Renu Agrawal

Exciting News! Announcing Motherboard - A New Platform for Women Entrepreneurs In honor of National Women's Small Business Month and Diwali celebrations around the world, I'm thrilled to share that I'm embarking on a new venture designed to address a critical need in the entrepreneurial ecosystem: community and support for women. This effort was inspired by the exponential growth in women-owned businesses, a staggering 450% just in the past two years representing 14M businesses with 13M employees contributing to 2.2 Trillion in economic growth just in the US. While the "go it alone" narrative can be powerful, it often leaves women entrepreneurs feeling isolated and unsupported. We thrive on collaboration and connection, yet the current landscape often lacks spaces designed with our needs in mind. That's why I'm building Motherboard. 🙌 Motherboard is a platform designed to connect and empower women entrepreneurs at all stages. We're creating a space where you can: ▶️ Plug into a powerful network: Connect with peers, mentors, and industry experts. ▶️ Access vital resources: Find the tools and knowledge you need to succeed. ▶️ Unlock opportunities: Discover collaborations, funding, and growth potential. We're bringing together women entrepreneurs, educators, mentors, and industry leaders from all sectors to foster a thriving ecosystem of support and collaboration. 🎉 Launching Q1 2025! 🎉 Want to be part of the Motherboard community? Click on the link and sign up below: Women Entrepreneurs: https://lnkd.in/eVz8Uphy Mentors & Industry Experts: https://lnkd.in/ewkfBWeX Service Providers: https://lnkd.in/eEDPFS3V Banks: https://lnkd.in/eGm4vZUE I'm incredibly excited about this journey alongside a brilliant team of powerhouse business executives: Debbie Miller Gitanjali Baveja Stephanie Barrows Prosasty C. Furthermore, thank you to the incredible advisors who have provided invaluable input for and inspiration to the creation of Motherboard. Renda Mathew Lori Bettinger https://lnkd.in/ezcjDBnH #womeninbusiness #entrepreneurship #community #motherboard #comingsoon

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Looking forward to meeting women entrepreneurs who are on their journey to create some pathbreaking ideas and inspiring others to do the same. #advaitawomenentrepreneurs #womeninbusiness #entrepreneurship #womenentrepreneurs #EmpowerWomen #womenleaders #businesswomen

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A timeless throwback interview between Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman where Vinod discusses the importance of overcoming "near-death" experiences as a rite of passage to advise entrepreneurs, particularly VCs sitting on a board. "Near-death" experiences will change how you perceive and manage risk for your company. Every pivot from every great startup today was born from a near-death experience. As it turns out, most successful startups that live to tell their story go through multiple near-death experiences (Airbnb, Slack, Tesla, Twitter, Square, Stripe, etc). This is an experience that entrepreneurs covet because it is impossible to truly understand without having gone through it firsthand.   Top VCs recognize this and use it as a lens when investing or providing advice. Vinod refers to the ability to make gut-wrenching decisions in highly ambiguous situations to address business risks, only to live to fight another day and tackle the next challenge. It's always the greats that have the most self-awareness.

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Christina Farr authored the excellent article (with helpful contributions from Nathaniel Lacktman) on the potential impact of California's proposed law (California AB 3129) banning the MSO-Friendly PC business model for healthcare organizations. The description of the law as a "blunt instrument" is apt and the article is a useful read here: https://lnkd.in/gsDDqGNn The primary concern prompting regulators to pursue such drastic laws is that investor-funded healthcare businesses are driving healthcare costs up and reducing patient care quality. Blanket bans like the proposed law throw the baby out with the bathwater--a very concerning move given the size of California and the tech presence involved with healthcare in the state. I encourage investor-funded healthcare providers to evaluate meaningful strategies to combat this growing perception, sadly abetted by some notorious bad apples. In my work, we have helped organizations adopt the Value-Based Enterprise structure to both align the incentives of management and clinicians with #ValueBasedCare goals and build a governance structure suited to demonstrating progress in controlling costs and increasing medical care quality. There are a lot of great resources to reduce the time and capital investment needed to adopt this business model. We recently participated in a podcast with attorneys from Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough addressing just this topic. I will link to it in the comments if you are interested in learning more. #digitalhealth, #valuebasedenterprise, #healthcareinnovation

