Product Updates

Visible started as a way for founders to update their investors but has since transformed into a purpose-built platform for both founders and investors. Since 2014, we’ve powered over 3M interactions between founders and investors. Our brand refresh represents our commitment to equip founders and the investors who back them. Founders can now manage their investor relationships and capital raises from start to finish. Investors can centralize data, uncover insights, and report to their LPs and stakeholders—all from one place. We are excited to unveil our refreshed brand, marking the beginning of the next decade in our dedication and commitment to founders and investors. Equipping Founders and Investors for Growth Raising capital is fundamentally about building relationships. Founders and investors spend months forging connections that, once solidified by a term sheet, can evolve into partnerships lasting 8 to 10 years and beyond. We set out to highlight the people behind the investments, not just the companies or firms they represent. As we continue to grow, you'll notice more familiar faces from different startups and venture funds featured on our site (👋 Hi Lacey!). Shaping Our Future Across our website and marketing assets, you’ll see 3D shapes floating in the background. While they add aesthetic appeal, they also carry a deeper meaning. For example: We believe raising capital from VCs or LPs closely resembles a fundraising funnel, a concept brought to life through the funnel shape that appears across various pages and assets. Sphere, torus, and pill shapes symbolize the connections between VCs, founders, and stakeholders, reflecting the interwoven nature of these relationships. These forms also symbolize forward momentum and the continuous progression within the venture ecosystem. As our product has evolved to offer greater flexibility in moving data into and out of Visible, you'll notice pipes integrated into the design, visually representing the seamless flow of data through our platform. Logo and Wordmark To maintain and perpetuate our brand equity, we opted to anchor our brand to our current logo and wordmark. The Visible logomark is made from three overlapping, equilateral triangles. Each triangle is slightly transparent, allowing the mark to interact with other design elements. These triangles represent human relationships and the connection between founders and investors, which is core to our mission and vision for our company. Color Palette Our signature black primary color remains, but we've refined our palette for a fresh look. We've transitioned from a complex, rich color scheme to a more cohesive and defined palette, creating a unified and bold approach to color across our brand. Introducing the new Visible color palette: Product Guided by our core values of trust and transparency, we designed our product to embody these principles. Our product visuals across the site are predominantly high-fidelity for the first time, highlighting its capabilities visually rather than relying solely on words. The updated typography and refined color palette are seamlessly integrated into our product screens, further enhancing the overall brand experience. Voice & Tone A brand is more than just its visual identity; it requires a voice and tone that harmonizes with its design. We aimed for our voice to be authentic, credible, and consistent, supporting both investors and founders alike. This commitment led us to define key principles for our voice and tone: Be a guide Less is more Recognize that different users face different challenges As you explore our marketing site, we hope Visible reflects these values and resonates with you. Transparency = Trust As we noted earlier, raising capital is fundamentally about relationships. Trust and transparency form the foundation of any strong connection. Throughout our website, you'll notice subtle transparency elements that embody this core principle. This new iteration of our brand is built to scale, but that doesn’t mean we won’t continue to evolve and elevate the experience for the betterment of our prospects and customers. Here's to shaping the next 10 years! Up and to the right,  The Visible Team

Visible Updates allow founders to send beautiful investor updates via email, link, and PDF. To help founders even further customize their updates, we’ve got two new releases to our update editor. Check them out below: Improved Text Alignment You can now align text on the left, right, and center. Highlight the text you’d like to re-align and select your alignment, as shown in the screenshot above. Change Text Color Easily change the color of your text in Visible Updates. Want to show a positive growth month in green? No problem. Select the text and the color, as shown in the screenshot above. Check out the editor improvements and draft your next investor update below:

Understanding which investors are engaging the most with your fundraising assets such as Visible Decks, Visible Updates, and Visible Data Rooms gives you insight into where to best spend time during the fundraising process. A New Contact Activity Page With this latest product update, we've made it easier to discover important engagement activity from the investor contacts stored on Visible. You can use these contact insights to determine who your most engaged investors are and when is best to follow up next. The updated contact page now displays all properties, engagement trends, recent activity, and the latest shared items, all in one view. Check Out Your Investor Activity Ready to see how investors are engaging with your Visible assets? Log into Visible below to take a look at the new contact pages for your investors:

