Blog Posts | Kerosene Ventures

Pitching

September 14, 2022 in General, Pitching

Win the Game of Fundraising

Written By: Kelly Bryant It’s officially Bears season again and (speaking as a Chicagoan) that means two things: 1) the battle of Soldier field continues and 2) it’s socially…

August 25, 2022 in General, Pitching

Read This Before you Pitch a VC

Written By: Marc Halpin This quarter I am on track to meet more Founders and hear more pitches than any other quarter in my entire life. It is, of…

July 14, 2022 in General, Pitching

Swing and a Miss

Written By: Kelly Bryant It’s Cubs season and baseball is on my mind. I love a Friday afternoon at Wrigley - the taste of cold beer, waiting for the…

June 30, 2022 in General, Pitching

Three Pitch Pointers from the (roof)top

Written By: Marc Halpin Dinners are fine, but I’ve always liked a proper lunch! Maybe it’s the Roger Sterling in me, I’m not sure. There’s nothing better than getting…

June 16, 2022 in General, Pitching

5 Tips For Your Next Pitch Competition

Written By: Kelly Bryant The team and I were invited to lead a workshop at a tech conference in NYC last weekend (shoutout to the NextGen family!). Part of…

October 20, 2021 in General, Pitching

Mother of Dragons

Written by: Janine Kick I’m rewatching Game of Thrones. Don’t get me started on House of The Dragon...I cannot wait! Jon Snow just died (I knew it was coming…

March 3, 2021 in General, Pitching

How to be Confident at Cocktail Parties

Written By: Marc Halpin 22 years ago, the venture capitalist John Doerr had the opportunity to make the largest financial investment of his life. The company he was investing in…

December 8, 2020 in General, Pitching

Over 18?

By: Janine Kick “How long should my actual pitch presentation be if I have an hour long meeting?” It’s a common question, and one of the most fundamental things we…

November 3, 2020 in General, Pitching

Video Killed The Radio Star

By: Janine Kick Eight months into COVID-19 and we’ve all had our fair share of Zoom meetings with our teams, clients, and prospects. We’ve mastered the basics (at least I…

September 22, 2020 in General, Pitching

3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Pitch

Written By: Kelly Bryant I’ve had the privilege of helping over a dozen tech entrepreneurs across numerous industries with different backgrounds navigate the fundraising process and they all have something…

September 10, 2020 in General, Pitching

Pitch Perfect

Written By: Marc Halpin You get the meeting with the VC you’ve been trying to meet for months. You’ve got 1 hour to make your pitch. You’ve got your deck…

Pitch Decks

February 16, 2023 in General, Pitch Decks

The 10 Problems With Your Deck

Written By: Marc Halpin A couple of weeks ago I came across a deck I built over 10 years ago when I was raising the seed round for my…

February 23, 2022 in General, Pitch Decks

3 Minutes and 44 Seconds

Written By: Kelly Bryant A number of years ago, DocSend partnered up with HBS professor Tom Eisenmann to study the fundraising process by analyzing 200 startups. (You can find…

September 30, 2021 in General, Pitch Decks

Certified Lover Boy vs Donda

Written By: Janine Kick We’re big fans of Drake and Kanye here at Kerosene. People give Drake a hard time for being ‘in his feels’. You know, emotional. Kanye…

July 29, 2021 in General, Pitch Decks

Swimming with Sharks

Written By: Kelly Bryant My colleagues and I were recently asked to prepare a virtual presentation for 50 student founders on my favorite topic: pitching. The university-level attendees are…

June 29, 2021 in General, Pitch Decks

Go Big or Go Home

Written By: Kelly Bryant If you’re trying to raise capital and you’ve never heard the name Don Valentine, you’ve got some homework to do. Although he passed away in…

October 19, 2020 in General, Pitch Decks

Why Give a Damn about TAM?

Written By: Kelly Bryant Ask any Venture Capitalist what their #1 deal breaker is when it comes to investing in a company and nine times out of ten I bet…

Founders + Teams

February 8, 2023 in Founders + Teams, General

The 1st Decision

Written By: Kelly Bryant Getting a business off the ground requires making lots of decisions. These decisions include deciding what the company will be called, how it will be…

July 8, 2021 in Founders + Teams, General

Sweat Equity?

Written By: Marc Halpin What’s your startup all about? The people? The idea? The mission? All of those are true and important in their own ways. However, at some…

June 2, 2021 in Founders + Teams, General

GenCoin

Written By: Kelly Bryant What do a Haitian gangster, Stanford drop out and a South Beach wannabe have in common? If you’ve watched Netflix’s new series ‘Startup’, you know…

May 11, 2021 in Founders + Teams, General

Think Different

Written By: Marc Halpin 20 years ago this week Steve Jobs opened the first Apple store at Tysons Corner Mall, Virginia. See him walk you through the store pre-opening here.…

May 3, 2021 in Founders + Teams, General

The Three Amigos

Written By: Kelly Bryant I recently had dinner with my favorite serial entrepreneur and uncle (hi Mike!) who offered me an observation about building startups. “Kelly” he explained, “It’s so…

January 26, 2021 in Founders + Teams, General

Eric?

