A glimpse back in quotes on Series A Academy

As the last Series A Academy event for the year is approaching we compiled a list with interesting quotes from our previous guests. Have fun reading!

Mina Mutafchieva, Dawn Capital

• “Dwelling too much on what happened in the past is not a great strategy — everyone is pivoting in the early stages. At the growth stage, it’s most important to focus on what is going well and celebrate it. Investors want to hear what’s going great right now and what the future holds.
• “one thing that is nice about SEE is that having to build for a big market from the start gives startups a real advantage,”
• “Another thing to keep an eye on are Glassdoor scores. Investors pay attention to any signs that the culture is not right, such as people abandoning the ship with a bad taste in their mouth.”

Enis Hulli, 500 Startups

• “Eastern Europe is more made up of disconnected local ecosystems and that has to change.”
• “[European startups] don’t burn money like there’s no tomorrow. That’s something that a Silicon Valley startup can do.”

Oliver Holle, Speedinvest

• “Articulating reasons clearly is a skill that needs to be learned.”
• “Don’t spend too much time on forecasts or revenue projections for the next couple of years, explain very clearly where you are, what is your annual and monthly runway, what are the core KPIs that you focus on,”

Carlos Espinal, Seedcamp

• “When it comes to Series A, first of all, you need to have established a scalable go-to-market strategy and enough repeatability on your business model. You basically need to show that at the end of this Series A round you will be able to amplify success — be it through scaling up the sales team or scaling up the unit economics.”

Cem Sertoglu, Earlybird Venture Capital

• “We were constantly seeing the best in class entrepreneurial teams and engineers in the region. But we felt that there was some tentativeness — founder teams were not thinking big enough. And we felt that part of the reason was that they could only raise a couple of million dollars from the region. We thought that if we brought deep pockets to the table and provided strong commitment and conviction, they would start thinking bigger and getting bolder.”
• “Every client tries to shape your product in a way that suits them. A founding team needs to have a vision of what kind of customers they want to ultimately serve.”