Product Focused Early Stage Venture Fund
San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2018
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Excited to announce Bling Capital cc @bling0
Khosla GP launches Bling Capital to help seed-stage startups build products tcrn.ch/2Sj9tSJ by @kateclarktweets
We just dropped the next post in our Navigating Diligence series:
🧮 The D+ Financial Model
Designed for pre-seed and seed founders — no finance lead required, cash-based (not GAAP), and simple enough to build yourself.
👉 blog.blingcap.com/financial-…
In the post we cover:
✅ Why even pre-seed founders need a model (clarity > precision)
✅ Why gross profit, not revenue, reduces burn
✅ Why founders should “earn the right to burn” (once proven PMF)
✅ Common mistakes + quick fixes
Bonus: We also included a link our Financial Model Template (used by 100s of founders)
Read it here 👇
blog.blingcap.com/financial-…
We just dropped the next post in our Navigating Diligence series:
Market Sizing in 30 Minutes
We take the outputs from the previous exercise, Customer Segmentation, and plug them into a simple, bottoms-up “mad-libs” for TAM:
📘 blog.blingcap.com/market-siz…
Our simple market sizing “mad-libs”:
To get to $100M in gross profit per year, we need X customers paying $Y/year, where X = K% of the market. There are (X / K%) such customers in the US.
Primary segmentation traits are A, B, C.
Our customers have A, B, C.
In the post we cover:
✅ Why market sizing matters to investors
✅ Why all revenue is not equal (gross profit > topline)
✅ Common mistakes + quick fixes
Bonus: Our Market Sizing Template (used by 100s of startups pre-seed → pre-IPO)
Read it here 👇
blog.blingcap.com/market-siz…
We just published the next post in our Navigating Diligence series:
Segmenting Your Customers for Market Sizing
Segmentation helps you and your investors understand your business and its potential — i.e., path to $100M+ in gross profit
blog.blingcap.com/customer-s…
🧵 What's inside
We cover how to:
✅ Build a MECE segmentation framework
✅ Define objective characteristics + anchor segments with real customers
✅ Identify pricing, margin, and GTM strategy per segment
✅ Avoid common mistakes
✅ Use segmentation as the input to bottoms-up market sizing
Segmentation lays the foundation for additional diligence items that come later:
- Market sizing and path to a venture-scale outcome (i.e., $100M+ in gross profit)
- Product roadmap and pricing strategy
- GTM and financial model
Read Part 3 👇
blog.blingcap.com/customer-s…
We just dropped the next post in our Navigating Diligence series:
Nail the 'Hair-on-Fire Problem' + 10x Better Solution
This is the first (and, we think, most important) exercise in our diligence playbook.
📘 blog.blingcap.com/hair-on-fi…
🧵 What’s inside:
We also cover:
✅ How to write current + future user flows as “instruction manuals”
✅ What a real 10x improvement looks like
✅ Common mistakes (and how to fix them)
This first diligence exercise supports everything else that follows 👉
• Market sizing
• GTM
• Product roadmap
• Hiring
• Financial model
Read Part 2 👇
blog.blingcap.com/hair-on-fi…
Many founders think diligence starts after the term sheet. In reality, it begins the moment a VC leans in.
We just launched the Bling Capital Playbook: Navigating Diligence — a monthly series of cheat-sheet guides for founders.
First post 👉: blog.blingcap.com/navigating…
🧵
Takeaways:
✅ Diligence helps investors understand what it’s like to work with a team
✅ It aligns founders and investors around a believable post-investment plan
✅ It’s also how founders evaluate if a VC is the right partner
📅 New posts drop monthly.
Thanks to @gokulr, @melodykoh, @jaredsf, @jasonkrikorian, Nevin and Andrew (Co-founders at @grata_inc), @MaloneyTyler (CEO at @TeachMe_To), and @IAmBrandonTerry for reading drafts of this post.