If you are building a company in Nebraska that is looking to raise capital, you may not really know where to go or how to begin. I'd love to help and would be happy to connect you with the resources in Nebraska that are part of building our startup ecosystem. At some point, you may be ready to start the process of raising money and if so, I may be ready to invest. Here are the things I'm going to be most interested in reviewing with you:
Your business plan should contain numbers from your financial model, your financial model should have your KPIs in them. The documents should match.
If you think you're ready or someday you may be, please don't hesitate to connect on LinkedIn and we'll take the conversation from there. =D
I love entrepreneurship. The idea that we live in a world, country, state, city where a person can have an idea one day and immediately go to work on it is an incredible gift. But freedom, creativity, and a good idea are not enough for a small business to succeed. It takes careful planning, deliberate execution, and close monitoring. Great entrepreneurs know their market, make a product, and monetize it by carefully allocating limited resources. The journey isn't easy; the adventure is inescapable.
I get it. I've been there at or near day 1 of a business 4 times in 4 industries. I've also had 3 exits (working on #4!). I've had days where I was grasping for hope, desperate to find any way to make payroll to lavish, expensive dinners at the finest restaurants in Los Angeles with titans of industry, and pretty much everything in between. I've had budgets of thousands of dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars.
And now I'm home. Living and working in Lincoln NE, I'm excited to be building my next business here and am looking forward to sharing what I've seen and learned elsewhere. Having built businesses and invested in others outside of Nebraska, I'm also looking to bring some of the things I've learned about startup investing back home. Part of what I hope to do with my investment process is to gently promote skills and process within the startup ecosystem that I find critical to startup success and to more carefully vet companies for those things. While I won't make an investment without checking all of my own check boxes, I am going to focus my vetting process on a few areas where I think the local ecosystem will most benefit from my time. I'll also rely on other investment groups to review other aspects that they are better setup to do. Hopefully as our entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to develop, things I find to be fundamentally critical to a small business' success continue to be things that small businesses work on in their planning stage and an even more robust network of investors are able to rely on each others' skills to make better investment decisions.
Finally, I have come to find that companies who build socially responsible values that go beyond shareholder value actually end up more likely to succeed and when they don't, at least they were doing some good along the way. I am looking for business leaders who find it natural to build social responsibility into their business planning.
In this way, I am looking to accomplish these 5 things with this investment:
I hope that over time our Nebraska startup ecosystem continues to flourish and we see progress in these areas.