Author: Nicole Glaros

Venture Deals Course starts 2/22 – and it’s free

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Venture Deals book cover

If you’re an entrepreneur interested in raising venture capital, or maybe you’re an individual looking to get into venture capital, I cannot recommend this course enough. When I was learning venture, the book Venture Deals was my bible, and luckily I had the authors Jason & Brad to call as friends. Now it’s been turned into a free course thanks to the effort of the Kauffman Fellows and Techstars, and I was honored to be included as part of the team. 

The course starts on February 22nd, and it’s free – no strings attached.

Enroll here!

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Add value first

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I was at an event recently where one of the sponsors took about 5 minutes to address the room, talk about his firm, what they offered, and how to reach them. 

The crowd politely clapped, as everyone usually does with sponsors, but I seriously doubt a single person from that event will reach out – not because he did anything wrong, but rather because there was no value in what he said. Having been in the event organizers’ position of relying on sponsor dollars to make the numbers work, I was bummed for all of them.  And it got me thinking about the notion of value. At Techstars, we had a word for this, it was called #GiveFirst, but in my mind, it’s not just about giving, it’s about adding value first. 

In the early days of Techstars, we didn’t yet have a lot to brag about. I could show a few logos, sure, but like any embryonic company, you’re trying to figure out anything you can say to gain credibility, to gain attention.  I remember trying to recruit companies for Techstars and David Cohen giving me the sage advice to teach people something, rather than just waving a banner.

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Nailing your vision is only step 1

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I’ve recently worked with 2 different companies who are struggling. In trying to help diagnose the issue, I talked to a handful of people (board, leadership team, employees, etc), and when asked “in your own words, tell me what the vision of the company is” – I heard surprisingly different answers. 

We all know how important vision is – in fact, we know it so well that we dismiss it. “Yeah yeah yeah, it’s table stakes, we did that already at last year’s offsite… don’t tell me about how important vision is.”

Yet vision itself is important only to the extent that:

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Bigger isn’t always better, better is better

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There is a long-running belief that things grow or die. In startups and in business, growth tends to mean more topline revenue.

But growth doesn’t have to mean more topline revenue. Growth can also mean improvement, better; better product, better systems, better processes. Here’s the thing (I always have a thing), better almost always leads to bigger, naturally.

The challenge with focusing exclusively on topline revenue when you want to grow is that problems nearly always scale faster than solutions.  When you throw dollars into marketing and sales, without a healthy, underlying business, the top line will grow, giving you false positive feedback, which leads to you to keep spending. However, problems are being created, and are scaling faster than the revenue, and eventually those challenges will consume the company leading to its ultimate demise. For instance, you can’t see that the CAC to LTV ratio no longer works – or maybe it never worked and you figured that by spending more in different niches, it would eventually work. Or maybe you don’t even know what the unit economics actually are, and you’re scaling a business that fundamentally doesn’t work. Or you can’t see that there’s disagreement on the direction of the company at the leadership team level. Or you can’t see that while growth is happening, customer returns/dissatisfaction and churn are happening at a faster rate than before. Or your team spends more time firefighting than driving results, creating incredible inefficiencies and destroying the bottom line (not to mention the employee turnover).

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Play to win, don’t play to not lose

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I recently gave a talk to a room full of founder/CEOs about how to leverage your board of directors by shifting from a reporting board to a collaborative board.  It can be tricky, but for those who do it, the company and the founder can grow wings. Part of the shift involves trusting your board and bringing them into your confidence, being vulnerable with them, and asking for their help and input when things aren’t working.  This can be scary for most CEOs because the board usually has the power to remove him/her. However, if you have the right board members, and if you create the right dynamic at the board level, this usually won’t be the outcome.

One founder in the room raised his hand to challenge me. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “That’s a lot of ifs and usuallys. Why would I take that risk? If my board can fire me, why would I risk being fired and losing my company by admitting weakness and vulnerability?”

I love this founder for asking that question – it’s at the heart of why most CEO’s don’t go to their board with challenges.

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Asking others for time

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This week I’ve been on the receiving end of multiple emails that go something like this:

Hey Nicole, we met at X event and talked about lots of cool stuff. I was wondering if you could help me out with this project/problem I have. If you’d be willing, please grab some time here [link to their calendering tool].

I know the intention of including your calendering tool is to save time and the back and forth email. But here’s the thing – you’re asking ME for time. Whenever you’re asking someone else for a favor, like a meeting or time, you want to make it as easy on them as possible so that they help you. You want to work around them. When you share your link, it makes it easy on YOU, but less easy on them because they have to click, load a webpage, compare your availability to their own, select a slot, fill out their info, etc.

