Adventures in fundland: Recent Episodes
Seed to Harvest Ventures
Welcome to Adventures in fun(d)land! We’re Victoria and Isabelle from Seed to Harvest Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage fund that invests in women identified founders of color building software enabled companies. We are product and design operators turned emerging managers and we are sharing our experience with our first fund.
Episodes air weekly and cover topics like building your deal flow pipeline, fund models, fundraising, focusing your offering, values, working with lawyers and back room admin.
Say hi, share feedback, or request a topic at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
We're kicking off a series of material that aims to demystify what it means to be an LP. Todays episode covers the basics of what it means to be a limited partner (LP) in a venture capital (VC) fund.
We cover the process of investing in a fund, including who can invest in a VC fund, what an accredited investor is, how investing in a fund works, how money is made from a fund, and the typical life cycle of VC funds. We also dive into the risks and benefits of investing in VC, how to evaluate a VC fund, and how investing in a fund can help diversify an individual's portfolio or align with other goals.
If you're interested in learning more about being an LP, join us for a virtual panel April 19th where we'll be speaking with 3 women who are sharing their experiences in becoming LPs!
Follow us onLinkedin,@sthventureson Instagram or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
In today's episode, talk about where we began, where we're at now and what we've learned since we began the fund. We're going to cover the evolution of our fund model, approach finding founders, nailing the perfect pitch, creating a killer pitch deck, and how we deal with tight deadlines and keep our LPs motivated.
Follow us onLinkedin, @sthventures on Instagram or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
Today we're talking about where we're at as a fund with data and research. Basically, the industry wants more info on diverse founders, but unfortunately, it's not something that's often collected. There's a real lack of data on Black, Latina, and women founders, as well as diversity in the tech world overall. And a lot of the research out there just forces people to pull together bits and pieces from all over the place to try and back up their ideas. So, we're discussing what data we want to collect and how we can team up with others in the ecosystem to come up with shared metrics. We want to build coalitions that can share resources and data to tackle this issue. The data we're after covers things like race/ethnicity, gender, wealth-building strategies, diversity in the C-suite and LP participation, funding rounds, traction, valuation, amount raised, time between rounds, team size and diversity, roles, and ways to create wealth.
Follow us onLinkedinor drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
Our fund has recently grown to a team of 4 (!!) and we are chatting through how that process has gone for us.
We cover:
- The challenges in knowing when to get help and being able to take action on it
- Knowing what type of help to get in an industry with wildly varying titles and roles
- How to approach onboarding new members and hiring while you're in the weeds
Follow us on Linkedin or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
We recently did a session with Bubble.io's Immerse Cohort of founders and spoke with them about how to run pilots and use early traction to tell a fundraising story. We're going to share the key points that came out of that talk for today's more founder focused episode.
We cover:
- How to set up a pilot now that I have an MVP
- What factors do I need to consider? What should I measure?
- What are markers of a successful (or unsuccessful) pilots
- Forming relationships with your first usersVC Fundraising
- What kind of traction do VCs want to see?
- How should I start building relationships with investors when I'm not yet ready to raise?
Follow us on Linkedin or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
We've recently had several conversations with investors and founders around how they prioritize their work (or not!). Today we dive into how we prioritize as a small team, process we borrow from our product development backgrounds and for founders, why it's important to be able to communicate prioritization to investors.
Follow us on Linkedin or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
From creating our first deck (lol) in January 2022 to fundraising, closing some early deals, events and developing our investment strategy, we cover the evolution of our fund this year and our biggest learnings!
Looking forward to hosting guests and continuing to share our experience in 2023!
Follow us on Linkedin or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
Community can be a buzzy term, but is something critical to building a fund. We dive into what community means to us, how we go about creating and cultivating community and chat through what that looks like with founders, other fund managers and LPs.
Follow us on Linkedin or drop us a note at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
As an emerging manger, it's tough to get critical feedback as you start out. People want to help but also want to be polite and often times that means they're not giving you the feedback you need to progress. So how do you go about getting helpful feedback? When do you take action on it? Feedback has been core to our careers so we'll be sharing how we think about feedback, how we work it into our day to day and how we try to get feedback from LPs and other peers in the ecosystem.
