5/5/21: While conducting research for Great Founders Write, I ran into Allison Byers, an entrepreneur and expert in raising venture capital. She was generous enough to let me interview her on pitching investors. Great pitch decks tell great stories. That makes Allison Byers a world-class storyteller.
4/20/21: The Capital Network's first demo day received glowing reports. Founders loved having a champion by their side, and many of them reported multiple connections with investors. Investors appreciated the convenience of pre-recorded videos to review at any time, rather than a live pitch.
4/6/21: Growing your network can open doors to countless opportunities, but it also takes time and energy—something that's not always easy to come by during these times. Thankfully, some top-notch networking experts shared their tips for growing your professional connections right now, without leaving your home.
4/6/21: What if we took a hard look at what is broken in the current early-stage funding system, and rebuilt it to make it better, giving more people more access to capital?
2/26/21: Are you seeking funding for your startup and struggling to connect with the right people and resources because you don’t fit traditional pattern matching? Meet Allison and learn how she’s teaching diverse founders to create a pitch video to humanize the capital raise process.
2/25/21: Nick Hughes and Allison had a great conversation about Scroobious and pitching. Skip to 14:08 for a deep dive into pitch deck specifics.
1/22/21: Top fundraising and development resources for Black, Latinx, and women founders compiled by Erik Bullen, a Techstars mentor.
1/7/21: We encourage you to read our stories. There are 100 of us in this book and we're just a tiny fraction of all the female founders out there right now! There is no pipeline problem. Investors are looking in the wrong pipes.
Hear from leaders who are building pipelines or redefining access for 'underrepresented' founders in various ways. From platforms to programs and partnerships, these groups offer concrete resources for funding and supporting more ‘new majority’ founders.
10/17/20: Allison Byers, CEO of Scroobious, a new video-pitching platform for entrepreneurs, shared with Business Insider the 10 most important elements of a startup pitch deck. She collected these elements from hundreds of pitch deck iterations and presentations and ran them by a large network of investors to get their insights.
10/13/20: The Buzz covers pre-funded early-stage ventures in New England and profiles the organizations that support them. They showcased how Scroobious is creating an efficient way for investors and under-networked founders to connect.
9/21/20: Women and minority founders have been shown to deliver outsized investment returns, yet they receive a small fraction of investment dollars. These underestimated diverse founders are outside investor networks and therefore perceived as riskier. Allison Byers recently founded Scroobious to address these problems with a platform solution that uses video, technology, and data science to humanize and expand pitching and sourcing in underestimated markets.
9/13/20: Allison is the founder of Scroobious. Scroobious is building a way for investors to efficiently source diverse deal flow and a humanized way for underrepresented founders to establish investor relationships.
Listen to this episode if:
9/1/20: Nowhere is inequity more visible than on technology and VC event stages and in news stories. At tech events, only 1 in 4 speakers are women. Founder & CEO Allison Byers was selected for the All Raise Visionary Voices Speakers Bureau, an easy resource for reporters and event organizers to connect with female and non-binary founders, funders, and operators who are visionary leaders and domain experts.
5/14/20: Dubbed Scroobious — in a nod to a poem by Edward Lear, "The Scroobious Pip," that celebrates being unique — the technology will enable founders to showcase their startups through four-minute video pitches. By leveraging predictive algorithms, similar to technology used by companies like Netflix and YouTube, the idea is that investors will be shown video pitches that are a best match for their interests.
5/5/20: 340+ VCs, accelerators, angel networks, conferences, platforms, and communities supporting women innovators and investors.