Written By: Marc Halpin It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...it was the…

December 1, 2020 in Founders + Teams, General

Storytellers

Written By: Marc Halpin We tell stories. This one starts in California. It was always going to be different; I knew that much. I’d first raised capital with my previous…

November 10, 2020 in Founders + Teams, General

Do I Need to Lose 60lbs?

Written By: Marc Halpin The average jockey in the US weighs somewhere in the region of 115lbs. I’m 172lbs (on a good day). It strikes me as funny that most…

Fundraising Prep

January 25, 2023 in Fundraising Prep, General

Silver Bullet

Written By: Janine Kick If you’ve talked to any Kerosene team member, I am sure you’ve heard us at one point or another get on our soapbox about ‘running…

January 11, 2023 in Fundraising Prep, General

KISS

Written By: Kelly Bryant It’s officially 2023 and that means it’s time to start acting on your fundraising plan! As a Founder, you’ve got a lot to think about:…

September 1, 2022 in Fundraising Prep, General

Be Careful What You Ask For

Written By: Janine Kick One of the most frequently asked questions we get asked is, “how much seed capital should I be raising?” The answers to this question you’ll…

August 3, 2022 in Fundraising Prep, General

Are You Ready to Launch?

Written By: Janine Kick If you’ve been following Kerosene over the last couple of years, you know it’s no secret we are hyper-focused on helping great tech founders raise…

April 8, 2022 in Fundraising Prep, General

The Most Important Question a VC Will Ever Ask You

Written By: Marc Halpin Sometimes when you’re juggling ‘all the things’ as a startup Founder it really can be difficult to see the forest for the trees. You’ve got…

March 10, 2022 in Fundraising Prep, General

Multiple Choice

Written By: Marc Halpin Winter is ending, spring has sprung, and you’re ready to go for it! You’ve got a cool startup, it’s a couple of years old, you’ve…

December 1, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

New Year’s Resolutions

Written By: Kelly Bryant Tis the season of New Year’s Resolutions! In my world, that looks like founders telling me they have a goal to raise capital in 2022…

June 15, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

Listen Carefully

Written By: Janine Kick It’s no secret that most Founders start out with a lot to prove. At the beginning of your startup journey, the risk of failure is…

May 18, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Written By: Janine Kick You’ve built your deck, you’ve prepared your pitch and now you’re ready to get in front of investors. Let’s go for the big guys: Sequoia,…

April 7, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

Gold Digger?

Written By: Marc Halpin ♫ She take my money when I’m in need, Yeah, she’s a triflin’ friend indeed! ♫ A recent CB Insights survey of 368 start up failures…

March 17, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

Dog Food

Written By: Marc Halpin I liked Brian from the first time I met him. I thought to myself, “this is a guy I want to be in business with.” It…

February 2, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

What’s Your Number?

By: Janine Kick How much money should a startup seek to raise in a round of funding? The same question comes up often from first time entrepreneurs. Ideally, you’d raise…

January 5, 2021 in Fundraising Prep, General

Venture Capital – An Idea by Mick Jagger?

By: Marc Halpin If you've been in the startup world for more than a month you've most certainly heard of the concept 'Product Market Fit'. The term was first coined…

Fundraising Landscape

March 8, 2023 in Fundraising Landscape, General

How to Raise in a Downturn

Written By: Kelly Bryant There’s often 3 reactions people have to uncertainty: fight, flight or freeze. When it comes to raising capital in a downturn, I see Founders embody…

January 19, 2023 in Fundraising Landscape, General

What’s the Current State of Seed Stage Venture?

Written By: Marc Halpin Einstein argued that particularly massive objects warp the fabric of space-time. I’ve decided after much deliberation he was right! To give my agreeable thoughts some…

October 20, 2022 in Fundraising Landscape, General

For Tech Startups, the Party Is Over!

Written by: Marc Halpin “This is a proper correction. The end of a cycle.” “This is clearly not just a speed bump”. “VC’s are going to pull back massively”.…

August 12, 2022 in Fundraising Landscape, General

What’s Going on in the Markets?