For the venture capital world, 2023 has largely been characterized by slowed fundraising activity. Over the year, we’ve seen thousands of founders utilize Visible to update investors, track key metrics, and manage their fundraising efforts. Learn more about how founders utilized Visible to strengthen relationships with current and potential investors during a challenging year below: Update Your Investors Over 672,000 investors received a Visible Update in 2023. The average Visible Update was sent to 56 investors — more than the number of current investors most founders have. We’ve seen founders leverage updates to nurture their potential investors to help strengthen relationships for when it is time to “actively” raise.” Check out a few Visible Update features we released in 2023 below: Build out updates using best practices from other founders with content blocks Add past updates to your Visible Data Room to help show potential investors your commitment to communication Turn your Visible Requests from investors into a shareable update with Visible AI Share Your Pitch Deck With 61,000+ Visible Deck views in 2023, we can learn how founders approach their pitch deck sharing. Like previous years, July and August saw pitch deck sharing slow down with activity picking up in October and November — surpassing activity from the spring and early 2023. We found that pitch decks with 12 or fewer slides receive the most activity/views from investors. Check out a few of the Visible Deck features we released in 2023 below: Add decks directly to your Visible Data Room Move investors down your fundraising funnel with call-to-actions Build Your Data Room We launched Visible Data Rooms in 2023! With data rooms, you can now manage all parts of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors with Connect, our free investor database. Track your conversations in our Fundraising CRM. Share your pitch deck with potential investors. And communicate with current and potential investors with Updates. Over 30,000 files were uploaded to Visible Data Rooms in 2023. Learn more about data room improvements we released in 2023 below: Share your Visible Data Room via link Add a call-to-action to your Visible Data Room to help move investors down your funnel Preview documents and PDFs directly in data rooms Manage Your Fundraise Founders created 2,800+ Visible Pipelines in 2023. Like Decks, we saw the number of pipelines being created slow in the summer and pick back up in the fall — a promising sign for 2024. As fundraising has slowed in 2023, founders are utilizing Visible Pipelines to keep tabs on their ongoing conversations so they can raise faster when the time is right. Learn more about some of the Visible Pipeline features we released in 2023: Add multiple investors from Visible Connect, our free investor database, to your fundraising pipeline in one click. Better navigate between investors and stages with our new fundraising table and UI Automatically log conversations outside of Visible with BCC Track Key Metrics A core role of a startup founder is to track high-level metrics and share them with investors and stakeholders. For first-time founders, determining which metrics to track and who to share them with can be intimidating. To help, we analyzed our data to find what the most commonly tracked and shared metrics in Visible were in 2023: Revenue Cash Balance Runway Gross Profit FTE Headcount Check out some of the improvements we made to dashboards, metrics, and integrations in 2023 below: Display changes to key metrics with waterfall charts Liven up your charts with gradient charting options Improve dashboard sharing with our improved widget and dashboard design.