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In the latest article, "Bridging Boardroom Divides: Conflict to Consensus," the intricacies of boardroom conflict resolution processes and their significant impact on corporate governance are explored. This piece provides insights into effective boardroom management and how strategic conflict resolution can enhance decision-making and governance. It discusses how transforming inevitable conflicts into constructive dialogue can strengthen board dynamics. Discover more about navigating boardroom challenges and fostering a conducive environment for organizational growth. #CorporateGovernance #BoardroomDynamics #BoardConflict #ConflictResolution

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"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world." Shining the light on the dark side of corporate governance. Companies that suffer from nepotism, old networks, favoritism, and a "we use each other" mentality. Understand your rights and options as a stakeholder if you get stuck in a "grab first, ethics later." situation. This post is also added to the "Entrepreneurship Collection," with the link available in the comments. "In a civilized world, law floats on a sea of ethics." In corporate governance, the interplay between regulatory frameworks and ethical responsibilities often finds itself strained by the actions of certain "legalized lawless operators." These entities or individuals operate within the legal's technical boundaries yet engage in ethically questionable or socially harmful practices. The existence of legalized lawless operators highlights a crucial dichotomy between legality and ethics in corporate behavior. While legality pertains to adherence to the letter of the law, ethics concerns the broader spectrum of moral principles and societal expectations. This dichotomy becomes particularly pronounced in areas where regulations or contracts are outdated, insufficient, or deliberately designed with loopholes that can be exploited. Learn and share your experiences in the comments. Alph Keogh Jeff Broz BS, RT(R)(CT)(MR) Don Fowler Morris Panner Achaiah P M Sudhir Bahl Ashim Purohit Ashok Kakkar Rohan Prabhu Vivek Mehrotra Manikandan Bala Kumar Satyam Manusha Chereddy Vijayarajan Alagumalai https://lnkd.in/evKTvrU7

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I was recently introduced to the Mensarius Oath - a pledge for the investment community akin to the Hippocratic Oath for medicine. As I begin to build the next stage of my investing career, I believe the values imparted in this oath to be both essential and fundamental to my success as an investor, money manager, and human. I urge anyone working with investor capital to review and reflect on these core values as a reminder of how we should carry ourselves through this world. https://lnkd.in/gMhifhtT #values #investor #ethics #mensariusoath #beagoodhuman

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I first met Mike Maples, Jr in 2010, when Founders Network was just an idea. Over the years, Mike and his team at Floodgate (special shoutout to Arjun Chopra) have been great mentors, sharing their insights and guiding our founders. Most recently, their advice played a pivotal role in helping us launch Founders Network Fund. Today, Mike shared the key ideas with FN'ers from his new book Pattern Breakers (https://a.co/d/buKBd5O ), which explores the insights he’s gained from backing companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta -- and which put him on the Forbes Midas List 8x. This is the most important book on startups in the last ten years, according to Steve Blank. My notes on the key concepts of his talk: 1) Inflections – "not a trend but a change event that represents a turning point in our ability to provide empowerment." e.g. The GPS chip in iPhone 4s 2) Insights – "a non-consensus and right insight about the future that's powerful and non obvious and leverages inflections." e.g. Lyft = GPS + strangers driving you 3) Founder future fit – "Living in the future before other people live in the future and then try to build what's missing in the future." If you're a founder, check out the book. Grateful for the impact Mike and Arjun continue to have on both me and the Founders Network community!

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Does your value creation plan answer these 4 questions? ▶️ Enjoyed talking with Shiv Narayanan about the First 100 on the PE Value Creation Podcast! Thx for having me Shiv. #PrivateEquity #PE #ValueCreation #First100

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It’s critical to determine the right product pricing strategy from the get-go by keeping in mind the eventual unit profitability! 🙌 Shoutout to Sajith Pai and Madhav Chanchani for highlighting this important pitfall for startups. Setting initial product pricing too low for consumers, may result in a *perceived* PMF, but it can lead to trouble down the road. If you are forced to increase your product’s pricing to achieve unit profitability, it could result in the entire customer segment itself changing! This becomes a massive problem since you would need to start your PMF journey for this higher segment all over again! We are seeing this in late stage venture companies all the time. This issue is particularly challenging in emerging economies like India, where lower GDP per capita makes consumers much more price sensitive than places like the US, China etc. We need to coin a new term PMUEF (Product-Market-Unit Enomics Fit) instead of just PMF for India! 🙏

