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Paraj Mathur

Post Seed Purgatory

In the past 12 months, the public markets are a sea of red. While the S&P500 is “only” down 17% this year, the Nasdaq is down 30%. Tech stocks have been the hardest hit. Even the esteemed FAANGs have not been spared. Apple, the darling of the public markets

Product Metrics for Early Stage Startups

Startups exist to build products to solve problems. While revenue is an oft-used yardstick to measure the effectiveness of a solution, analyzing product usage behaviors is the most important direct indicator of how much customers love your product. When I am digging into a company, I usually like to deep

Demystifying VC Diligence

Fundraising is hard. The monotony of cold outreach, the sudden rush when an investor responds, and the adrenaline of pitching your life’s passion on a 13 inch monitor, or if you are lucky, a coffee shop. Constantly pitching your idea, your baby, that you are spending every waking moment

Negative Network Effects

Airbnb, Dropbox, Fortnite, Facebook, Whatsapp all, other than being massive businesses with hundreds of millions of users, have something in common. Their success is driven by network effects. Network effects provide the biggest defensible moat in the digital world. Not only that, they also account for over 70% of the

A Day In The Life of a Junior Investor

The most common question I get from aspiring VCs — how do you spend your time on an average day? While days can vary wildly depending on deals in motion, I wanted to share what a typical day might look like. Venture is one of those industries that is “always on”

Becoming a VC

Growing up in a middle class family in India, entrepreneurship was not even in the universal set of career options I could aspire to. Everyone in my family was an engineer. Entrepreneurship or starting a business was not even remotely in my cultural consciousness. Let alone venture capital. In fact,

The Creator Economy Chasm

The internet has given rise to the “Creative Class”. They are the 50 million people online who consider themselves creators. The kids who, instead of dreaming of becoming a doctor or an engineer, aspire for Youtube or Tiktok success. Platforms like Twitch, Substack, and Patreon have unleashed this, previously untapped,

The Art of the Seed Pitch

I meet 20+ seed and pre-seed founders every week. Every founder has a unique presentation style. Some like to go through the deck slide by slide. Others prefer a more dynamic conversation without a deck. After studying hundreds of pitches, the most effective and efficient pitches follow this framework — Founder-Product-Market-Fit.

SuperSub - The Future of Sports

12 years ago, Kevin Kelly, WIRED editor, wrote a prescient essay predicting the rise of the creator economy. He asserted that creators can build sustainable revenue by deeply monetizing a small base of die-hard true fans. Today, this creator economy is thriving in a lot of different verticals. Platforms and

Mapping Digital Food Entertainment

This week I was looking through my credit card bills and I realized something weird. Quarantine has been BRUTAL for my food delivery spending. Before, I would eat a meal at work and somehow muster up the oomph to cook dinner at home. Now, sitting at home 24x7, I have