My grandfather, Lev Fridgan, was an architect in the Soviet Union. He built one of the more famous buildings in our hometown of Kharkov, Ukraine. It’s called the theater “Ukraina”. The most interesting aspect of it being the roof which he was instrumental in designing. Here are some images of the theater.
Back in 1973 he wrote a paper on stress testing of materials and my father Alex Friedgan has diligently restored the text and is currently in the process of translating it into English. The Russian version is available here. The post will be updated when the English version becomes available.
One of the most common requests I get from my portfolio companies, is references to document templates, advice on various pieces of documents (such as fragments of legal language), recommendations for tools to solve a particular problem and bits of code (usually they ask from some complicated solution but what they really need is 2-3 lines of code). So, I’m starting to create a library of useful information that startups I have equity in will have access to. I probably have some legal and technical work to do to figure out how to be able to share this stuff the right way (if anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them).
Around the beginning of every month I get updates from a number of my investments. Depending on who is running the business and how mature it is I see anything from a quick e-mail with a few bullet points to an elaborate explanation of this or that bunch of statistics. The more of this stuff I see that more I realize how valuable it is for a company to agree on a standardized set of reports they manage their business by every week.
There are a number of software as a service companies that have popped up over the last few years that should make this process easier. I don’t recommend things I have not invested or participated in but some quick searches will point you in the right direction.
Arram from ZeroCater has a brilliant post up about what it means to start a company. It’s a great read for any entrepreneurs to see “hustle”.
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Lately I’ve seen a number of folks pitching great ideas, ideas that have a good chance of making money. You know, enough money to do well for themselves and a couple of small investors. But they try to multiply all these market size numbers together and think they have millions and millions of enterprise value and they are going to have the next billion dollar IPO. What happened to the idea of having a good small business? What about investments that can pay a dividend and don’t need the company to have a giant exit to be successful? So, if you’ve got a plan where you can pay dividends and make money today and more money tomorrow instead of the “build it and they will come”, “me too, i’m a ceo of a startup” model, come talk to me.
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Obviously anonymized, but…we invested at the second vertical bar from the left 
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A lot of people have ideas. On some level, ideas are a dime a dozen. It takes quite a bit of work to make an idea into a business. You need to understand how you’re going to build your idea, what your team needs to look like so you’re not spending money on simple things, and really most importantly how you’re going to make money (not a bad idea to have a couple options here, as not all of them work out). You need to understand who your customers are and what your product is, without that your startup is an idea, it isn’t a business.
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Catapult Fund is a new Chicago based incubator. Be on the lookout for the first class of companies to be funded and propelled by the Catapult.
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I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and a couple of entrepreneurs overheard my conversation. They found me on AngelList and then on Twitter and got in touch. The rest of this story is yet to be written…
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