York IE COO Joe Raczka joined Investor Connect to talk about the future of venture capital, Dyn’s scaling journey and more.
About Investor Connect
Investor Connect, hosted by Hall T. Martin, helps bring startups and investor together for funding opportunities.
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Key Takeaways
Advice for startup investors
“It’s a risky asset class. Unless you have experience here, you should be careful. The earliest stages of investing, where we’re focused — pre-seed, seed, seed-plus — it’s just risky. And also, there’s tremendous amounts of deal flow. There’s a lot of noise. So much about the early stages of investing is about access. Deal access is critical. Founders are now picking and choosing which investors they want to work with, versus just whatever cash comes their way.”
Advice for founders seeking investment
“Founders need to focus on team building, hiring and building a pipeline of people. It’s never been more critical. You need to be an attractive company in order to be able to hire. You could be the most intelligent subject-matter domain expert in your particular space, but if you don’t have a team of complementary parts to put around you, you’re going to struggle to build a business.
Talent determines winners, and you’re seeing companies get funded these days just based on the team, based on the experience, based on the complementary parts.”
The future of venture capital
“What we’re seeing is more of a need for active capital, smart money. There’s plenty of passive money coming into early-stage companies, but is that valuable to a founder and entrepreneur? ‘Thank you for the check. Here we go. I’m off to the races.’ Sometimes that’s a lonely feeling. The investors and the advisors that you’re putting around the company, it’s a critical piece. We’ve seen tremendous mismatches, which leads to conflict at the early stages, and it’s just a shame.”