A good rule of thumb is to make it insanely easy for them to say yes by offering to work around them. My go-to language on this has always been something like:

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How to make better decisions

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Early in my career, I learned how important it was to make great decisions. When you’re investing, your performance as an investor is directly tied to the decisions you make, but with early-stage investing, you don’t find out if you’re right or not for a decade or longer. Then when I started to train and manage many of the Managing Directors at Techstars, learning how to make better decisions became a scalable challenge and opportunity, because now we had dozens of people making investment decisions. How to help them all improve their decision-making abilities tied directly to the returns we generated and the bottom line of the company.

I’ve been meaning to write a series on how to make better decisions, but haven’t seemed to get around to it (this is a good segue to time management and prioritization, but that’s for another post). Luckily my friend Matt Blumberg, CEO of Bolster created a 6-minute podcast on the topic. So while this doesn’t cover all the topics in how to make better decisions, it is a great summary.

Check it out here!

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A thank you

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Today, October 4th, marks the 1-year anniversary of leaving Techstars, an org that I helped birth, that I spent 14 years at, an org that has my fingerprints all over it, from the content taught in the program to the way the accelerators are run.  When you spend so long on something, it becomes part of you. You become part of it. And it can be hard to separate the two, which is one of the reasons I left.  It was time.

The last year has been a time of rest and recovery, and with some space from it, I have tremendous gratitude for my time and experience there.  For David Cohen who saw something in me that I’m not sure I saw in myself and whose deep trust and belief formed the foundation of how I want to work with others. For David Brown, who put up with me and my ever-changing demands at work. For Brad Feld, the ultimate mentor, philosopher, and investor, your words ring in my head often. For Jason Seats, my best friend and partner in crime and work, and someone I dearly miss working alongside every. single. day. For so many people.

I had no idea it would take almost 8 months before I stopped waking up feeling anxious that I was missing something important. It took a concentrated effort to let go of the judgment by people who discovered I was of no use to them. Their looks usually meant one of two things: 1) oh, you’re one of those people who don’t work or 2) I can’t get anything from you? NEXT. It took a while to discover what was interesting to me again, to see who I wanted to spend time with versus having to spend time with. It took some self-examination to not tie my self-esteem to a fancy title or a big company.  It took some time to catch up on life projects that I always meant to get around to, and then realized I would never actually get around to them, and the freedom that comes with just removing them and most of the other bullsh*t from my to-do list. It took a while to see the horizon again, rather than only my feet or the rearview mirror.

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Create a challenge group

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Last week I blogged about my transition to gray hair and the metaphor it held for me. When I posted it, I asked my husband Mark for feedback because he’s one of the few who will be candid with me. After reading it, he mentioned that for a post about how I looked, the photo was “cringy” and I should consider hiring someone to take a professional headshot. He mentioned I looked a little washed out and crosseyed, and that a professional photographer would do better than I did with my iPhone in portrait mode.  

Busted! I did use my iPhone in portrait mode set against the backdrop of an accent wall in my house because I didn’t have the time to get a professional headshot. I found his input valid but decided I didn’t care enough to hire someone yet, and just posted it anyway.

After publishing, the post received far more attention than I had expected. Every person was complimentary about the photo, which was good for my ego but contrary to my husband’s feedback. I relayed to a friend what he said, and she gawked.  “What?!” She protested.  “How could he say that? That’s so mean!”

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Nicole Glaros Headshot

Gone Gray

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I’m going gray. Okay, I’ve gone gray, and I’m not exactly sure when it started because I’ve been covering it for so long.

The last time I dyed my hair was in January of 2020. But like many women who couldn’t get to the salon during COVID, and who hate dying their own hair, I started to let it grow out to see how gray it was, and holy crap I’m 95% gray, actually silver, or platinum as my stylist likes to call it, but that’s just lipstick on a pig.  After 2 years of this, I don’t recognize myself in the mirror or in photos anymore.  I still don’t know if I like it – I waffle on it actually.  One day I think “hell yeah, I’m doing this thing!” And other days I jump out of bed with the intention of heading straight for the hair dye.

The thing is I hate dying my hair, I always have.  The chemicals and unhealthiness aside for a moment, I’m a low-maintenance, all-natural kind of girl.  I don’t wear makeup often, in fact, the makeup I do have is from my wedding which was 15 years ago.  I hate shopping and would gladly pull the Steve Jobs “I wear the same outfit every day so I don’t have to make a decision” if I thought I could get away from it.  A successful male entrepreneur does it? Brilliant! A middle-aged woman does it?  Not so much.  Because I talk to people all day for a living, sitting in a salon chair and chatting with my stylist is pretty low on my list of ways to spend time.  No offense to Janina who is wonderful, it’s just that I crave silence and alone time.  Can I order the silent treatment for an extra $25? My idea of ‘doing my hair’ involves 15 seconds, a small hair clip, and a twist, and I often wear a hat so I don’t even have to bother. Basically, dying my hair was expensive and time-consuming and there were so many other things I’d rather be doing.  

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