We last updated our brand identity in October 2020. Since then, Visible founders have gone from sending 8,000 investor updates per month to over 75,000 — we also launched Visible Pitch Decks and Data Rooms. We’ve learned first hand that building a startup is difficult. Most founders take a major risk to invest their time, money, and careers to build something. At Visible, we want to better celebrate the thousands of founders doing the difficult. We’ve been on the sidelines watching these founders grow while our own team, product, and organization has grown. In order to reflect these efforts, we are excited to roll out our new brand direction that supports this new phase for Visible Putting Visible Founders First In order to put founders first with everything we do at Visible, we wanted to showcase their individual stories and experiences across our marketing efforts. You will notice individual founder headshots, stories, and quotes across the website. Data and Stories to Help the Next Set of Founders Thousands of founders use Visible every month to update their current investors, share their pitch decks, build their data rooms, and manage their fundraising efforts. In order to help the next generation of founders using Visible, we want to highlight the first-hand data and best practices we’ve uncovered. Color, Gradients, and a New Font to Bring Life to Our Brand While difficult, building a startup should be lively. In order to better recognize the highs of building a startup and align with our guiding principles we wanted to refresh our brand. Logo Our logo is staying and is the anchor to our brand. The Visible logomark is made from 3 overlapping, equilateral triangles. Each triangle is slightly transparent, allowing the mark to interact with other design elements. These triangles represent human relationships and the connection between founders and investors. Brighter colors & gradients Our black isn’t going away either, but are using the same color palette from our application to bridge the gap between our product and brand. You will see brighter, more vibrant colors in our product screens to bring those metrics to life. We have also added gradients across our website to enhance some elements like our product screens and call attention to our informational graphs. Bridging the Product & Go to Market Gap We wanted to bring the same sleek and modern feel from our product to our marketing efforts. In order to do so we’ve changed our serif font to a san serif font. Across our website, you will notice product screens that show our product in a more realistic approach.

Data rooms are the next step to help us on our mission of giving founders a better chance of success. Data rooms are the culmination of a fundraise, diligence, or M&A event. They combine all of the documents, data, and resources that an investor will use to evaluate a company. With data rooms, you can now manage all parts of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors with Connect, our free investor database. Track your conversations in our Fundraising CRM. Share your pitch deck with potential investors. And communicate with current and potential investors with Updates. Learn more about Visible Data Rooms and how you can leverage them for your next raise below: Organize and Structure Key Fundraising Documents Build data rooms specific to your raise. Organize your data room with folders, upload files, and create pages directly in Visible. Segment and Share Specific Folders Securely share your data with investors. Segment their access by individual folders or give them access to the entire data room. Understand How Investors Are Engaging with Your Data Rooms View analytics to understand how individual investors are engaging with different documents and files in your data room. Data rooms are enabled for all Visible users. Log into Visible below to get started on your first data room below: Create a Data Room Check out a few of our other resources to help get you started: What should be in a data room? How to write a cover letter for your data room How to create a data room How to share your data room How to create a folder in your data room How to view the analytics in your data room Build and share your data room with Visible At Visible, we oftentimes compare a fundraise to a B2B sales and marketing funnel. At the top of your funnel, you are finding new investors. In the middle, you are nurturing and pitching potential investors. At the bottom of the funnel, you are working through diligence and ideally closing new investors. With the introduction of data rooms, you can now manage every aspect of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors at the top of your funnel with our free investor database, Visible Connect Track your conversations and move them through your funnel with our Fundraising CRM Share your pitch deck and monthly updates with potential investors Organize and share your most vital fundraising documents with data rooms Manage your fundraise from start to finish with Visible. Give it a free try for 14 days here.

The Fundraising Funnel Raising venture capital often mirrors a traditional B2B sales & marketing funnel. At the top of your funnel, you are identifying potential investors through research, direct outreach, and intros from your peers. In the middle of the funnel, you are sharing your pitch deck, meeting with GPs, and perhaps the entire partnership. At the end of the funnel, there are (hopefully) multiple term sheets and negotiations ahead of closing. Just as a sales & marketing team has dedicated tools, so should a founder that is raising venture capital. By having a CRM in place to track and monitor the status of a raise, founders will be able to spend more time on what matters most — building their business. We’ve helped thousands of founders manage their raise with our Fundraising CRM. In order to help founders take their tracking to the next level, we are excited to announce our BCC email feature. Learn More Tracking Conversations with BCC With our BCC tool, founders will be able to simply copy & paste their unique BCC email address into any email. From here, the email will automatically be tracked with the corresponding contact in Visible. Check out an example below: This is great for cold emailing investors, nurturing investors, and staying in touch with current investors. To learn how to get BCC set up with your Visible account, head here. Related Resource: 3 Tips for Cold Emailing Potential Investors + Outreach Email Template

