Ry Walker

“We were fortunate to have really strong metrics.” This was the response Brock Weeks gave when asked how they raised a $12M Series A round during a really tough fundraising environment earlier this year. Metrics matter when you are fundraising. And, you need to be armed with a solid knowledge of your numbers when talking with investors about your company. If you need help with knowing and understanding your numbers, let me know. I have some free resources I would be happy to share with you, including: 1) The Finance Playbook for Founders 2) Fundraising Benchmarks Report Comment 1 or 2 (or 1&2) …… And I will send this to you.

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The practical application of AI to help manufacturers eliminate unplanned downtime is key to our current and future offering. We do not label ourselves as purely an AI company, as that is one component of our value delivery, but I can say we have a world class team of AI Engineers building incredible tech alongside a team of world class Condition Monitoring Engineers. I am bullish and excited to see how Central Ohio emerges as a global AI hub with Intel as an anchor. cc: Brian Graham, Seyed Mohammad Parvasi, Ph.D., Jaidev Krishnan, Matt Longhouse, Chris Berry

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Make sure your investors and funding partners don’t inadvertently kill your business. Beyond just putting cash into your company your funding partners need to fall into one of the three following buckets: 1. SWEET MONEY: funding that’s such a sweet deal you can’t possibly turn it down. Supportive grant programs with non-onerous funding requirements fall into this bucket. 2. SMART MONEY: people who can make connections, add legitimacy, guide you, and know how to execute investments with standard terms. Savvy angel investors and professional investors fall into this bucket. 3. SHHHHHH MONEY: silent investors who want to support you and are willing to lend a hand when asked fall into this bucket. Funding partners can create bad corporate structures, distract you from your customers, or create burdensome requirements and kill your company if you’re not careful. We’ve been very fortunate to have amazing funding partners, when I looked at why it’s so easy to work with them it’s because they fall into one of these three buckets.

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Few agencies without a technical lead are able to get by (and none thrive). Relying on contractors can be a double-edged sword: they bring specialized skills but often lack a cohesive vision that aligns technology with your customer’s long-term goals. This disconnect results in software bloat, where unnecessary features and technical debt pile up. The pain is real: without a consistent, forward-thinking approach, your business is at risk of compounding technical debt that will stifle innovation. Don’t let short-term fixes lead to long-term problems. It’s time to rethink how you approach technology, ensuring it supports—not stifles—your growth.

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Dev agencies, if you don’t want to be treated as a commodity, stop acting like one. - Learn the business context for engineering needs - Stop squeezing your clients every opportunity you get - Prioritize transparency, communication, and accountability In short, position yourself as a partner that uses tech to solve business problems. You really can’t complain about being seen as a commodity if you treat everything as a transaction.

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I've been a vocal proponent of this perspective, particularly in the startup-to-enterprise and back cycle. It's a virtuous loop. Navigating the departure of high-performing team members is a challenge many managers face. Clarissa Shen, COO of Q Bio, introduces the concept of 'Giving Away Your People,' emphasizing the importance of preparing for and even encouraging the growth of top talent beyond your organization. By fostering open dialogues about career aspirations and supporting team members in their professional journeys, managers can cultivate a culture that attracts ambitious individuals and enhances the company's reputation as a talent incubator. How do you approach talent development and succession planning within your teams? Share your strategies in the comments below.

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Great post by Josh Wagner on the importance of urgency. If you don't want to build a company characterized by urgency and extreme intensity over a long period of time - at least a decade - you would be better off not raising venture capital.

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Huge opportunity

One awesome thing about our work at Groops is that the organizations who seek us out are the ones who care deeply about their people. Summer Friday is one of those companies. Culture is built into their core values and shapes everything they do. Every decision they make is grounded in how it impacts the human doing the work. I know because they have Groops for their entire company and I also lead their executive Groop. We have been with them for over a year now. We bring experts in organizational psychology to meet with their teams on a regular basis, teach core content in high cohesion / high performing teams, and help them have regular, honest conversations about what is working and what they want to improve. We provide ongoing insight reports with recommendations so everyone stays in communication. So, we end up knowing our partners well. They invited us to lead a full day (virtual) retreat last week where everyone took a personality assessment and we spent the day discussing how team makeup impacts their performance, how engaged they feel, and the direction of the organization. This is particularly important for them as they are a virtual company and clear communication and exploration and articulation of team functioning are mission critical. Having these types of conversations is also how cohesion is built. Bravo Summer Friday. We are proud to be your partner. Awesome work Rob Simone, Sarah Roberts, CPA, Michael Cruz, and Alicia Wiedemann. You are great leaders. And thanks Charlotte Bingaman MArch EdM , Sydney Davis, and Allison L. Barnes, MA, PCC. I am proud to have you on our team. #peoplematter #workplacewellness #peakperformance #IOPsychology #IOPsych #industrialorganizationalpsychology #cohesiveteams #connection

