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Last week I wrote a post titled “What makes fundraising so stressful?” and asked founders to tell me which parts of the fundraising process suck . As of this writing, about 110 founders have completed the Typeform survey. The results are very interesting, and in some cases shocking. More on that below, but let’s start with the responses to the first question: “Your optionality is an illusion” More than 60 founders took the time to answer the additional free-form question (“What else has stressed you out?”). In their comments, many people emphasized and provided additional detail on some of the topics shown above, but several founders also pointed out additional issues. Reading through all of the comments has been very enlightening (and in a few cases humbling). Here’s a small selection of the answers: "The big egos" "Everything takes 4x more time than initially thought" "Associates who constantly want calls without involving a partner who can actually get th...

In theory, raising venture capital could roughly look like this: You create an investor deck and send it to 5-10 VCs that you like (1 week) You meet the ones that are interested and quickly figure out the 3-4 that are really bullish (1-2 weeks) You have a few more meetings with those 3-4 VCs and answer their questions (2 weeks) You negotiate with 2-3 of them and sign a term sheet with your favorite one (a few days) You hand it over to your lawyer for the final due diligence and the legal paperwork (3-4 weeks) So ideally it's a couple of trips to Sand Hill Road (or San Francisco or London or Jaegerstrasse ) over a period of 4-6 weeks to get a term sheet, and after another 3-4 weeks you've got the money in your bank account. In practice, things rarely go so smooth. More often than not, raising venture capital is a huge distraction for the founding team. Even if things go reasonably well, it usually means that one of the founders spends half of his time talking to VCs for several ...

This is part two of Jenny's article about the importance of reference checks. If you haven't read the first part yet, start here . Last time we spoke about WHY you should do reference checks and what impact a bad hire can have on your organization. In this second part I’d like to share my personal experience as well as some outcomes that have recently been discussed within the Point Nine family around the HOW. General thoughts on the HOW: If you do reference checks, make sure they are one of the last steps of your recruitment process. Because if you do them right (I’ll explain further what that means) it will cost you time. You want to make sure that time is invested in the right candidate. The number of reference checks people do varies greatly between 1 to 15 checks per person. You want to find inconsistencies within the feedback you receive about the person. Depending on how senior the candidate is, ask for more references. A good start is 2 references for junior/entry role...

This is a guest post by Jenny Buch, who recently joined us as a Talent Manager. It's the first in a series of two posts. The second one will appear here soon.  To follow up on the recently posted interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings , I’d love to share my experience about reference checks with you. So, many of you probably made the experience of hiring someone that you would have stated as “a really promising candidate” upfront. But after four months into the job it turns out that the hire was actually a total fail, that your staff is thinking you’re an idiot for bringing him on board (even if they don’t tell you) and that you now have to pay the debts by firing that person and start a whole new time consuming hiring process again to reduce the mess you’ve just done to your organization. Well, even though things like these sometimes just happen and can have many reasons, there are ways to dramatically reduce the likelihood. One of them is to have a strong hiring process in pl...

Jack Newton, co-founder & CEO of Clio, at the 1st PNC SaaS Founder Meetup in 2012 About three years ago we thought that it would be nice to organize a little meetup for the founders of our still quite young but growing SaaS portfolio. The idea was that by putting all of the SaaS founders in one room for a day, we'd give them an opportunity to compare notes, share war stories and learn from each other. The result has been nothing short of amazing. After the meetup, many of the attendees told us that they've never attended an event which was nearly as useful as this one, and everyone left the meetup energized and eager to implement all the new learnings. The success of the first meetup, which took place in San Francisco at the end of 2012, encouraged us to do another, bigger event in 2013 in Berlin and an even bigger one in 2014, again in San Francisco . By now it has become a tradition, and last week the 4th annual PNC SaaS Founder Meetup took place in Berlin. Thanks to all...