A Day in the Life of 1517…
People often ask us what a day in the life of 1517 looks like. Michael and I are wrapping up a week in Florida sitting in a hipster coffee shop in Orlando. I’ve seen more midriffs and cutt-off jean shorts this week than I’ve seen in about ten years back when I lived in San Diego. In fact, two seconds ago someone walked by me with a crop top on under a sports jacket. The US has so many different flavors of style.
Yesterday we visited our portfolio company, Luminar Technologies, which has its manufacturing facility here. This marks my second visit out to this facility and every time I am humbled and blown away by their progress. The last demo of their sensor I saw was in December, and I thought that was fantastic, but another one is out and I was speechless. We also got to meet a new hire, Nico, who joined the company after he said that he wanted to join an autonomous driving company once he finished school when he was a contestant on American Ninja Warrior. Nico is legally blind and will never drive a car.
Sitting in the coffee shop, I’m getting through some emails (which largely get neglected when we’re on the road), sipping some Edith Grey tea (the barista informed me “Picture Earl Grey with rose petals” — hipster indeed), with a pathos on our table.
I’m introduced to a team working on a mobile social app. They included some info and a deck. I offer the following:
~~Spoiler Alert: Candid Deck Feedback Ahead~~
As some feedback on your deck, your competition slide needs some real work. The axis that you’re using [innovative vs stagnant UX, less vs more user control] may be true statements, but they also may not be the axis that matter the most in those markets. Going up against [major incumbent] is HUGE. Like, that is some real David and Goliath narrative right there…so you’re going to have to have a more compelling argument.
Raising $1M on your current traction [<500 people on the app] is going to be tough. Investors these days are pretty shy on social. The innovation you need to be focused on is how to you get a lot of people on and using in a relatively short period of time. I see you’re focused on a student population I haven’t seen specifically targeted in an app before. It might be best to triple down on that in your deck and user experience, I think it’s an interesting take.
Knowing little about your work, but knowing a lot that investors are shy on consumer and especially on social, I’d bring in only a tiny bit of cash to help you get out to more student groups on campus and do more pilots. As a comparable, when we invested in another consumer focused app they had 150K users and were raising about $1M.
Lastly, there’s a lot going on in your deck: social, marketplaces, blockchain. I think you need to think more about what your first offering is. Deck comes off a bit buzz wordy right now. Go for substance over flash always.
Hope this is helpful! I prefer to be frank right away to help get you all to where you need to be so that you aren’t out there pounding the pavement, getting exhausted from weird investor meetings where you can’t translate what they’re saying (“it’s too early for us” — wish people gave real feedback! I’m a teacher at heart), and then go heads down on product again weeks or months later.
That said, your mileage may vary, and my job is also to be wrong a lot of the time.
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In a couple more hours we will be at the airport and back to SFO. We might slide in another meeting on arrival tonight. But for now, I’ll do as many hours of email as I can on the plane (including lots of follow ups from this trip), start drafting our investor update, kiss my boyfriend when I get home, and give my kitties lots of love.
Danielle