The pitch deck is the core marketing asset that jumpstarts any fundraising effort. It acts as the catalyst for connection, conversation, and relationship building. How Pitch Deck Sharing Works We talked to hundreds of founders, and three problems emerged around pitch deck sharing: I’m not sure how prepared a potential investor is before heading into a meeting. I’m under-networked. I share my deck to get meetings but want to understand who is engaged. I iterate on my deck every hour. Sharing the latest version is a pain. Introducing Visible Pitch Decks Today, we are launching Decks. A dead-simple way to host and share a pitch deck on Visible. Decks are completely integrated with our fundraising crm and leading investor updates platform. You’ll be able to set customized sharing permissions, notifications when investors view your deck, upload new versions without clicking a button, and understand how potential investors have engaged with your content. Just as a sales team has dedicated tools for their day-to-day, founders need dedicated tools for managing the most expensive asset they have, equity. Our community can now find investors, track a fundraise, and share a pitch deck directly from Visible and completely integrated. Want to see a Deck hosted on Visible in action? Take a look here. Whether we are building fundraising automation with our Zapier Connection or crafting integrations with companies like ProfitWell, we are driven by giving founders a better chance of success. It is going to be a very fun fall 😉 Up & to the right, Mike & The Visible Team

Keeping tabs on your SaaS metrics, like subscription growth, MRR movements, churn rates, etc., is vital to continued growth and improvement. We are excited to announce our direct integration with ProfitWell to do just that. About ProfitWell ProfitWell is a free tool that provides SaaS metrics insights, helps reduce churn and optimize pricing. Visualize your ProfitWell data directly in Visible, share it with your most important stakeholders, and combine it with other data sources to understand how your subscription growth is impacting your overall business. ProfitWell + Visible Our integration with ProfitWell allows you to sync 39 metrics to your Visible account (learn more about them here). Check out a few examples of different charts and data you can pull into Visible below: With ProfitWell, you can bring in all of your recurring revenue movements — new, upgraded, downgraded, churned. If you’d prefer to not share such granular data with your investors (and potential investors), you can also pull in your current recurring revenue which may look something like this:Alternatively, you can also chart your customer count movements to get a look at how your customer base is growing. How SaaS Metrics Help Fuel Growth ProfitWell has taken an added focus on leveraging your current customer retention to fuel growth. As they put it, “Acquisition is the weakest growth lever. How do we know this? We studied the levers—acquisition, retention, and monetization—of 512 SaaS companies. We found that monetization and retention have much higher revenue impacts than acquisition when considering the same level of impact across each growth lever.” Keep tabs on your retention directly in Visible. If you’d like to learn more, make sure to save a spot in our webinar with Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, as we discuss all things churn and retention. Learn more about connecting ProfitWell Don’t forget you can combine your ProfitWell data with any of our other integrations as well. P.S. We are hosting a webinar with Patrick Campbell, the CEO of ProfitWell, on July 7th to discuss all things net revenue retention and churn. Save your spot here.

Fundraising is a full-time job for startups. It’s a process most founders are running 24/7/365. The fundraising lifecycle typically has two parts: Actively Raising: Founders are actively raising new capital for their business. Hopefully, they are using a process to build momentum (check out this First Round article for great tips). Passively Fundraising: This is when founders are building relationships with future, upstream investors that might be a good fit for future funding events. The Fundraising Process We believe if founders run a great process when they are actively raising and build rapport with potential investors when they are passively raising they will raise faster, with better terms, and get back to building their business. Over the last year, we’ve built and improved (with features like custom properties, update sends to potential investors, and Visible Connect) our Fundraising CRM with features to make a founder’s next raise as efficient as possible. We are thrilled to announce our Zapier + Fundraising CRM integration. The integration will allow founders to fit fundraising into their daily workflow by using Zapier triggers to automatically add potential investors to their Visible Fundraising CRM. Visible + Zapier Examples Some examples of our favorite Zaps to get you started: Send email to a potential investor –> Add to Visible Pipeline Zapier Google Chrome Extension –> Add to Visible Pipeline Slack message –> Add to Visible Pipeline and more Give Visible + Zapier a Free Try Here are some templates to help get you started: To learn more about getting your Zapier connection setup with our Fundraising CRM, check out this post. If you have a Zap you’re using to automate your fundraise, we’d love to hear about it. Send a message to marketing at visible dot vc.