Written By: Kelly Bryant “What market trends are you seeing in early-stage funding given the current climate?” If I had a dollar for every time I was asked this…

June 2, 2022 in Fundraising Landscape, General

10 Things To Do If You’re Raising Capital Now

Written By: Marc Halpin Looking back at 22 years of building and supporting startups I sometimes wonder if we, as Founders, are all completely nuts! Let’s face it, it’s…

January 20, 2022 in Fundraising Landscape, General

Three Types of People

Written By: Marc Halpin "California presents to people a new model for the American dream-one where the emphasis is on the ability to take risks, the willingness to bet…

November 10, 2021 in Fundraising Landscape, General

Ageism in Tech?

Written By: Kelly Bryant I meet all kinds of founders. Old, young, female, male - everything from ivy-league graduates at the top of the corporate ladder to college dropouts…

September 9, 2021 in Fundraising Landscape, General

Going Down Stream

Written by: Janine Kick Is it me or are more and more ‘big’ funds coming down stream? a16z announced last week that they have raised a $400M seed fund, Index…

September 2, 2021 in Fundraising Landscape, General

Lions and Tigers and… Unicorns? Oh My!

Written By: Kelly Bryant Chicago’s been on fire this summer and I’m not just talking about the insane heat we've been experiencing. Unicorns (companies with billion-dollar valuations) are no…

July 20, 2021 in Fundraising Landscape, General

How Jeff Bezos Got to Space

By: Marc Halpin NEWS FLASH - Wikipedia skips a really important piece of information! Under Amazon’s history it reads: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in July 1994. He…

June 10, 2021 in Fundraising Landscape, General

Act Accordingly

Written By: Marc Halpin “I offered a pre-money valuation of $500M, the deal got done at $1B.” “The fund didn’t make it; the market’s too competitive. He couldn’t get…

April 20, 2021 in Fundraising Landscape, General

What are you going to do?

Written By: Marc Halpin I loved science-fiction as a kid and really, really loved those movies that centered on time travel. All those paradoxes used to get me geeked out!…

November 17, 2020 in Fundraising Landscape, General

Why You Should Invest in the Midwest

Written By: Kelly Bryant Nowadays, having the infamous ‘Midwest Charm’ isn’t the only trait people in the upper-middle part of the United States should be known for. While we will…

October 13, 2020 in Fundraising Landscape, General

A Tough Time to Raise Venture Capital

Written By: Marc Halpin I ordered pancakes. It never seemed to matter what I ordered; I hardly ate anything when I was pitching investors over breakfast. It was late 2010…

Founder Mindset

October 27, 2022 in Founder Mindset, General

Welcome to Separation Season!

Written By: Janine Kick I was recently reminded of an episode from one of my go-to podcasts, The Ed Mylett Show. Specifically, his episode on the ‘Separation Season’ (take…

April 20, 2022 in Founder Mindset, General

Love Me Tender

Written By: Kelly Bryant Hate him or love him, Elon Musk sure has a way of getting on people’s radar. One of his latest tweets “Love Me Tender” suggested…

April 14, 2022 in Founder Mindset, General

Seven Deadly Sins

Written By: Janine Kick Raising capital is not for the faint of heart. Mistakes can be fatal for a startup. Below are the Seven Deadly Sins of Fundraising I…

March 24, 2022 in Founder Mindset, General

Crucible Moments

Written By: Kelly Bryant Earlier this week I was listening to an interview with Luciana Lixandru - partner at Sequoia Capital - on the VC20 podcast. During her interview,…

November 4, 2021 in Founder Mindset, General

Screw Everything Up and Still Succeed

Written By: Marc Halpin Google ‘Product Market Fit’ and you are faced with pages of definitions and perspective on the subject, quite often (read: always) by people way smarter…

September 22, 2021 in Founder Mindset, General

Three Cheers for Sir James Dyson!

Written By: Kelly Bryant Did you know the founder of Dyson is in fact Sir James Dyson - a knighted gentleman who is actually a farmer turned inventor turned British…

June 24, 2021 in Founder Mindset, General

Maybe you’re wrong too!

Written By: Marc Halpin Ok Rocketship Captains, it’s multiple choice time... How much venture capital will your start up raise in total? a) $2.5B b) $50M c) Closer…

March 24, 2021 in Founder Mindset, General

Do Opposites Attract?

By: Janine Kick Startups exist in a symbiotic relationship with venture capital. Neither can exist without the other. The difficulty for most founders is understanding how a VC may view…

March 10, 2021 in Founder Mindset, General

Think Like a Scientist

Written By: Kelly Bryant I recently finished reading the book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant. The book has been highly recommended by…

October 6, 2020 in Founder Mindset, General

The Little Engine That Could

By: Janine Kick Remember reading that book as a kid? Me too. Ironically, it’s mantra, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can” has morphed into…

September 28, 2020 in Founder Mindset, General

Tequila

Written By: Marc Halpin It was a Friday afternoon in the Summer of 2012. Two things were happening that day: I was getting a term sheet for a $1M investment…

September 1, 2020 in Founder Mindset, General

Hunger Games?

