Raising Capital

• 13/06/2025in Insights / Research, Raising Capital, Startups

  You Don’t Need Traction. You Need to Understand Why They Say You Do.

  There’s a special kind of eye twitch that founders get the 37th time they hear, “We’d love to invest, but you need more traction.” It’s a vague hand-wave of a dismissal that sounds helpful, but is really just cowardice in a hoodie. And when you ask what kind of traction they mean, they blink like...
• 27/02/2025in Raising Capital

  Your Startup Pitch is Bad; Let me Explain How I Know

  Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been pushing us to question traditional startup methodologies such as lean startup or how venture capitalists discern investments, through an exploration with you of First Principles Thinking and the Bell Mason Diagnostic. In fact, I’m not inherently a detractor of either, rather frequently advocating...
• 20/02/2025in Raising Capital, Startup Ecosystems

  The Bell Mason Diagnostic and First Principles Thinking in Venture Capital

  Why Venture Capital Needs a First Principles Overhaul Venture capital is broken. Not in the “bubble’s about to pop” and certainly not in the sense that so many are pissed off because they aren’t getting funded, but in the “founders keep getting bad funding advice from firms still operating on outdated, ineffective methodologies” sense.  In th...