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Exciting news! We just sent out the inaugural newsletter for Future Frontier Capital, our pre-seed venture fund backing frontier tech startups. As I hit "send," I realized how launching FFC parallels the path of the founders we support. Starting FFC has required the same passion, perseverance, and self-belief that drive entrepreneurs. Just like a startup, getting a VC fund off the ground demands relentless hustle—building the brand, perfecting the pitch, and networking tirelessly. There are constant challenges that test your resolve and endless hours of unglamorous work behind the scenes. And perhaps most daunting - the self-doubt, wondering if you're crazy for attempting something so bold. Pushing through that negative self-talk requires unshakable faith in your mission. Raising this VC fund reminds me of starting our IP strategy and patent analytics firm two decades ago. It’s a powerful reminder of the perseverance, creativity, and resilience needed to turn an ambitious idea into reality. This experience makes us more empathetic partners, ready to support the founders we back. Our work is just beginning, and this inaugural newsletter underscores our commitment to supporting frontier tech startups every step of the way. #startups #VentureCapital #EmergingManagers #Entrepreneurship #InnovationMindSet

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I recently saw this metric from Carta’s 1Q24 VC Fund Report, which is very concerning. DPI... is nowhere to be found in earlier vintages that probably should start showing DPI. Funding early-stage projects is great, but ultimately, these venture dollars need to exit their investments and pay back their limited partners. That’s where the metric Distributed to Paid-In Capital (DPI) comes in. While managing a fund, we get interim measures during the life of the fund (e.g. IRR, MOIC), but ultimately, “you can’t eat IRR.” If you want to build a lasting venture capital organization, you need to start showing DPI for your fund. Keep in mind that this is traditional VC data from Carta, and is not strictly crypto venture. Crypto venture tends to get liquidity earlier (tokens) and things tend to go parabolic sooner (faster, more unicorns) - but I’d wager that the data here is somewhat similar for Crypto VCs… Not as much DPI as there should be from these earlier vintages. Read the full article, as well as a recap of all the crypto fundraising rounds for August, here: https://lnkd.in/g3eVJ-iF

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2 active fund offerings from the Echelon Fund team who have been killing it ever since their cohort at The Fund School. https://lnkd.in/gVd-dhfY sidecarportfoliofund.com This presentation of Echelon Fund, LLC and Sidecar Portfolio Fund (the “Company”) is for information only and shall not constitute an offer to buy, sell, issue or subscribe for, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, sell or issue, or subscribe for any securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is based on publicly-available information, internally developed data, third party information and other sources. The third party information has not been independently verified. While the Company may not have verified the third party information, nevertheless, it believes that it obtained the information from reliable sources and has no reason to believe it is not accurate in all material respects.

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I've been a bit surprised recently with the number of decent-sized software businesses (i.e. $15M+) that don't have a legitimate VP of Finance or CFO on their leadership team. I think some product and/or industry-expert founders and CEOs view finance as simply "accounting" vs. a strategic partner to help them properly scale the business. This seems to particularly be the case with first-time CEOs. They likely haven't seen "what good looks like" when it comes to a finance leader and the positive impact they can have, so they hire an outside firm or individual to manage their finances...treating it like a "necessary evil." The role is far more critical than that. I've found that the right CFO is a fact-based, unemotional partner and sounding-board for the CEO, and an invaluable resource to other members of the leadership team as they determine strategy, budgets, etc. Plus, referring back to another recent post of mine (https://lnkd.in/eTjvqdnv), having the right CFO allows your company to better represent itself and speak the language of your investor / buyer. P.S. I was fortunate to have two strong partners as CFO at Daxko. Jonathan Sides and Winston Gillum both made a world of difference!

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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I've recently come across Bridge, which streamlines the process of making and receiving introductions to investors. Vaulted Ventures is using Bridge to connect to investors as we raise our current equity seed round. It seems like a great way to make connections, as it removes a lot of the back and forth emails (and InMails) to set up intros. It integrates well with LinkedIn also. Use this link to join my network on Bridge: https://lnkd.in/gBPuCscP What do you think? Is this the future of online business networking?

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Kettleborough VC has been active for ~6 years, invested in ~30 companies, gone through ~80 funding rounds, witnessed ~12 exits including ~4 instances of partial principal erosion, seen ~4 seed to $100M journeys, tracking ~29% XIRR across the portfolio. A couple of IPOs from the portfolio surely seem very much in line ahead.

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An incredible deep dive from Nathan M. into the cultural and structural issues that are plaguing Boeing and how they got to where they are today. This article should be turned into a business school case study it's that good. And many of these issues aren't unique to Boeing. The focus on financial engineering over actual engineering is an issue at play in many scaled aerospace and defense companies. A definite must-read! https://lnkd.in/gkdpF2tM

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r/PropTech, 2018 someone asked: "Anything new and interesting in prop tech lately?" Didn't get much of a response. I think I can help answer... If I was going to answer this in 2018, I'd say we were seeing a lot of exciting things around residential fintech. Our residential fintech investments have been premised on the fact that there's these inherent inefficiencies, these archaic and anachronistic processes, around buying and selling real estate in the U.S. and all of the ancillary financial products you have to buy. This was of course affected by rising rates and lessened home affordability. I actually think now more than ever is an exciting time in proptech, because difficult times for the real estate industry (and it's been very, very difficult over the past few years) have totally opened up the industry to seeing the value in adopting technology. This adverse environment has totally thrust this imperative to become innovative (which is something the real estate industry has historically not been good at) front and center onto the real estate industry. I think that attitude shift is going to make for a really exciting time, and it's going to lead to some amazing new companies being born, doing everything from the proptech classic of "digitizing pen-and-paper processes to make them more efficient" to building entirely new real estate businesses on the backs of data and technology -- much like we saw Lineage do with cold storage and logistics. #proptech

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