Building a company is difficult. Being a founder can almost feel impossible. As Naval Ravikant, Founder of AngelList, wrote, “It’s never been easier to start a company. It’s never been harder to build one.” Being a founder can be an incredibly lonely journey. There are very few people that truly know what it takes to build a company while being a strong leader. The best way to learn is from someone who has been there before. Being a founder can oftentimes be an “asymmetric experience.” As Seth Godin, business author, puts it: “In these asymmetric situations, it’s unlikely that you’re going to outsmart the experienced folks who have seen it all before. It’s unlikely that you’ll outlast them either. When you have to walk into one of these events, it pays to hire a local guide. Someone who knows as much as the other folks do, but who works for you instead.” We are excited to launch the Founders Forward Podcast to do just that — enable founders to learn from their peers and leaders that have been there before. Every week our Founder, Mike Preuss, will interview a founder or startup leader that has a specific area of genius. We will cover everything from sleep and wellness to alternative forms of financing. Why a podcast? Our mission at Visible is to give startups a better chance to succeed. As we and our brand continue to evolve, so will our content. We want to give founders the absolute best resources they need to move forward. We will launch a new episode of the Founders Forward Podcast (paying homage to our original newsletter name) for the next 6 weeks. We will use this to elevate our other content and give founders digestible takeaways. You can check out our first 3 episodes below (or listen on any podcast player): Episode #1 — Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and Founder of Casted Episode #2 — Amanda Goetz, CEO and Founder of House of Wise Episode #3 — Jeff Kahn, CEO and Founder of Rise Science How can you help? This is our first season and foray into podcasting so any feedback is very much welcome! If you have any suggestions, questions, or would like to recommend a guest, send us a message to foundersforward at visible dot vc. To stay up-to-date with the Founders Forward Podcast subscribe to the Visible Weekly Newsletter below:

