A couple of months ago I wrote about my setup for video meetings. TL;DR: I wasn’t happy with the video quality of my webcam so I connected a DSLR with a video capturing device and bought a good video light, leading to a massive improvement in video quality. I also bought a motorized tripod, which makes it easy to tilt the camera if I want to stand up during a video meeting and walk around a bit.

A lot of people had asked about my video setup (which sparked that blog post). But after hearing me talk about clean HDMI…

By Nathan Benaich and Christoph Janz

A little while ago we wrote about why we both invested in Mission Barns. If you haven’t read the post, d̶o̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w here’s a very brief summary:

1. The way meat is currently produced is horrible in terms of animal welfare. It is not sustainable from an environmental point of view and is a long-term threat to the human race.
2. But humans love meat. …

Last week, NexHealth announced a $31 million Series B led by Josh Buckley. Congrats to Alamin, Waleed, and everyone at NexHealth on this achievement! And congrats to Josh for doubling-down on your investment in the company.

NexHealth is a patient experience management platform that helps doctors get more appointments, retain patients, and offer a better service by digitizing everything from booking and reminders to forms and billing. What’s more, NexHealth has built a universal API that makes it easy for developers to integrate healthcare data.

Just like Plaid lets developers connect their apps to people’s bank accounts using a single…

A few weeks ago, P9 Family member Loom announced that it has raised $130 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion, making it the latest addition to the P9 Unicorn Club. In the last couple of months this club has gotten almost a little crowded: Mambu, Chainalysis, Clio, Westwing, and now Loom, have all entered this exquisite sub-group of the P9 Family.

Loom has brought the P9 Family unicorn count to nine, which is a̵n̵ ̵e̵x̵c̵e̵l̵l̵e̵n̵t̵ ̵e̵x̵c̵u̵s̵e̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵b̵r̵a̵g̵ a good occasion for some reflection and celebration.

When Pawel and I started investing we would have never in our wildest…

Don’t get me wrong: I love Zoom. We’ve been using it for years at Point Nine, and it’s been a huge quality upgrade over Skype and Google Hangout, which we had been using before. The company’s growth in the last 12 months has been truly spectacular and has catapulted Zoom into one of the most valuable companies in the world. When we talk about Zoom fatigue, let’s not forget that when the world went into lockdown a year ago, Zoom helped tens of millions of businesses, families, and schools to stay in touch. …

One of the most important hires a startup can make, usually between the Series A and the Series B, is a VP Marketing. It’s also one of the hardest hires to get right.

This post’s divided into five sections that’ll hopefully help you with this challenge:

• Part 1: Deciding what kind of VP Marketing to hire
• Part 2: Picking a hiring ‘anchor’
• Part 3: Assessing candidates
• Part 4: Interview tips
• Part 5: When things go wrong

Let’s dive in!

Introduction

Before we get started, it’s worth noting that every VP hire is important — and never easy. Maddy Cross, Partner at…

Between Board seats, deal-flow, sourcing candidates for the P9 Family, and coming up with (sometimes) funny jokes for our monthly newsletter, I feel pretty stretched these days. Therefore we decided to look for an Associate who will work closely with me to help me k̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶a̶i̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶a̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ increase our bandwidth to spot outstanding startups and to deliver a world-class service to our portfolio.

The role is similar to what some firms call “Chief of Staff”. This is a great job description from First Round. However, a “Chief of Staff” sounds like someone who’s managing staff, and that’s…