DISQUS

The Founding Member · 1 year ago

I find the quote from David Stern disturbing, but not surprising. Who are these mysterious "high quality CEOs?" What makes them "good"? It seems that David places unusually high stock in the ability of a CEO to connect to him through his closed personal networks, by having "their friends simply pick up the phone and call him directly" (which, by the way, is what TheFunded Connect does).

Well, at an event in the valley last week, and a CEO bragged that he had connections to "everyone" in the valley, asking to test him on his network. Once he was directed to the list of top rated venture capitalists published weekly on TheFunded, the CEO started looking up his connections to each top VC on LinkedIn. Before passing the first five names, it turned out that one VC was not on LinkedIn, and the CEO had not heard of the fund...

The moral of the story is that high quality CEOs and connections to venture capitalists do not go hand in hand. In fact, many CEOs on TheFunded look at venture capital as a financing of last resort, so it is unlikely that their VC network is up-to-date every three to five years when they might need to raise capital again.

David's comments appear especially out of place considering that (a) Clearstone set-up a meeting with a trial company in the Connect program and (b) multiple Clearstone portfolio companies have posted on TheFunded using their own names. His current and future portfolio companies are on TheFunded using various services.

As another journalist pointed out to me after reading the quote from David, "Genius... You just opened the door to a whole new class of entrepreneurs who aren't in the 'high-quality CEO' club. High Quality CEOs take note..." (sarcasm intended)

TheFunded Connect is designed to help streamline and simplify a difficult and time consuming process. In testing, top VCs responded to inquires, including David, in less than 6 hours.

Don Jones - VentureDeal · 1 year ago

Best of luck to TheFunded. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who want to contact VCs, and there are new and innovative services providing that capability.

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