Iterative Ventures is a group of ex-Facebook/Meta entrepreneurs based in the San Francisco Bay Area, focused on investing in and developing frontier technologies.

Iterative Ventures

We are a community for former and current Facebook/ Meta employees supporting entrepreneurship as founders, investors, and advisors. We invest in strong companies from the FB alumni and affiliated network and support founders by providing intellectual resources, advisory, and a strong network of FB alumni.

We thank Kasey Kyungsil Roh and Mark Kim for speaking with us last Friday on how to engage with venture capital firms and investors!

In the talk, both of the speakers gave great insights on how to build relationships as well as how to pique VC's interest for eventual fundraising and company building.

Specifically, the key component here is to engage VCs not in a manner of going straight for fundraising but to seek feedback and use the chance to potentially paint the massive opportunities at hand.

Additionally, it's important to do background research into what every investment partner is interested in investing by looking at their recent investments as well as any blogs or articles published to get a better understanding.

In the end, it is in a founder's best interest to conduct thorough research and find the right investors to get the best result. On the other hand, the right investor can provide valuable support. Samsung, for example, would provide spots at tradeshows through their partnerships and other marketing partners to help spread brand awareness beyond just capital deployment.

#startup #venturecapital #fundraising

We thank Yun-Fang Juan, Nick Bilogorskiy 🇺🇦, and David Swafford for speaking with Iterative Ventures' incubator and sharing insights on their experience with angel investing as well as their support for founders!

During the talk, the panelists shared how they evaluate projects and opportunities as well as the various benefits of working with angels such as access to the network (Nick Bilogorskiy 🇺🇦 is the founder of Nova Ukraine and Yun-Fang Juan was an early Facebooker building the ads engine and exchange) and advisory with industry expertise (eg. David Swafford has a background in network engineering).

Additionally, the panelists universally advised that in times like this where fundraising is harder, traction, such as revenue and user growth are paramount for fundraising.

It also comes down to articulating the uniqueness of your own background and project to demonstrate founder-product-market fit whether that is technological innovation or market access.

#angelinvesting #fundraising #startup

We thank Vinay Jain, co-founder of Sesame Labs, for speaking with our incubator cohort on early-stage fundraising.

In the session, Vinay Jain laid out the perspectives on what makes for a compelling pitch as follows:
- There is a universal and urgent problem. In the case of Sesame Labs, it's that dApps can't run ads effectively on web2 platforms like Twitter.
- Clear definition of addressable market.
- Validating customer interest: sharing your customer interview findings speaks volumes to the problem you discovered.
- Founder market fit: why your team is best suited to tackle this problem

Additionally, Vinay Jain also spoke about the fundraising gameplan as follows:
- Soft-pitch to other founders and investor friends as a way to practice and prepare your data room to make sure all of the docs are ready for due diligence
- Securing your term sheet and narrowing down the target investors as you make progress. In this, Vinay suggested that one should not worry too much about valuation nor commit to a timeline just yet.
- Once you are getting strong interest from target VCs, that's when you start pushing for a timeline.

With this, Vinay Jain mentioned that early-stage fundraising is 90% about the problem and 10% about the product.

VCs investing in early stage care more about how well a founder can discover problems and opportunities.

#startup #fundraising

We'd like to thank James Wong for speaking with us on how to build a founding team!

During the talk, James Wong shared his experience on how he got started with XP Health and the various pivots that he had to go through.

James recommended in searching for a co-founder, one should look for:
- Complementary experiences and skillsets. At least one of the founders should have a founder market fit.
- Working effectively as a team. How do you test for this? Work together for a few weeks to test out the vibe. A question to ask here is how both of you work together to solve a problem and deal with a difficult situation. More specifically, how do you handle disagreement?
- Why is the person starting a company? What does he or she care about? Is there a broader mission that this individual is striving for? (https://lnkd.in/gtGa4Jc9)

The reason why James recommended these considerations is because startups will encounter a lot of pivots and uncertainties and the ability to deal with such is key to a company's survival James Wong also shared the story of how he had to trim down the team to ensure the survival of the company (always a difficult decision).

Our next topic will be about fundraising. Keep iterating 💪

#startup #foundingteam #cofounder #entrepreneurship

Here's our more in-depth write-up on the last two sessions: https://lnkd.in/gqmqfJH4

We want to thank Product Leader and Zing Data founder Zack Hendlin for speaking with our incubator on Figuring out what to build & and finding product market fit!

In the workshop, Zack Hendlin shared extremely valuable insights on ways to build conviction as well as a systemic process to validate ideas with various questions to ask such as:

- Is X a problem for you?
- Why is X a problem for you?
- What would it mean to you if you could solve this?
- How urgent is the priority?

etc.

Oftentimes in conducting user interviews, especially for folks who are doing this for the first time, founders may mistake "good vibes" and "feel good" responses as validation.

Good vibes are good, but it's a long way out from monetization and actually creating a business.

In sharing his experience, Zack Hendlin related to his experience in taking up Zing Data through meetings with executives who wanted to have data ready at their fingertips to roll out to customers who are not in front of their computers and in need of real-time and quick data.

Be like Zack Hendlin who is relentless in figuring out customer needs and tirelessly executes to deliver.

Keep iterating.

And as always, we’d love to thank our sponsor Jonathan Chan and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for hosting us!

#startup #pmf #entrepreneurship #product

Iterative Ventures Incubator Lift-off!

We are excited about last Friday's incubator kick-off!

In this cohort, we've received more than 50 applications and have admitted around 10 teams.

In the next 10 weeks, we will have workshops led by ex-Meta founders and industry leaders who will go over the fundamentals of how to get a startup off the ground including how to build an MVP, how to find a co-founder, how to form a business model, etc.

At Iterative, we will also work assiduously with founders on their pitch decks in preparation for the demo day at the end of the program.

Also major thanks to Philip Fung for sharing his experience as an early Facebook employee (#15) to starting various companies including chatbot, blood tests, etc. As Philip Fung says - grit is ALL that matters. If you dedicate yourself to any field for 2 years, you'll become an expert. The key is to survive.

As what we say back at Facebook - This Journey is 1% done.

Ps. Thanks Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Jonathan Chan for hosting us!

#kickoff #incubator #startup

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Iterative Ventures