My guest today is Lucy Deland, Partner at Inspired Capital, who back early-stage founders with transformative ideas, brilliant teams, and relentless determination. Some of her investments include Geneva, Habi and Dandy.
A couple of books that inspired Lucy:
Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Here's some questions I ask Lucy:
- Since you went from investor to founder to investor, where it makes sense to start is what attracted you to focus your career on technology and innovation?
- What was the insight that led you to founding Paperless Post?
- What led you to going back to your "roots" (so to speak) and become an investor again?
- Tell me a little bit about Inspired Capital and the formation.
- What were some of the lessons learned from your experience as COO that made you a better investor?
- I know that you're a generalist, but thesis driven. How do you approach which categories to focus on and opportunities?
- In our prior conversation, we spoke about some of the differences when your customer is a consumer, SMB and enterprise. When it comes to technology, IU, and feature set, depending on who you are selling to, what are your must haves?
- How has your due diligence process been disrupted by COVID?
- What are some of the different milestones a company has to have at the seed vs. series A?
- What are current trends (that are consumer facing) that you're focused on?
- What's one thing that you would change when it comes to venture capital?
- What's the best piece of advice that you received?
- What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?