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📚Pattern breaking is a counterintuitive force that drives outlier success in breakthrough innovations. Wonderful weekend read - Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate, “Pattern Breakers” - for founders and investors who have big aspirations of greatness. From inflection points to insights to ideas and movements, the book is an insightful and approachable devotion to the founder journey of being different and winning big. #startups #venturecapital #web3 #books

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I often feel like "Future of Work" means everything and nothing all at the same time. But what does it mean when we say we are investing in the future of work at Reach Capital? In general, I like to think that we are investing in products and tools that help to elevate workers and create pathways for economic mobility, wherever they are in their careers - exploring careers, landing the job, up killing / Reskilling, supporting and augmenting them throughout their work, providing the benefits/enablers they need to thrive in the workplace, and more. We've invested in companies, including WorkWhile (a worker-first on demand labor marketplace for hourly workers), Replit (collaborative IDE for developers), Stepful (training for the allied healthcare workforce), Take2 AI (simulation-based talent acquisition), Hopps (on-demand expert help marketplace), and so much more. As the concept of work, continues to change rapidly we've surrounded ourselves with an amazing advisory board that supports us and our portfolio companies (Maisha Gray-Diggs (MGD), Dermot O'Brien, Gordon Trujillo, Ekpedeme "Pamay" M. Bassey, Guillermo Miranda, David Landman, Ph.D., Q Hamirani) and have committed to continuously learn (check out our latest ReImagineWork report linked in the comments).  If you're building a company that is focused on improving the future of work, please reach out! You can find me at [email protected]. Some areas I'm personally interested in right now: 👩‍⚕️ Tools to augment clinicians and reduce burnout (e.g. workflow automation tools, business-in-a-box for self employment, health system focused retention and engagement tools) 👩‍🏭 Products that help to increase supply / liquidity or improve the productivity of existing supply, through learning in the flow of work, in supply constrained markets (e.g. manufacturing) 💻 Skills inference tools that surface skills insights from the work people actually *do* and help large enterprises with workforce planning

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Rebalance Cohort 07: Introducing one of the most energetic (and mindblowing!) scientist-duos 👩‍🔬 👨‍🔬 we've ever met in the last few years, Shruti Kutmutia and Dr. Pranav Nair who were recently part of Rebalance's 7th accelerator cohort that concluded in August 2024. <Applications for Cohort 08 are currently open! Link at the end of the post> Shruti and Pranav are long-standing friends who decided to start BacAlt Biosciences together on a mission to develop green alternatives to synthetic biopolymers found in personal care, agricultural practices, textiles, and many other industries. They have discovered a breakthrough platform to develop green biopolymers on a mission to address hidden plastics at the source.🫧 🤯 Hidden plastics are a $66Bn opportunity! Some cosmetic products contain as much plastic added as ingredients as the plastic they are packaged in. 🧴 87% of the top-selling cosmetic products contain microplastics (bulking agents, emulsifiers, opacifying agents, film formers, glitter, viscosity regulators, etc). 🧼 With growing awareness and impending bans globally, a wide range of industries that have relied on plastics in their formulations are now forced to pivot to green ingredients in record time. 💄The green ingredients market is worth $54.8Bn currently and growing at a CAGR of 16.5% It's not easy to traverse the journey from the lab to a VC pitch! If we can make this journey even a little easier and worthwhile for academia that are venturing into entrepreneurship, we'll feel we've done some good. It warms our hearts when we see feedback like this for our program because we know put our whole heart in it as a team. 🥹🥹 Thanks Shruti Singh for recommending us! You can watch it below or on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g_MRzUjk Applications for Cohort 08 are closing on 15 October 2024, apply on this link if you're a female-founded/co-founded startup and are looking to accelerate your journey from 0-1 or raise capital: https://shorturl.at/45z7W More about us: www.therebalance.com CC: Vikas Kumar Pallak Jain

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In PE, tough to create a value creation without a clear & compelling vision for the portfolio company. And no, the "Vision" ≠ the financial targets Fantastic discussion with Shiv Narayanan on the PE Value Creation Podcast! Thx for having me Shiv. #PrivateEquity #PE #ValueCreation #First100

