The end of the year is — usually — a time for resolutions. But not in the VC world! For VCs, it’s time for predictions (so intriguing!) 🔮What will this new year hold for us? What trends do you invest in as VCs and focus on as founders? Could we…

Remote Team vs. Everyone in the Same Office. Not Everybody is Ready to Work Remotely, and It’s Not Always the Best Solution at the Pre-Seed or Seed Stage. — What’s better? Remote team or everyone in the same room? I think about this a lot, especially observing lessons learned from our 60+ portfolio of investments. When we formed Lombardstreet Ventures in 2017, we believed that distributed access to talent would outperform the canonical model to hire people and work…

People need to understand why keeping your small founding team all together in the Bay Area is the best thing you can do to give your company the chance to be massively successful. — Distributed work is good; maybe it’s the future to scale talent acquisition; nevertheless, keeping your founding team together, possibly in the Bay Area, is the top priority to maximize your chances of creating a massively successful company. …

Something changed over the last few months, and founders have to deal with that. 2020–2021 will not come back easily; it was an anomaly that comes once in 30 years. — Listening to founders pitching their ideas weekly, I’ve understood that people are not listening to what’s happening since 2022 started. The time of Seeds, Mango Seeds, or Coco de Mer Seeds is over. It’s time for startups to get healthy again.

Everybody “knows” that the global conjuncture and public market performance are determining a slowdown in the US startup market. But, is it true? A closer look at the Seed Stage. — The first quarter of 2022 is behind us, and everybody knows that lot of changed since Q4 2021. Since January, valuations and VC investments slowdown have been all over the news on Twitter. The public market is going down while the Russia-Ukraine war threatens to escalate to a global conflict.

A startup is about growth, that’s what Paul Graham used to say in one of his iconic essays. Let’s see how much important growth is when you move your first steps into the market. — Our team at Lombardstreet Ventures is small by design. We are just three, and we aim to stay small, managing one small fund at a time. We designed our company this way because we love to work and invest in companies when they are very young. The ideal sweet spot…

Probably not the best way to reach out to a VC, but if you want to be effective in writing a cold email to Lombardstreet Ventures, here is what we suggest you do. — Even though cold emails are not the best way to contact a VC, we keep receiving tons of cold emails. Today we will explain how to make your email interesting enough for us and attract our attention. Geography + Market We try to reply to every email we receive with a personal message…

Brex acquired for $90M Pry, a fintech startup based in Silicon Valley, part of our Lombardstreet Ventures portfolio. Pry is a financial planning platform that essentially replaces Excel for founders, helping them plan and manage budgets, create hiring plans, build financial models, predict cash runway, analysis, forecasts, and custom modeling…

Lombardstreet Ventures’ new fund has been active on the market since March 2021, looking for Seed-Stage companies to invest in. We made 19 new investments in the last ten months and are eager to get to know you. — We receive hundreds of emails — cold and warm — every week; we read them all, but we can reply only to a subset of them. Most of the time, if you don’t get quick feedback from us, your startup is off-target for Lombardstreet Ventures, and that’s why I decided…