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Off Balance #52
🎙️ Andrea Gurnari talking about building hardware and investing across Europe at 2100 Ventures on Nothing Ventured 🔥 What founders get wrong about EBITDA and burn.
Aarish Shah
October 08, 2024
In partnership with
👋🏾 Hi friends!
This weekend I spoke at Niyo Fest about the gender and ethnic funding gap that seems to be persisting.
An interesting (and depressing) stat that I talked about from this Crunchbase article says it all:
In the first half of 2024, Black-founded U.S. startups received $228 million in funding — or about .3% of the nearly $79 billion that went to U.S.-based startups. The dollar total also represents a whopping 60% drop from H1 of last year.
It was great to have been able to give my perspective on what founders can practically do to improve their chances of securing funding - irrespective of the real or perceived barriers out there 💪🏾
I’m well underway writing about all the things I’ve learned from the last couple of decades as founder, CFO and CEO, so sign up for early access to Off Balance - The Book and feel free to share with anyone else you think might enjoy it 😄.
Now let’s get down to business…
In this weeks Off Balance:
🎙️ Andrea Gurnari from 2100 Ventures on Nothing Ventured talking about building hardware and investing across Europe.
🔥 What founders often get wrong about burn.
This week on Nothing Ventured I spoke to Andrea Gurnari, Partner at 2100 Ventures 🚀
2100 Ventures is a pre-seed and seed stage fund dedicated to supporting European entrepreneurs driving the new golden age of industrial innovation, investing in B2B businesses across a range of verticals. Prior to 2100 Ventures, Andrea was an investor with Atomico and Connect Ventures before which he worked in and co-founded startups in Italy and the UK.
We talked about:
💸 How early should founders be thinking about monetisation.
🇬🇧 The collaborative and international nature of the UK and why that’s a huge advantage for the country.
🤔 How the psychology of the founder impacts their decision making, accepting that the experiment hasn’t worked can be very difficult.
🧠 Why founders need deep intellectual honesty.
👹 The ecosystem owes it to founders to not demonise failure.
🧪 Everything starts with experiments.
🇪🇺 Can we innovate on the old economy of Europe and rebuild productivity the region has lost.
🤨 Andrea’s contrarian take - sometimes you have to judge the reasoning not the output.
If you have any feedback on the podcast or the newsletter, just reply to this mail or ping me online!
(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)
Now let’s get into it.
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