Written by: Marc Halpin It was my first meeting with a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. I was nervous. I thought I was prepared (I wasn’t), so I thought…

Fundraising Process

November 6, 2022 in Fundraising Process, General

The Fundraising Dichotomy

Written By: Kelly Bryant For most of the Founders I meet, fundraising and asking for money is seen as a necessary evil. It involves lots of rejection, spending countless…

July 29, 2022 in Fundraising Process, General

Pick 2

Written By: Marc Halpin It was 2004 in London. I was working with KPMG who were channel partners for my first startup’s product. Richard (KPMG) and I were in a…

May 20, 2022 in Fundraising Process, General

Trust the Process

Written By: Kelly Bryant Repeat after me: “the purpose of the 1st meeting is to get to the 2nd meeting” We drill this mantra into the heads of our…

November 17, 2021 in Fundraising Process, General

1 in 101

Written By: Janine Kick A recent study from Harvard Business Review found that for each deal a VC firm closes, the firm considers on average 101 opportunities. Of those,…

October 13, 2021 in Fundraising Process, General

Squid Game

Written By: Kelly Bryant If you haven’t seen Netflix’s latest series Squid Game you’ve probably been living under a rock. It was only released last month and is “poised…

August 15, 2021 in Fundraising Process, General

What Mike Tyson Can Teach Founders

Written By: Marc Halpin There's a boxing ring in the gym I go to. Quite often, there’s guys in the ring. They have their hands taped up and they…

April 13, 2021 in Fundraising Process, General

He’s Just Not That Into You

Written By: Kelly Bryant How many times have you left a VC meeting feeling like you crushed it only to receive radio silence afterwards? Sadly, you’re not alone. Many of…

February 17, 2021 in Fundraising Process, General

Please See Point One!

Written By: Marc Halpin Raise capital before you need to raise capital. When you are ready to raise capital don’t raise capital. This is the best way to raise capital!…

Investor Relations + Outreach

February 24, 2023 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

No @$$h0l3s!

Written By: Janine Kick I was recently sent a Twitter thread from Michael Arrington the founder of TechCrunch, Crunchbase, and Arrington Capital. He passed on a deal that was…

December 7, 2022 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Naughty or Nice?

Written By: Janine Kick Tis the season to be jolly! If you’re reading this, you’re likely thinking about raising capital or actively raising capital and let’s be real –…

September 28, 2022 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Gotta Let it Burn

Written By: Janine Kick “It’s been a long time coming, but we done fell apart. Really wanna work this out, but I don’t think you’re gonna change. I do,…

July 7, 2022 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Brr, It’s Cold in Here

Written By: Janine Kick I’m often asked what’s the best way to cold email an investor and it goes without saying, it’s simpler than you’d think. That said, it’s…

March 16, 2022 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Running Through the Tape

Written By: Janine Kick During each raise, we come to a critical point where there are a solid number of investors ‘in the mix’ and a fair number have…

February 17, 2022 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Music to My Ears

Written By: Janine Kick A founder asked me the other day what they can say to an investor to get their attention right away and it got me thinking… What…

February 3, 2022 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

LMKHICBH

Written By: Janine Kick “Good luck with the raise and the business, and let me know how I can be helpful.” If you’ve ever raised capital or attempted to raise…

September 15, 2021 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Let’s Fall in Love

Written By: Marc Halpin Brad Feld is interesting. He wears very colorful shirts, he’s got a great hairstyle, he writes one of the most painfully open and honest blogs…

August 25, 2021 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

My Favorite Question

By: Janine Kick I talk to VCs every day, lots of VCs. I ask them qualifying questions to make sure they’re a fit for the founders and the startups…

July 1, 2021 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

You’re Too Early…

By: Janine Kick If you haven’t heard that statement from an investor, you haven’t started your fundraising adventure yet. At the seed stage, you will hear “you’re too…

April 27, 2021 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Panic Room

Written By: Janine Kick There tends to be this pivotal moment in a capital raise for every founder where things are moving ahead quickly, you really like a couple of…

February 23, 2021 in General, Investor Relations + Outreach

Will You Accept This Rose?

By: Janine Kick I know what you’re thinking, “The Bachelor has nothing to do with venture capital.” And I say, oh but it does! Picture this: You’ve spent tireless hours…

Term Sheets

January 26, 2022 in General, Term Sheets

Deal or No Deal?

Written By: Kelly Bryant I was recently chatting with a founder who told me he and his co-founder received a term sheet on the last day of 2021. Initially,…

February 9, 2021 in General, Term Sheets

Champagne? Not Quite Yet…

Written By: Kelly Bryant You’ve spent the last 4 months fundraising and you finally received a term sheet. Congratulations! Here are four concrete steps you should take to optimize the…