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This is a good resource I've stumbled upon. It covers a plethora of VC and startup-related topics and contains links to expand your knowledge. https://lnkd.in/dqkdV4fA TL;DR: "It's the founders, stupid!" These two lines made me hover over: "I know the physical and emotional tolls that entrepreneurs face". "Resources for Managing Founder Anxiety and Depression" I've been one myself, and it's not for the faint-hearted. I struggled and failed many times. From the standpoint of a person working now for a VC fund, the ability to support a founder who was hit with too much at the same time, to know how to listen, mirror and label Chris Voss's style, and a bit of guidance to build confidence back can do wonders. Assisting portfolio companies doesn't have to be just intros and throwing money or unsolicited advice. And what about identifying troublesome founders before investing to prevent assisting portfolio companies from becoming a nightmare flop? Ahh, that's a tricky one. Startups fail for a variety of reasons. At the early stage, we should look at many things, to name a few: product-market fit, go-to-market, blue ocean or zero to one, CAC and LTV ratio, CAP table, passion, leadership potential, intelligence, technical ability, and many, many more. Crunch the numbers. Sure. What about the early stage? Limited information and knowledge when a decision has to be made, and the outcome is impossible to predict because the future is unknown and unknowable. Examine the founders. If you don't read the founders right and overlook some hidden toxic traits and coping mechanisms that mask something that can derail the startup and founders down the road (vulnerable narcissism, antisocial tendencies, Machiavellism, blameshifting or more benign like anxiety-prone, conflict avoidance, burn-out tendency, inability to delegate, perfectionism, risk aversion, etc.), the chances that it will be your next outlier significantly diminish. How many of you saw dead equity on the capable, founders' clash, low morale, a founder playing the sunk cost game with the fund after burning cash, lying, or even more brazen behaviours like experimenting with horse tranquilisers and smoking weed on a podcast? A "Sudden" shift of values with a splash of megalomania could lead to a CEO removal attempt by the board. Or stealing "HER" voice. It is fun to watch as a TV drama, not to deal with as your portfolio. We won't be able to see it all during a few conversations with the founders and not everyone is Wendy Rhoades from Billions. Knowing how to ask a question behind which is a hidden question and being able to detect when founders say what they think we want to hear to get the funding is a good start. Spending extra time learning that is a good investment. A splash of psychology, empathy, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence to become an excellent GP won't harm your ability to identify and help the right entrepreneurs build great companies.

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Excited to invest in Anmol Madan a second time We initially met Anmol when he was a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab where he was focused on using large amounts of mobile data to understand human ideas and behavior Soon after, he started Ginger, an early digital health pioneer - we were the first investors in the company and worked with Anmol for the next 8 years – the company later merged with Headspace to create the leading company focused on mental health After Ginger, Anmol spent time as Chief Data Scientist at Livongo and Teladoc - leading teams to use data to help drive better patient outcomes at the largest enterprise health platform Growing from that experience, he's building RadiantGraph, tech that empowers employers and health service orgs with AI platforms that deliver high-quality, tailored healthcare campaigns that encourage customer engagement and activation RadiantGraph merges patient data, marketing, and care delivery into one cohesive platform – helping healthcare providers with patient lifecycle management and revenue ops in a way that’s never been done before – Over 1,400% growth in just one year, their AI-driven recommendations are already transforming how health plans engage members = better clinical outcomes and real progress in reducing the cost of care U.S. healthcare spend is $4.5 trillion per year, and up to 30% of the world’s data is healthcare related (with most of that huge data set is not available on the public internet)    We think there is a very large opportunity to drive better health outcomes and better business models in healthcare – and Anmol is uniquely suited to tackle that opportunity True was excited to be the first investor in the pre-seed round for RadiantGraph and we’re excited to participate in the Series A round with our friends at M13 + XYZ announced earlier today Latif Peracha Morgan Blumberg Ross Fubini

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"Poor financial management is cited as a key factor in the failure of 60% of social impact investments." Being a for-profit with an impact mission ADDS to the burden of good operational and financial management, not the other way around. We don't get a pass - we will get more scrutiny. #MissionDriven #EnvironmentalImpact

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