Stefano Bernardi

First day as Dave McClure’s shadow

I’ll be reporting about my 2 weeks shadowing Dave McClure here. Hope you can all get at least half as much as I’m getting out of it.

This post was written on Monday (so tomorrow = Tuesday)

7am - Wake up, shower, breakfast with my lovely Fiance, put bike in the car.

8 am - Drive to Menlo Park, say bye to my Fiance who’s going to play tennis at Menlo High School. Get bike out of the car, bike to Menlo Park Caltrain Station.

9 am - Walk into 500 Startups

It’s my first day as Dave’s shadow and I can’t even describe who exciting it is.

10am - I’m sitting in 500Startups’ Team Meeting and it is just awesome. I’m getting a quick overview of how the fund and the accelerators work, new deals, follow ons, fundraising, expenses, demo day preparations and a lot of other random stuff.

I unfortunately can’t share that much about it, but I was really impressed in Dave’s ability to keep everything in mind. Tons of new startups to invest in, tons of intros do to for entrepreneurs, managing all the investors and fundraising, organizing conferences and geeks on a plane, hiring for 500startups’ team and a lot more stuff.

What I got out of the first day: Dave really is a master of 500 hats.

I can’t even start to believe how lucky I am to get this exclusive view of how one of the most well known and important Valley’s funds works from the inside.

I must say it has been quite similar to dPixel’s staff meetings with the difference that here everything moves 100x faster for a lot of different reasons that I’ll leave for a different post :)

Everybody is getting ready for DemoDays that will start tomorrow with a “dry-run” reserved to the mentors. Dave was really very tense about it and hopes everyone won’t fuck it up.

Weirdly there hasn’t been a lot of swearing, yet.