It’s been five years now since large VC ‘signaling’ entered the seed stage entrepreneur’s lexicon.  Yet even today, whether or not to take a (relatively) small check in a seed round syndicate from a multi-hundred million or even billion dollar fund is still a decision which takes quite a bit of consideration and sometimes consternation.  […]

Just about fifteen years ago, Josh Schanker and I, along with our co-founders Elliot Shmukler and Tammy O’Neil Bolduc started Sombasa Media together.  Our company offered a series of consumer-facing properties, including our flagship property BargainDog, which was an early e-commerce daily deals email newsletter.  Over the course of a couple short years, we grew […]

Rob, Lee, and I couldn’t be more excited to share that as of Monday, Jay Acunzo has joined NextView as our Director of Platform and Community. Jay joins us from HubSpot, where he was a senior manager on the marketing team, specifically leading the blog and content strategy. In his Boston-based career, he’s also worked […]

A couple years ago, my partner Lee penned a blog post about the milestone benchmarks for startups raising a Series A round of financing.  The five conditions for a Series A financing which he enumerated are: a core team ready to scale, demonstrable market size, repeatable cost effective customer acquisition, metric momentum, and plausible monetization. […]

Fairly often entrepreneurs will pitch investing in their seed-stage company, and it starts sounding great… interesting market… great team… notable early traction… until we arrive at the financials + fundraising slide and the projections state that this round of Seed financing is planned to be their last. Sometimes it’s even presented as an additional feature […]

My partner Rob wrote bit more on his blog about our motivations for adding our first new team member at NextView Ventures — a Director of Platform and Community.  All three of us are excited to expand our efforts and are currently in the process of seeking an exceptional individual to fill a unique role […]

I’ve commonly heard entrepreneurs recite some version of “I don’t want to waste too much time fundraising because it will distract me from building my business, so I’ll only talk to a few potential funders.”  The idea is that a couple of highly-qualified VC conversations will follow the 80/20 rule of a “good enough” financing […]

My partners and I at NextView talk a lot about how fundraising is about finding the true believers rather than convincing the skeptics.  The energy that it takes persuading someone who starts with a bias not to invest is much better suited searching for additional prospects who want to believe in what you’re building.  We’ve […]

Recently, we surveyed our Boston-based NextView portfolio Founder/CEOs asking them about which service provider firms they’ve been using. The goal was to assemble data in order to share it back to our portfolio companies (especially the newer ones) so that they didn’t have to recreate the wheel in determining a short-list of firms to talk […]

Mobile is changing the world. As a startup-tech industry, we’ve been talking about it coming right around the corner for well over a decade. And now, it’s actually happening. Really happening. I am not going to spend time in a blog post detailing figures & charts about this mega-trend which will astound you, despite the […]