Upside Partnership

Metrist & Web Services Observability

I owe my career to web services. Without them, founders would be forced to fund and build out…

Smallstep and a Fundamental Tension of Early Stage Venture Capital

In the early spring of 2016, when Mike Malone told me he was ready to start Smallstep, I was thrilled. He was someone I had been tracking with the hope that Upside Partnership would be able to write the first check…

Retain & Category Creation

There’s a trope common to fund raising pitches, “We’re building X for Y” where X is an admired company and Y is…

Fundraising Commandments

As a pre-seed & seed investor, I see hundreds of pitches every year. I’m also constantly working with a handful of companies looking to raise their Series A/B/C rounds. What follows below are the core tenets of how to avoid some all too common mistakes. In fact, I feel strongly enough…

Building Our Partnership

I moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 with the intent to learn. My goal was to build a business and I jumped at the chance to immerse myself in tech. Since making that decision, I’ve been able to dig into the inner workings of both startups and venture, first at Readyforce and then First…

A Seed Fund’s Investment Checklist

With seed investments, failure is excusable. But having a poor process for making investment decisions is not. To help ensure that we are thoughtful about the commitments we make at Upside Partnership, I keep the following Investment Decision Checklist on my desk.

On Upside’s First Anniversary