Over the past twelve months, Visible has evolved from a tool to help founders write great investor updates to a platform to help founders Raise capital, Track key metrics, and Update investors. We felt it was only fitting to evolve our brand just as we have evolved our product. We’re excited to share our new brand identity with you that pays homage to our past while letting us grow into our future. Our mission hasn’t changed, we are still here to give founders a better chance of success. We’ve updated our logo, wordmark, typeface, colors, and imagery across our marketing assets and app. Below we’ll get into why we ultimately made the change and how we went about accomplishing the overhaul this summer. Why change? Simply put, we love founders. We really started to feel this over the past two years after getting to work with over 4,300 founders across the globe. In our new brand identity, you’ll see that founders will be at the forefront of everything we do. Why do we love founders? Because the odds are perpetually stacked against them but they always find a way to keep going. Being a founder is the toughest and oftentimes the loneliest job there is. Founders are forging new paths with future obstacles they can’t see paired with an environment that is ever-evolving. So how does a founder navigate all of this? Withtrusted guides. Maybe that guide is a founder who has forged their own path or an investor who has seen others succeed (or fail) through similar obstacles. The guide could also be a significant other, an independent board member, or a close mentor. One thing became clear to us, scaling a startup is a people and relationship driven endeavor. We hope thatVisible can act as a trusted guide and resource to founders. We also want Visible to act as a catalyst to help founders build relationships with other trusted guides to help take them on their journey. This is why we are updating our brand, to reflect our drive to serve founders first and the guides who support them. Here are some of the tools & resources we’ve recently launched for founders to help them on their journey: Visible Connect – A free investor database so founders can quickly find which potential investors they should be building relationships with. 176 editions of theFounders Forward – Our curated weekly newsletter that has gone out rain or shine every Thursday. Visible for Investors – The most founder friendly tool an investor can use to engage with their portfolio. We wrote 3,800 words in ourall encompassing startup fundraising guide to help founders who are fundraising for the first time. The Visible Founder Community – This is currently in alpha with some of our customers. We just made a hire to take this to the next level. Stay tuned! If you like getting into the details of how we went about deciding on the new brand and what it entails. Keep reading! The Process After we decided that we wanted to update our brand identity we dug into our design values & process, looked at the competitive landscape, talked to our customers, and even reviewed conversion data of our marketing funnel. To give an inside peek at some of our research and process: Design Values Empowerment – We want to make complex tasks simple, while also providing customers with all the valuable information they can get to improve their investor relationships. Reliability – We want customers to trust Visible. They should not only trust that every investor update email is going to be sent but that our team is here when you need us. Consistency – We need to be consistent in our communication and in our user experience. When we launch something new customers should feel like they know it by heart. Competitors We took a look at our customers and their brand identities. We wanted to make sure we could differentiate and stand out. We saw a lot of blue. Mood Board After we pulled all of our research together, we got started on a mood board. We knew that if we wanted to be a trusted guide for founders we need to convey trust, fearlessness, and experience. Here are some early mood boards: Two ideas started to emerge that we liked: The editorial feel our marketing site could have. Our articles and resources were read by more than 175k people in 2020. Let’s elevate the content with a more editorial and educational look. Triangles vibed well with where we wanted to go. The glyphs above have a lot of parallel meanings to building a startup, it plays nicely with the V in Visible and also has elements of climbing a mountain. Of course, we reviewed many iterations of our logo, typeface, and marketing site before landing on the final product. The Logo It is made of 3 overlapping, equilateral triangles. Each triangle is slightly transparent, allowing the mark to interact with other design elements. The triangles represent human relationships, both the connection between each of us and the ever-shifting overlap across myriad networks. There’s also a resonance with the strength of triadic relationships in management and the value created between customers, founders, and VCs, as well as founders, VCs, and LPs. The logomark also pays a nice tribute to our current logo which has an overlapping pie chart. The logo also makes your eyes go “up and to the right”, a common salutation for our content and represents the never ending journey for growth. Typography We found the need to have both serif and sans-serif typefaces in our updated brand style guide. With software interfaces at the core of our products, we found that sans-serif fonts offer the right combination of efficiency and legibility at all sizes. We’re also introducing a beautiful new serif typeface that helps us express the quality and trustworthiness of the content we create and curate for founders. The serifs look great for headers and big and bold for things like inspiring quotes. Imagery We really wanted to bring our customers, founders, community – people! – to the forefront of our brand. Illustrations are trendy but can feel very abstract and lack relatable humanness. We found beauty and inspiration in seeing a diverse group of people doing incredible work. We enjoy the stark contrast of a black and white photo but also how it plays nicely with vibrant headshots. Our logomark really pops across different media types from photos to videos. Founders Forward –> The Visible Weekly The Founders Forward is now The Visible Weekly and will also get a bit of a facelift. We decided it was better to support fewer brands and sunsetted the yellow branding and logo. If we want to better serve founders we felt that Visible should be the core focal point across all of our content. Don’t worry… the newsletter isn’t going anywhere! It will still be curated by our team and produced once a week. If you haven’t subscribed you can do so here -> visible.vc/subscribe Our App In the immediate, our app will have the new logo, color palette, and showcase some of the new brand elements. Over time we’ll introduce more changes that further blend our brand identity into the product. Thanks Most importantly we’d like to thank you, our community, for your encouragement, feedback, and support to get us to this point. We are energized for the years to come and can’t wait to give you a better chance of success. I personally want to thank the entire Visible team for their drive to better serve founders and our customers. The new brand was a total team effort and none of this would be possible without a team who isn’t scared to do the difficult. Up & to the right, Mike Preuss Visible CEO & Co-founder

