David Cross, Venture Partner at Rain Capital, gives fundraising advice to first-time founders reaching out to institutional venture capital investors.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.2s
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“For me personally, is an element is like, you send me the deck as the pre-read opening versus get on a call, right, is I say, be proactive. If you really have something that good, and you'll send me the deck right up front, and it's that good, I'm going to want to talk to you.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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More from David Cross
Insight
Cross: Seed VCs and founders should pursue fast $20M-$50M exits over unicorns
“I think there's a ton of opportunities that you think about of smaller companies, that 20 to fifty million dollar is that some people call it the aqua hire, but right, it's like a founder can come in, your founders can come in, in 18 months, take a couple mill…”
David CrossDec 10, 2024▶ 20:2110 - Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups with Rain Capital Partner David Cross
AssertionSupported
Cross: No evidence yet of adversaries using AI for complex attacks
“We haven't seen really any, I say evidence, right? Or of cases that are occurring now where that they're using AI to do very complex or compound attacks and surveys. We haven't seen that yet.”
David CrossDec 10, 2024▶ 5:1410 - Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups with Rain Capital Partner David Cross
PredictionHeld up
Cross: Adversaries will eventually use AI to find zero-days in code
“Is that saying that we're going to use AI to find zero days in source code? We just haven't seen quite the evidence of yet, but we should still be very suspect that it will occur in the future.”
David CrossDec 10, 2024▶ 6:0210 - Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups with Rain Capital Partner David Cross
AssertionSupported
Cross: Ransomware is shifting from encryption to data extortion
“Ransomware now is not going so much after encrypting everything. It's more of a great grab the data, breach, pull it out, and then hold it for extortion, right?”
David CrossDec 10, 2024▶ 7:2510 - Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups with Rain Capital Partner David Cross
Insight
Cross: Founders often get trapped keeping early executives who cannot scale
“You may hire someone at the very start when five people, they're the chief marketing officer, but now you're 200 people. Are they really still ready to be the chief marketing officer for that next stage? And it's hard sometimes as founders, it's hard as early,…”
David CrossDec 10, 2024▶ 15:1310 - Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups with Rain Capital Partner David Cross
Insight
Cross: Founders who hide data and claim secrecy have zero chance
“If there's no data, red flag, right? Is if you'd say, oh, it's secret. Oh, we're behind the scenes. We know what we're doing, right? Red flag, right? If you can't be open and transparent, open in the kimono, no chance.”
David CrossDec 10, 2024▶ 18:3110 - Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups with Rain Capital Partner David Cross
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