How a Newsletter Led to a $6M Round

Nelson Mills, a former Investor at Global Founders Capital and now a Venture Associate at Lux Capital, was able to source a major deal for GFC, as well his first personal angel investment through the OnePager Investor Day newsletter.

Nelson Mills is an MBA student at the Columbia School of Business, as well as a former Investor at GFC and a current Venture Associate at Lux Capital, both premier venture funds. As a new investor in the venture world, he is constantly looking for ways to grow his network and source deals that can bring value to his firm. Nelson has a unique perspective on how businesses look at venture capital and their investors from his own experience working at early stage businesses and understands that unique sourcing practices can be the difference between a good investor and a great investor.

When it comes to sourcing in venture capital, there are two traditional strategies. The first is to have companies fill out a form with their basic information or to reach out over email - referred to as “cold” leads. This process creates major hurdles for both founders and investors as great opportunities can easily be lost in the mix. The second path for sourcing deals comes from an investor’s personal network of other industry contacts, investors and entrepreneurs - referred to as “warm” leads. While this provides a base level of qualification, it can create a bottleneck in the process and limit the volume of potential investments seen since personal networks are limited - especially for junior investors who are just starting to build out their connections.

Nelson also noted that relying solely on personal networks and warm intros is a key part of the diversity problem in venture. He's proud that three out of four of his investments have diverse founding teams and thinks OnePager helps talented founders who don't have strong VC networks be heard and seen. 

“OnePager Investor Day has been a great way to see deal flow and connect with founders. No matter where you are in your career, it's a great way to see deals outside of your network.” - Nelson Mills, Investor @ Lux Capital

By subscribing to the OnePager Investor Day newsletter, Nelson and the Global Founders Capital team were able to receive qualified deal flow from outside of their network in an easily consumable format. With the newsletter being shared every two weeks, it guaranteed that Nelson would consistently see a new group of companies that he may not have been exposed to otherwise

From this new channel, Nelson was able to source two investments: WOMBO, a $6M round that GFC led, and GameFi, a pre-seed round that he personally invested in.

A New Take on Curated Deal Flow

The OnePager Investor Day newsletter addresses a core pain point in the venture capital sourcing process by providing qualified deal flow from outside of investors personal networks. Every two weeks the OnePager team combs through hundreds of OnePagers to identify teams that are actively fundraising, reviews their materials for completeness, and makes small suggestions to founders on how to best use OnePager to present themselves. As an extra benefit, the newsletter brings in top investors and founders to provide signal on which companies in the batch they are interested in.

Easy to Digest

With OnePager, investors know that they will receive a clean, easily digestible webpage for reviewing a company’s “first-date” information. Not only is the content efficiently presented, but OnePager also gives context around the company’s pitch deck with FAQs and Metrics, allowing founders to premeditatedly address questions from investors, as well as show their expertise or growth within their market.

No Strings Attached

The OnePager Investor Day newsletter comes to investors’ inbox every two weeks and, as a free newsletter with no financial ties to the OnePager team, the benefit is up to investors to decide. The OnePager team is solely focused on providing these companies with additional exposure and opportunity, as well as ensuring that both investors and founders are not limited to their own existing networks and processes.

In Conclusion

The OnePager Investor Day newsletter solves a major issue for how venture deals are sourced: increase the number of opportunities without limiting the quality of deals being seen. For a junior investor like Nelson, this provided a channel of high quality deal flow that is traditionally limited to investors with years of experience. This increased exposure ultimately led to him sourcing a $6M investment opportunity for Global Founders Capital, as well as his first personal investment as an angel.

OnePager is a tool for founders to consolidate and share their company and team information, pitch deck, FAQs, and more from a single URL. By subscribing to the OnePager Investor Day newsletter, investors are provided a no-cost channel for qualified deals that are presented in an easily consumed webpage.