TL;DR — We are excited to announce Visible Connect, our investor database. Visible Connect uses first hand data and directly integrates to our Fundraising CRM. You can give Visible Connect a try here. Fundraising is a challenging, time consuming process for startups. One of those challenges is finding the right investors. Founders spend countless hours trying to understand: Is this investor active? What deals have they done recently? Will they lead? Take a board seat? What geographies do they invest in? What stages? What verticals? What size checks do they typically write? Have they raised a new fund recently? Do they have certain traction metrics or growth rates they like to see? The current patchwork of data sources & resources lack the founder first mentality, can be cost prohibitive and lack insightful data for founders who are fundraising. This isn’t a novel idea. Founder-friendly individuals who know the pain of fundraising consistently try to solve aspects of this problem with lists like Joe Floyd’s Emergence Enterprise CRM and Shai Goldman’s Sub $200M fund list. We believe these efforts should be coordinated and data aggregated for the benefit of founders everywhere. Introducing Visible Connect In the spirit of the Techstars #givefirst mentality, we are thrilled to announce Visible Connect. Our attempt at curating the best investor information in the world and opening it up as a resource for founders to derive investor insights and run more efficient fundraising processes. Visible Connect allows founders to find active investors using the fields we have found most valuable, including: Check size — minimum, max, and sweet spot Investment Geography — where a firm generally invests Board Seat — Determines the chances that an investment firm will take a board of directors seat in your startup/company. Traction Metrics — Show what metrics the Investing firm looks for when deciding whether or not to invest in the given startup/company. Verified — Shows whether or not the Investment Firm information was entered first-handed by a member of the firm or confirmed the data. And more! Visible Connect + Fundraising Pipelines Once you filter and find investors for your startup, simply add them to your Fundraising Pipeline in Visible to track and manage your progress (You can learn more about our Fundraising CRM here). We believe great outcomes happen when founders forge relationships with investors and potential investors. One of the benefits of the current system is that founders with options are forced to be thoughtful about who they reach out to. However, not all founders feel they have options. They need to know that they do. We believe Connect is not a tool for founders to ‘spray and pray’ or spam investors with template cold emails. There will be no contact emails provided on the database for this reason. We believe founders waste precious time trying to figure out investor fit and profile for their given stage when they could be spending that time building potentially fruitful relationships with the right investors. It should not be a core competency of a founder to understand all of the investment thesis for venture investors. Connect Data Sources We collect data in three principal ways: Primary information – Direct attestations from venture capitalists, accelerators and other investment firms about their business Secondary information – investor lists provided to us by venture capitalists (co-investors) or startup founders aggregated in the course of a fundraise or the ordinary course of business Public information – third party data sources that are not labeled as proprietary or have terms of use associated. These sources may include: deal flow newsletters, public lists and databases, social media posts, journalistic articles, and more We’d like to give special thanks to all the individuals who gave their time to build data sources used in the compilation of this ongoing project. The AllRaise Airtable of investors. All Raise is on a mission to accelerate the success of female founders and funders to build a more prosperous, equitable future. Data from the team at Diversity VC The Southeast Capital Landscape built by Embarc Collective, Modern Capital, Launch Tennessee, and HQ1 Joe Floyd and the Enterprise Fundraising CRM Shai Goldman and the Sub $200M VC fund list Crunchbase Open Data Map API NVCA’s membership database The Fundery’s Essential VC Database for Women Entrepreneurs Venturebeat’s NYC lead investor roster This public airtable aggregating investors who invest in underrepresented founders (anyone know who we can give credit to?) David Teten’s list of Revenue-based Investors (and Chris Harvey’s tweet about it) Tech In Chicago’s list of Chicago VCs Clay and Milk’s list of Midwestern VCs Brian Folmer of XRC Labs Nick Potts of Scriptdrop Ideagist’s list of accelerators and incubators in California Jason Corsello’s Future of Work Investors Dan Primack’s Pro Rata Newsletter (We manually enter this data daily) Evan Lonergan’s Excoastal (We manually enter this data weekly) Austin Wood’s Tech Between the Coasts (We manually enter this data weekly) We’re always looking to bring on more data sources, contributors and maintainers of the project. If you want to submit a data source or help contribute you can fill out this Airtable form.

