While our little firm is still very young, we have been taking note of some of the best practices of our highly-respected brethren. One of those best practices, particularly among firms that do true seed-stage investing, is office hours. And we have finally scheduled our inaugural office hours time slot, from 9:30am-12:30pm on April 15th at TBSP, 17 West 20th Street. We have set up a Google Spreadsheet for this purpose which can be accessed here.
We intend to hold office hours every 2-4 weeks, initially with 30 minute time slots for each entrepreneur / team. If we need to recalibrate our approach, we will. Our goal is to get even closer to the start-up community, with the hope of building a reputation as the “go to” firm in NYC and elsewhere for seed stage, data-intensive and data infrastructure start-ups. This is a big goal and we’ve got a long way to go, but I’ve been pleased with the support and interest from established VCs and entrepreneurs alike who serve as sources of deal flow.
The bottom line is that you want to work with a firm and with people whom you like, trust, respect and believe can really help your company build its business and commercialize its technology. IA Ventures aspires to be this kind of firm. And by holding office hours and providing feedback and input to entrepreneurs in our areas of focus, regardless of whether or not we invest, we hope to contribute to the budding NYC venture ecosystem and to give back at least as much as we get from being a participant.