By: Ben Freeberg
ff Venture Capital (ffVC) is a seed and early stage, tech-focused venture fund. A significant challenge in the startup world is transitioning from a company’s seed to series A round. ff will come in and help entrepreneurs think through their business models, back-end infrastructures and even assist with financial modeling, accounting, communications and engineering in order to make that transition as seamless as possible.
The firm has five partners, including the founding partner, John Frankel, who has been investing since the late 1990’s and was an early investor in CornerstoneOnDemand. David Teten, a serial entrepreneur, and Alex Katz, who has held numerous CFO and COO positions, are joined by Michael Faber, AJ Plotkin and Ryan Armbrust on the investment side, alongside 25 others in the firm that offer founders support across all areas of the technology ecosystem.
For VCs:
The ff Venture team is always looking to share knowledge and resources with other early stage investors. Furthermore, they like to partner with investors who focus on developing entrepreneurial teams, not just products.
As the team almost always syndicates their deals, they seek out value-add co-investors, who include Greycroft and Lerer Hippeau, for example. Coinvestors and founders with whom ff invest receive not only partner-level expertise; the team offers their full suite of resources and services to help each company succeed.
Lastly, during a time where start-ups are struggling to find outside lead investors, look no further than ff, who typically leads deals at the seed stage.
For Entrepreneurs:
ff Venture Capital is not just financial capital, they are intellectual capital. Entrepreneurs must think about how much the investor they are pitching will have their back. How strategic can they be?
Here are your 4 keys to success before heading into your meeting with ff.
- Do a background check on the investor. Do reference calls on ff’s portfolio companies. Working with a VC is a long-term commitment, you are most likely signing up for 7-10 year commitment.
- Prepare a 10-minute pitch that impresses. In this amount of time you should be able to clearly explain what you do, both in terms of your technology and value add.
- Show your passion. Entrepreneurs spend well over 100 hours each week thinking about their business and how to grow and develop it. Convey that passion you clearly have for your product. ff wants to see that you can’t sleep at night, because you can’t stop thinking about how to improve your business.
- Be clear and up-front about the current state of the business. Provide ff with an honest, well-thought out understanding of where the business is today in terms of financial projections, hiring plans and everything in between.
Startup Spotlight:
ff invested in Wade & Wendy, an AI machine learning platform attacking the recruiting space, in the Fall of 2015. By managing the relationship between candidates and employers, the Company can identify the capabilities and employees each employer needs.
The Company brings a network approach to the industry. It is not a binary approach; if one job doesn’t work, the platform can suggest other opportunities that apply to each candidate. The ability to cycle throughout all available opportunities prevents the need for a candidate to apply to different jobs over and over again.
ff Venture Capital sits on the board, and since investment has helped the Company figure out its financing needs moving forward as well as consistently assisting with general business strategy.
The Company just received a strategic investment from one of the top enterprise messaging companies, which, when integrated into gchat and other messaging platforms, will help Wade & Wendy as it seeks to become the recruitment interface for all chat-based communication platforms. With countless other initiatives and partnerships such as this one, we are excited to see how quickly Wade & Wendy will continue to grow.
Thank you to Andrew Kangpan and the ff Venture Capital team for assisting with this blog post.