Fund/Build/Scale

When you left a stable job with a Big Tech company five years ago to accept an offer from a seed-stage startup, maybe you imagined yourself in the group photo when your boss rang the bell at NASDAQ. But you didn’t take this job to get rich. You were excited about working on something new with real potential. Five years later, your company just raised its Series C, and an IPO still isn’t on the horizon.

Do you want to know the difference between marketing and PR? Marketing is when you say something nice about yourself; PR is when other people say nice things about you. Jenna Guarneri is the founder of JMG Public Relations and author of the bestseller, “You Need PR.” In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, she shares DIY PR tactics that help founders establish themselves as experts, attract customers, and raise their profile with investors — without spending a fortune on an agency.

I grew up outside New York City, but I’ve lived in San Francisco for more than half my life. As a kid, I was used to harsh winters, but my West Coast wardrobe is light on all-weather gear. Which is why, one February, I found myself in NYC helping a friend dig their car out of a snowbank to avoid a ticket. They were bundled up in a heavy coat, knit hat, and wool gloves. I had on jeans, a baseball cap, a thick sweater — and blue suede sneakers.

Eric Ly is CEO of KarmaCheck, where he’s tackling a problem he first noticed years ago as a co-founder of LinkedIn: People don’t always tell the truth about themselves. Fund/Build/Scale is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe. To address this, KarmaCheck — launched in 2019 — automates key aspects of the background check process. By reducing complexity, employers can speed up hiring, while job applicants experience less friction along the way.

For this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I asked YL Ventures Partner Andy Ellis (a former CISO) about his approach to storytelling, tactics for founder-led sales and marketing, and why he thinks the cybersecurity hiring challenge isn’t a talent shortage but a market misunderstanding. We also discussed refining product-market fit, customer discovery methods, and common pitfalls like believing in one's own narrative too strongly.

Two of the three co-founders of Operant AI — CTO Dr. Priyanka Tembey and CMO Ashley Roof — joined me to talk about building the first runtime application protection platform and navigating the challenges of cloud-native security.

In the startups where I worked, we never had spare laptops. When we hired someone, we’d order their laptop that day. That’s Startup Cashflow 101: don’t spend money until you have to. The same principle applies to your leadership team. Hiring a CMO before product-market fit? Too soon. And a CEO can handle COO duties for a while. Most seed-stage companies don’t need a full-time Chief Financial Officer, either.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a founder would rather turn to a podcast like mine for operational advice instead of the investor who led their round, is that VC really adding value?

In October 2024, Swell VC, a New York-based venture capital firm, announced its second fund with $11.5 million in commitments, bringing their total assets under management to $19 million. Co-founded by Rusty Ralston and Jay Patil in 2011, Swell isn’t trying to compete with the larger VC firms. Instead, they’ve chosen to focus on a hands-on approach, helping founders tackle critical early challenges like making their first hires and refining their go-to-market strategies.

If a startup has no product, no customers, and no revenue, what exactly are seed-stage investors betting on? According to Nnamdi Iregbulem of Lightspeed Venture Partners, the answer lies in human capital. He recently explored this in his essay, Seed Valuations Aren’t Valuations, where he argues that seed-stage valuations primarily reflect the opportunity cost of the founding team, particularly in a market where technical talent is increasingly expensive.