Official website of Dave Berkus
- The AI Governance Question Every Board Is Avoiding 06/25/2026Boards are fielding more AI questions than ever. In the past year alone, the volume of AI-related agenda items has surged across industries — and that trend shows no sign of slowing. Most of the conversations I see stay stuck at the technical layer: model types, data privacy architecture, vendor security certifications. These aren’t the […]
- Raising money is easy. Deploying it wisely is the hard part. 06/18/2026Here’s what 30 years of angel investing taught me about capital strategy. Over the years, I’ve watched brilliant founders raise millions, then burn through it on growth experiments that never had a real chance of paying off. They mistook motion for momentum and confused speed with clarity. Expensive hiring plans, premature expansion, and oversized marketing […]
- Are you wasting money filing patents? 06/11/2026I’ve been working with early-stage companies, and their intellectual property protection plans for years. But only recently I read a clear document on the risks and rewards of patent strategy. Thanks to Russ Krajec, a patent attorney, for the quick improvement in my education, here are some important points to consider when thinking of your […]
- In the age of AI, a hiring plan or better execution strategy? 06/11/2026For a few years, calling it a growth strategy mostly meant writing a hiring plan. More engineers. More sales reps. More headcount filling in the gaps between where you were and where you said you wanted to be. That worked when capital was cheap enough that the plan could outrun the question of whether it […]
- The biggest valuation mistake founders make isn’t aiming too high 06/04/2026It’s believing the number means something. I’ve valued 100+ early-stage companies. Created a framework (the “Berkus Method”) that’s used globally. Here’s what five decades taught me about startup valuation: Your pre-revenue valuation isn’t a prediction. It’s a negotiation. VCs know this. Founders often don’t. They walk into a room believing there’s some objective truth to […]
- What smart advisors taught me 05/28/2026The single best decision I made early in my entrepreneurial career wasn’t about product or market. It was asking smarter, more experienced people to sit beside me. That’s what an advisory board does. And unlike a formal board of directors — with its governance requirements and legal obligations — an advisory board is a smaller, […]
- What if your leadership decision is unpopular? 05/21/2026It will happen. More than once. Probably more than you expect. The moment arrives quietly, you’ve weighed the data, consulted the right people, and landed on a decision that you know is correct. Then you look around the table and read the room. Crossed arms. Flat expressions. Polite silence where enthusiasm should be. Here’s what […]
- The average successful founder is 42 years old. 05/14/2026Not 24. Not fresh out of a dorm room. Not someone who’s never felt the weight of a payroll they weren’t sure they could make. The mythology of the young founder is real — and it’s misleading. It selects for a very specific type of company (consumer tech, social, gaming) in a very specific window […]
- Over-valuation! The investor’s nightmare 05/07/2026Nothing kills an early funding conversation faster than a number that makes an experienced investor raise an eyebrow. I’ve sat across from many hundreds of founders over five decades. The ones who walk in with a $10 million pre-revenue valuation and a confident smile — but no methodology behind it — leave without a term […]
- Three times a flight home in silence. A VCs lament. 04/30/2026Three times a founder for which I negotiated the sale of his company looked a buyer in the eye at the final moment before signature and said, “No. Changed my mind.” No warning. No discussion. Just no. Let me tell you three short stories. The first was my very first early-stage investment. A music technology […]
