Read

Listen

image of Practical Ways to Effectively Manage Relationships with Your VC (with Henry Asseily)
Friday, November 13, 2020
37:23
minutes

Practical Ways to Effectively Manage Relationships with Your VC (with Henry Asseily)

Listen on

Podcast information

Share:

Episode Details

I'm interviewing former founder and VC Henri Asseily. He was the founder of Bizrate.com/Shopzilla, acting as CTO until its sale in 2005 for US$569 million.

Show notes

The better your company performs, the longer honeymoon with your VCs lasts.
Then the inevitable conflict arises. You deal with it by planning for it.

You plan for it before VCs invest.
Before a raise you prepare your company for capital injection. You do whatever you need to almost hire people. You have a marketing campaign planned out, ready to go. 

Once they money arrive you trigger a series of quick wins.
You execute what you have control over: marketing, hiring, product development.
If you do it right, you score wins. VCs see you as capable.

When a big obstacle shows up (aka COVID lockdown) and you need to pivot there’s a much higher chance VCs will agree with you.

Because you were executing like crazy.
Effective management of VC relationships is about thinking and planning ahead of time and having a series of quick wins so they trust you.


About the guest:
Henry previously launched Leap Ventures, an entrepreneur-led Venture Capital firm based out of Beirut and Dubai.
Has 20 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur focused on internet-related businesses and has particular expertise in relation to algorithmics and computer science. He was the founder of Bizrate.com/Shopzilla, acting as CTO until its sale in 2005 for US$569 million.

Here’s what you’ll hear about in this conversation:

- How do you manage relationships with your VC effectively and proactively
- Why Henry went back to being a founder after being a successful VC
- Advice to founders who will be raising money in the next 6 months
- How Silicon Valley investors differ from other countries


Want to see future episode highlights? You can add me on Linkedin here.

What is Off the Record with Aram?

Made by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Off the Record is about the journey. It’s about fears, doubts, wins, and devastating losses. It’s about how people kept going no matter what to build their businesses, raise cash and hire the team. Here battle-tested CEOs and VCs share how they jumped out of the airplane and tried to assemble it on the way down.I hope you like it.

Related podcasts

September 8, 2022
28:33 minutes
Koii is a new method to design communications infrastructure and build an internet owned by everyone. In this episode, our co-host Sergey Ross and Koii Network co-founder Al Morris speak about Al’s journey going from teaching career to being a founder of Koii, different hiring challenges, and what privacy looks like ten years in the future.
August 9, 2022
46:51 minutes
Mark Rickmeier, CEO at TXI, and Aram discuss the ugly side of growth. They explore what growth for the sake of growth does to employee and customer retention, why your competitors are worthy rivals that you can teach and learn from, why investing in experience pays you dividends, how being humble allows you to avoid being tunnel visioned, and how to strike a balance between time spent running a business and time spent with loved ones.
June 20, 2022
39:21 minutes
Ron Benegbi, founder and CEO of Uplinq, speaks to our co-host Sergey about what it’s like to grow a startup without unnecessary hiring sprees, inexplicably large teams, and being unintentional with how resources are allocated.
GET IN TOUCH
GET IN TOUCH

Want to learn more?

Let’s start collaborating on your most complex business problems, today.