4/ what is actually difficult, and worthwhile, instead is to do ONE single thing for a very, very long time. It's much harder and much rarer and results in outlier outcomes much more often.

Of course you can find this out too late if you are chasing the dragon of Ted talks etc

5/ if I had only worked on a startup for a year, I would've gotten nowhere, the same way that if you lift for 3 months, it achieves nothing. Everything good in life comes from perseverance, but at the beginning, you're just like "I need to be somebody!!!"
LIFE
Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
HORANADU ANNAPOORNESHWARI, CHIKMAGALUR (KAR)
#bharatmandir

Annapoorneshwari is the Devi of nutrition and food. The literal meaning of Annapoorneshwari is “Feeding one and all”. Anyone who comes here is offered meals and shelter within the premises.
@LostTemple7


Maharshi Agastya is believed to have done pratishtha here.

Once, Shiva and Parvati had an argument. Shiva declared everything in the world including food to be Maya or illusion. To prove him wrong, Devi Parvati disappeared resulting in entire Earth becoming still.


Taking pity, Devi appeared as Annapoorna and relieved everyone.
Another belief is that once Shiva beheaded Brahma and his skull got stuck in Shiva’s hand. He was cursed that till the skull is not full of food or grains, it will remain stuck to his hands.


Shiva went everywhere and asked for food but the skull was never full. He finally came here and Maa Annapoorna filled the skull with grains and reversed Shiva’s curse.

It is believed that who ever visits Devi Annapoorna here will never be without food in their lives.
ALL
Enigma
Enigma
@ainittomai
On December 25 Mr Pool retweeted August 16 message about the Phoenix and that the worst was still on the horizon to come. 1/*


Maybe now we can assume that November 3 message meant "FUD" nor "FUN". Putting the word in capital letters seems to indicate the aspect the word fud has in our space, FUD. 2/*


Brad started it on December 22 (1/3 posts (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 3/*


And immediately the SEC followed dropping the bomb (1.3 billions (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 4/*


FUD materializes, Bitstamp is one of the first that haltes XRP trading and so on. 5/*
FOR LATER READ