We touch on:
- When to take and/or disregard feedback
- How to receive feedback
- How to give feedback
- What to do when getting a lot of feedback
Follow us on Linkedin or email us at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
This week we dive into the topic of "your why," a critical part of any GP's narrative (and LPs in our opinion). We chat through what a why is, why you need one, and share ours with you.
We touch on a resource in the episode that was really helpful for us in crafting our story (and even pitch deck to an extent). It's a ted talk by Simon Sinek if you want to check it out - link to video here.
Follow us on Linkedin or email us at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
This week we are live from TechCrunch Disrupt and Culture Shift Miami!
We are talking all things conferences:
- How to conference and not get overwhelmed
- The difference and strategies behind going to industry versus VC conferences
- The value of speaking at conferences
- Networking at larger conferences
Follow us on Linkedin or email us at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
Inspired by some questions posed to her at New York Tech Week, Victoria leads our conversation today to talk about the themes we're seeing in the companies we are evaluating and the trends we are seeing in the market right now.
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Today's topic is on design's role in early stage companies. Victoria moderates and weighs in from a PM perspective and Isabelle shares her thoughts as a Designer. We'll focus on 3 main stages of a startup's life: fundraising, MVP, and scaling.
We cover:
- The visual and non-visual aspects of design
- How design and product (and engineering) have a lot of overlap in the early days
- Bringing in a culture of experimentation and learning early
- Tapping into emotional JTBD (jobs to be done) which might be a new definition for UX Design
- What to think about as you are setting the foundation of your product and why you should have frank conversations about product development debt early and often
Founder resources
STH Office Hours: For ALL founders and entrepreneurs in need of product and design advice for FREE. You can sign up for 15 min slots with us every Monday and Thursday. Please provide your name, website, and any information that will provide context to your question. Sign up here
STH Founder Hub: Find all of our founder events here!
We would love to hear from you! What would be a helpful founder topic for us to cover? Email us at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
This week we discuss the changing needs and asks that founders have to investors, specifically, what we as investors can offer other than money. We also talk about how the 3 buckets we call startup problems: money, people and product. There is a great level of support for founders when it comes to fundraising and money, but we see a gaps when it comes to product development and hiring/culture.
We’re trying to be ahead of the deep need founders have for better product support as they build their companies.
Follow us on Linkedin or email us at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
How do you build a pipeline of people who don’t want to be found, especially when not directly connected to wealth? In what we expect to be a multi-part series, today we chat about how we're approaching getting new LP leads and what that looks like as a team of 2 GPs.
We share what we've learned so far and how we're leveraging networking/events, emerging manager programs and lead generation/cold outreach.
We'd love to hear the creative ways you've done lead generation and outreach - drop us a line at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
To celebrate getting our LP portal and data room set up, we're going to talk about fund formation and back office admin!
Dive into the unsexy but necessary side of getting your fund up and running:
- Evaluating back office tools
- Banking! Lawyers! Mistakes we've made and tools we like.
- Contracts - operating agreements, term sheets, LPAs
- Emerging manager accelerator experiences and tips
- How we've evolved our deal flow and LP databases
- We sum everything up into a checklist of what you need to think about when tackling all of this! (The last ~6 minutes or so)
Follow us on Linkedin or email us at hello@seedtoharvestvs.com!
This week we deep dive into a central theme for us this month: Founders! We discuss:
- Getting an early start on pipeline
- What we’ve learned about ourselves as investors as we meet with more founders
- How our process with founders has evolved
- How meeting with founders early on has impacted our LP conversations
- Building your deal flow pipeline, inbound, outbound, and leveraging your network
Follow us on Linkedin or check us out at seedtoharvestvs.com!
Get to know your hosts, fellow emerging managers and GPs of Seed to Harvest! We share a bit about ourselves, our backgrounds in product and design, how we got into venture and why we are starting this podcast.
Follow us on Linkedin or check us out at seedtoharvestvs.com.