Naturally, communicating when times are tough is intimidating. No one likes to share what is potentially bad news. However, when times are tough it is more important than ever for leaders to communicate with their stakeholders. Loads of VCs and founders have written about the importance of communication during a crisis over the past few weeks: “First [of six disciplines for challenging times], transparent communication… There is no better example than Winston Churchill. As you articulate communication plans, speak with transparency, candor, and gravity.” — Tomasz Tunguz in Six Startup Disciplines for Challenging Times “When people get Happy Talk instead of Hard Talk, it doesn’t reassure them. In fact, it does the opposite: It causes them to question the credibility of their leaders, which heightens their anxiety and makes them feel rudderless.” — David Sacks in Happy Talk Versus Hard Talk “Culture should be a priority. And today it is more important than ever. For the amount of time we spend working it should be positive, enjoyable, challenging in a good way and everyone there should feel connected to the company. Happy people make for happy atmospheres regardless of the hard work being done.” — Joanne Wilson in Culture is Important Now More Than Ever “Communicate, communicate, communicate. It is even more important in a remote environment.” — Seth Levine in Tips For Working from Home From The Foundry Network “Regardless of the times, entrepreneurs should send a weekly email update to their constituents — employees, advisors, mentors, and investors. People want to know what’s going on. People want to help. Regular email communication is the most repeatable, and scalable, method.” — David Cummings in Weekly Communication “Key learnings – a) understand and optimize your cash position b) increase communication with team, investors and customers. More the better. c) organize around your customer – shift resources to help them. d) look for opportunities that others won’t see e) stay optimistic!” — Scott Dorsey on Key Learnings from Leading Through 2008 Crisis Everyone can come out and say that now is the time to communicate but that does not mean everyone will do so. Communicating when times are tough is easier said than done. Considering our bread and butter is investor and stakeholder communications, we decided to take a look at our data and see if leaders are in fact stepping up during these tough times. The results? Startups and leaders and taking communication incredibly seriously. First, we took a look at Update recipients by month: This chart is simply the total number of Update recipients by month. Clearly March has been our best month to date. It is refreshing to see leaders and founders doubling down on communication. So how are the recipients receiving the Updates? Very well. The chart below is number of Update Reactions, our version of a thumbs up/like, by month: The result? Investors, team members, and other stakeholders are trying to be as supportive as possible. It is incredible to see leaders double down on communication and their stakeholders pass along support. Leaders who can step up now will ensure that their team, investors, and other stakeholders are at ease. Plus, they’ll position themselves for success when we get through the current crisis. As Naval Ravikant wrote, “Leadership in the coming months, at every level, is the audition to lead in the coming years.” If you are ready to get an Update out to your investors or team, start your Visible trial here.

You may have noticed a new addition to the Visible application if you have signed in lately. We recently launched the Home section. The Home section provides an activity feed to show you exactly who is engaged with your Updates, Dashboards and other content. In this first version we’ll provide: Views of Updates (from an email or link) Clicks on Updates Reactions to Updates Views of Dashboards Your feed will also smartly group items together based on time and the activity type. Home also provides quick actions to see your recently sent Updates, edit existing Update drafts, and the ability to start a new Update from scratch or a template. We’re excited to provide even more activity types as we launch new ways to engage with your investors and stakeholders. Engaged Investors Engaged Investors = Startup Success. When startups produce regular investor Updates and prioritize investor reporting they create an unfair advantage of being top of mind. The Home section helps understand which of your investors are engaged, value-add and in the loop. When companies are top of mind they get the benefit of customer introductions, partnership introductions, follow-on capital, help with hiring and more. This is just the start with the new Home & Activity Feed. We’re excited to provide more insights on how to engage your stakeholders for success. Up & to the right, -Mike & The Visible Team