VC AMA with Eliot Durbin, boldstart ventures

Eliot Durbin serves as General Partner at boldstart ventures, currently splitting his time between Miami and NYC. With a professional career starting from his teenage years, successfully exiting his first company 2 years after leaving school, VC was a nature calling for the tech enthusiast.

A conversation on the topic of raising finance was hosted by Ali Goldstein Norup, the Head of VC & Startup Ecosystem in America for Google Cloud. While I’m certain that this “AMA”, was pre-recorded, making the format feel a little forced, the fast-paced conversation did deliver a load of value.

Below follows my notes of key soundbites from the discussion. I’m not going to labour everything in to a prose, for I think that the key takeaways should be easily digestible.

It was reassuring to have so many of my personal understandings reframed or validated by such experienced engineers and business builders. I left the conversation optimistic with ideas and ambitions...

Takeaways

Your pitch should be: “I build this prototype and got 10 users”.

Be patient in seeking an investor that understands what you are doing and gives you time to figure things out. They should help you discover Options and find Leverage.

What are the signals for when you are a ready to scale?

• Founder should be pinned to back of the seat
• Core team should all be pinned to back of the seat
• Two modes when starting up:
  1. Building first version
  2. Building tools for scaling
• Day 0 is User narratives and dashboards, not a Company
• Always “Product First”

What should the early culture be at a startup?

• “Culture of demo” - even if it’s not real or doesn’t work, produce the idea
• Always listen: Users will feedback and tell you how to bring a product to market
• Get the User right first, then translate that into a Budget
• “It’s the Total Addressable Market (TAM) you exit with, not the TAM you start with”
• Investment allows startups to hire a team (and reach better hires earlier)

How should my startup make an early impact?

• Create effective messaging
• Excite with new category creation/category disruption
• Build a community and culture around the startup
• Find focused folks to help with specific problems
• Get going early into the ecosystem
• “Nail it then scale it” — avoid premature scaling in wrong direction
• Tailor your language: Instead of “Marketplace for space”, simplify: “Rent out your spare room” for best effect

How should my startup be operating?

• Live and feel the pain point in order to experience user empathy
• Customer obsession until they would desperately miss if you disappear
• Get to what matters really quickly
• Act fast with either a “Fast No” or “Fast Yes” — no prolonged meetings
• Generate failures and tests in advance, with “Robots as a Service”

How do I financing my scaling startup?

• Best resource is someone who has first-hand experience: find a founder who has already raised
• Money can solve demand, but evidence reaching that demand before seeking money
• Non-obvious businesses can be difficult to raise for - can take a long time to reach marketplace acceptance (5+ seed rounds over many years)

Where should I focus new ideas?

• New sectors that are here to stay: Remote work, distributed teams, video conferencing, etc.

"Developer-first is one of the most important sectors out there"

Eliot Durbin