The Importance of Speed in Venture Investing
…And why most VCs get it wrong… VCs always say that they want an entrepreneur who executes rapidly, moves fast and gets things done quickly. Why then are the majority of VCs incredibly slow when completing their own due diligence and making their investments? The average time for most VCs in Europe from first meeting […]
COVID-19 and the future of healthcare in Europe: UK edition
Map of startups accelerating change in UK healthcare This blog post is part one of a two-part collaboration between Frontline and Speedinvest. Part 1 examines the impacts of Covid-19 on Telemedicine in the UK. Part 2 will cover DACH. In both blogs we cover respective governmental strategies, overall trends and local startups in each geographical area. […]
Covid-19: How tech start-ups can survive an Arctic winter
This article was originally posted by the Irish Business Post. Winners Survive For pretty much the last decade, the technology start-up ecosystem has been awash with capital. This is partly as a result of an explosion of companies developing groundbreaking technologies that promise major growth for investors. On the supply side, there has been a huge […]
The next Irish startups will look nothing like the last
In the past decade, only one venture-backed software company from Ireland, Intercom, has reached a billion-dollar valuation. This is a sobering fact for any Irish venture capitalist — and it should also be a concern for all Irish founders. Success breeds success. Without a steady stream of companies launching, winning, exiting and exploding, there is […]
The Talent Acquisition Playbook
Talent is tricky business – one of the top mistakes made by startups is not devoting enough time to it. A poorly designed/executed talent acquisition strategy can erode your budget, hurt your churn, and lead to expensive processes and poor results. We’ve partnered with Senior Talent Recruiter and Director of Roobix, Nikki Rooney, to create […]
The Pointy Story: First Principles Thinking Wins
The History of Pointy I first got introduced to Mark in 2012 by his college friend Lucinda, whom I worked with at the time. We kept in touch and in 2014, Mark told me about his plans for Pointy. The vision at the time was to make all products in physical stores searchable. Indexing the […]
How to write a perfect cold email to VCs (with examples)
It’s not that going in cold to a venture capital fund is bad, it’s that most cold emails are poorly put together in the first place. Whether it’s the info@email, a form submission, or cold emailing investors directly, there are usually a number of routes to get in touch with investors without needing a warm […]
How this VC thinks about pre-seed investments
When we say we invest early, we mean it. At Frontline, 70% of our investments have been pre-revenue and 60% pre-product. At Pre-Seed and Seed, there is little to be learned from intensive quantitative analysis pre-investment (woo). That said, over the past year and a half at Frontline, I’ve built a qualitative framework, designed around four key questions, […]
Using data to shorten VC learning cycles
Max Niederhofer recently wrote a very thoughtful piece reflecting on the psychology of venture capital called “Fear and loathing in Venture Capital”. One of the core points he discusses is how difficult it is for VCs to learn because of the painfully slow feedback cycles on our investment decisions. According to VentureBeat, the median time for an […]
10 reasons startups struggle when raising VC funding
A version of this article was originally published here. There’s nothing easy about raising venture finance for your startup. The odds are massively stacked against you as a founder. Statistically, roughly 1 in 100 startups that pitch to a particular venture fund are successful. That’s better odds than the Lotto, but tough odds without doubt. […]
When we say early, we mean it
Before I became a VC -as an early stage entrepreneur pitching to early stage investors- I always sought feedback on rejections to better prepare for the next pitch, but there was one response that always bothered me, “You’re too early”. This line of conversation was often cloaked in inventive wording: “Come back to me […]
How to hire fast when you’re small
Making employee Referrals work in practice Twitter’s (very ugly) EMEA headquarters in 2012. There was a smell of rotting animals under the floorboards. I joined Twitter in early 2012 during a period of rapid growth. While the product was a global sensation, the company’s headcount and revenue outside the US were small and I was […]
